Planning national adaptation responses to climate change

Climate change research must be nationally relevant for research outputs to be used broadly. This is why CIMMYT-CCAFS conducted its research in close collaboration with the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) and other stakeholders in Ethiopia. The climate research outputs generated were used as inputs during the development of Ethiopia’s National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy. The collaboration with national stakeholders also helped in building national climate research capacity in Ethiopia where climate change information is limited

Wood trade perspectives in greece during economic crisis and and new technologies challenge

In wood trade sector, the supplier is the forest and the product is round wood. The quality, the quantity and value of wood depend heavily on the practices that are applied in the early stages of the supply chain. The aim of the paper is to present the perspectives of wood trade in Greece and also to study how the economic crisis has affected the forest production and trade (imports and exports). Finally, we will discuss the challenge of using new information technologies, such as databases, digital timber traceability systems, sustainable timber and wood products, in collaboration with the traditional methods employed in wood trade sector contemporarily.</jats:p

FlexCore: Massively Parallel and Flexible Processing for Large MIMO Access Points

Large MIMO base stations remain among wireless network designers’ best tools for increasing wireless throughput while serving many clients, but current system designs, sacrifice throughput with simple linear MIMO detection algorithms. Higher-performance detection techniques are known, but remain off the table because these systems parallelize their computation at the level of a whole OFDM subcarrier, sufficing only for the less demanding linear detection approaches they opt for. This paper presents FlexCore, the first computational architecture capable of parallelizing the detection of large numbers of mutually-interfering information streams at a granularity below individual OFDM subcarriers, in a nearly-embarrassingly parallel manner while utilizing any number of available processing elements. For 12 clients sending 64-QAM symbols to a 12-antenna base station, our WARP testbed evaluation shows similar network throughput to the state-of-the-art while using an order of magnitude fewer processing elements. For the same scenario, our combined WARP-GPU testbed evaluation demonstrates a 19x computational speedup, with 97% increased energy efficiency when compared with the state of the art. Finally, for the same scenario, an FPGA-based comparison between FlexCore and the state of the art shows that FlexCore can achieve up to 96% better energy efficiency, and can offer up to 32x the processing throughput

Wâhkôhtowin: the governance of good community-academic research relationships to improve the health and well-being of children in Alexander First Nation

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a promising decolonizing approach to health and social sciences research with First Nation Peoples. In CBPR, the use of a community advisory committee can act as an anchoring site for trusting reciprocal relationships, collaborative decision-making, and co-learning and co-creation. Through a qualitative case study, this article illustrates the collective experiences of a well-established, multidisciplinary, and intersectoral committee that reviews, monitors, and guides multiple research projects in a First Nation community in Canada. Participants of the Alexander Research Committee (ARC) share examples of the value of fostering a high level of commitment to building both positive working relationships and learning spaces that ultimately result in research and policy impacts for their community

Evaluating the adequacy of social-emotional measures in early childhood

Technical adequacy and usability are important considerations in selecting early childhood social-emotional (SE) screening and assessment measures. As identification of difficulties can be tied to programming, intervention, accountability, and funding, it is imperative that practitioners and decision makers select appropriate and quality measures from the plethora of measures available. This study systematically reviewed and evaluated the technical adequacy and usability of 10 commonly used SE assessment and screening measures, using a framework for evaluating selected properties of measures (e.g., reliability, validity). Through this review, it was found that there are inadequacies in many commonly used SE measures, deserving the attention of both users and developers

Settling With Your Hands Tied: Why Judicial Intervention is Needed to Curb an Expanding Interpretation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

This Comment argues that the broad interpretation of the FCPA’s business nexus requirement, which criminalizes payments that both directly and indirectly “obtain or retain business,” encourages prosecutorial abuse and deviates from the intended purpose of the Act. The Justice Department’s expansive approach to FCPA enforcement has cost companies tremendously, even though the Act’s drafters intended for a more balanced approach. Part I of this Comment will discuss the history and background of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 and its amendments in 1988 and 1998. Part II will examine the application of the business nexus requirement in United States v. Kay and argue that its interpretation is inconsistent with the FCPA’s purpose. Part III will examine enforcement measures used by the DOJ and the SEC in a post-Kay world. Finally, Part IV will propose that judicial intervention in these enforcement measures is necessary to alleviate some of the challenges that currently exist, as well as to guide companies in distinguishing lawful from unlawful conduct. Cite as 42 Golden Gate Univ. L. Rev. 243 (2012)