Consumption-Based Conservation Targeting: Linking Biodiversity Loss to Upstream Demand through a Global Wildlife Footprint.

Although most conservation efforts address the direct, local causes of biodiversity loss, effective long-term conservation will require complementary efforts to reduce the upstream economic pressures, such as demands for food and forest products, which ultimately drive these downstream losses. Here, we present a wildlife footprint analysis that links global losses of wild birds to consumer purchases across 57 economic sectors in 129 regions. The United States, India, China, and Brazil have the largest regional wildlife footprints, while per-person footprints are highest in Mongolia, Australia, Botswana, and the United Arab Emirates. A US$100 purchase of bovine meat or rice products occupies approximately 0.1 km2 of wild bird ranges, displacing 1-2 individual birds, for 1 year. Globally significant importer regions, including Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and France, have large footprints that drive wildlife losses elsewhere in the world and represent important targets for consumption-focused conservation attention

Giant cell formation produced by laser microbeam irradiation of chromatin in Chinese hamster cells

A pulsed laser microbeam of wavelength 532 nm was used to produce visible small lesions in the nucleoplasm or in the cytoplasm of V79 Chinese hamster cells. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of microirradiated nuclei showed that the lesions were produced within the nucleus and comprised between 0.2 and 0.5% of the total chromatin. Serial sections above and below the lesion site did not reveal any detectable chromatin damage, indicating that a visible lesion was restricted to the focal point of the beam. Whereas cells microirradiated anywhere in the cytoplasm showed normal clonal growth with few exceptions, the cells containing nuclear lesions did not enter mitosis at the time of unirradiated controls. Instead they formed giant cells in a high percentage of cases (72/99). The DNA content of these cells was considerably increased suggesting polyploidization. In some cases, division of giant cells was observed resulting in non-viable daughter cells containing micronuclei. Further evidence that the induction of giant cell formation depends on chromatin damage was obtained by microirradiation of chromosomes in anaphase. Here, giant cell formation was observed in the daughter cell which received microirradiated chromatin, whereas microirradiation of cytoplasm between the moving sets of chromosomes did not affect subsequent divisions of both daughter cells. Our data point out that loss of reproductive integrity and giant cell formation can be induced by damage at many sites of the chromosome complement

Ives on His Own Terms: An Explication, a Theory of Pitch Organization, and a New Critical Edition for the 3-Page Sonata

Ives\u27s musical vision is tied to the expression of programmatic content. He believed that all music is program music. The first part of this study, An Explication, shows how the extramusical dimensions are articulated in the formal design of the music. The formal, motivic, textural, and tonal techniques relate to the program. The program for the 3-Page Sonata is found in three literary sources: a note Ives pinned to his copy of the first edition, the marginal notes on the composing score, and Memo 5 from Ives\u27s Memos, which contains a parody of the writing of the critic W. J. Henderson. An analysis of the formal procedures establishes the connection between Ives\u27s literary parody of Henderson\u27s statement and the parody of that statement in the music. An understanding of the programmatic content is intrinsic to an understanding of the music. The second part of the study unravels the components of Ives\u27s innovative language. Ives believed that innovation in the language of music was fundamental to music\u27s ability to communicate. Both manner and substance are vital aspects of an authentic art. The 3-Page Sonata is based on a symmetrical, cyclic pitch organization on a substructural level. Some compositional techniques are analogous to those in diatonic music. In the third movement four partially-ordered twelve-note sets are the basis of pc material for the entire movement. The need for a new edition was the result of the new findings in this study, through which many details were clarified. Especially because notation plays a role in Ives\u27s compositional process, a faithful and accurate transcription of the composer\u27s score is necessary. The assumption that is made in this edition is that everything in the composer\u27s score is there for a reason. Ives expressed passionate concern that his notation be observed. It communicates to the performer and the scholar signs about the metaphors in Ives\u27s music and about the interpretation of his music; it expresses the composer\u27s formal ideas and the new pitch and rhythmic language he invented

A Consumption-Based Approach to Carbon Emission Accounting – Sectoral Differences and Environmental Benefits

In recent years there has been growing concern about the emission trade balances of countries. This is due to the fact that countries with an open economy are active players in international trade. Trade is not only a major factor in forging a country’s economic structure, but contributes to the movement of embodied emissions beyond country borders. This issue is especially relevant from the carbon accounting policy and domestic production perspective, as it is known that the production-based principle is employed in the Kyoto agreement. The research described herein was designed to reveal the interdependence of countries on international trade and the corresponding embodied emissions both on national and on sectoral level and to illustrate the significance of the consumption-based emission accounting. It is presented here to what extent a consumption-based accounting would change the present system based on production-based accounting and allocation. The relationship of CO2 emission embodied in exports and embodied in imports is analysed here. International trade can blur the responsibility for the ecological effects of production and consumption and it can lengthen the link between consumption and its consequences. Input-output models are used in the methodology as they provide an appropriate framework for climate change accounting. The analysis comprises an international comparative study of four European countries (Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Hungary) with extended trading activities and carbon emissions. Moving from a production-based approach in climate policy to a consumption-based principle and allocation approach would help to increase the efficiency of emission reductions and would force countries to rethink their trading activities in order to decrease the environmental load of production activities. The results of this study show that it is important to distinguish between the two emission accounting approaches, both on the global and the local level

Upscaling Species Richness and Abundances in Tropical Forests

The quantification of tropical tree biodiversity worldwide remains an open and challenging problem. More than two-fifths of the number of worldwide trees can be found either in tropical or in subtropical forests, but only ≈0.000067% of species identities are known. We introduce an analytical framework that provides robust and accurate estimates of species richness and abundances in biodiversity-rich ecosystems, as confirmed by tests performed on both in silico–generated and real forests. Our analysis shows that the approach outperforms other methods. In particular, we find that upscaling methods based on the log-series species distribution systematically overestimate the number of species and abundances of the rare species. We finally apply our new framework on 15 empirical tropical forest plots and quantify the minimum percentage cover that should be sampled to achieve a given average confidence interval in the upscaled estimate of biodiversity. Our theoretical framework confirms that the forests studied are comprised of a large number of rare or hyper-rare species. This is a signature of critical-like behavior of species-rich ecosystems and can provide a buffer against extinction

Key features of palliative care service delivery to Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States: A comprehensive review

Background: Indigenous peoples in developed countries have reduced life expectancies, particularly from chronic diseases. The lack of access to and take up of palliative care services of Indigenous peoples is an ongoing concern. Objectives: To examine and learn from published studies on provision of culturally safe palliative care service delivery to Indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand (NZ), Canada and the United States of America (USA); and to compare Indigenous peoples’ preferences, needs, opportunities and barriers to palliative care. Methods: A comprehensive search of multiple databases was undertaken. Articles were included if they were published in English from 2000 onwards and related to palliative care service delivery for Indigenous populations; papers could use quantitative or qualitative approaches. Common themes were identified using thematic synthesis. Studies were evaluated using Daly’s hierarchy of evidence-for-practice in qualitative research. Results: Of 522 articles screened, 39 were eligible for inclusion. Despite diversity in Indigenous peoples’ experiences across countries, some commonalities were noted in the preferences for palliative care of Indigenous people: to die close to or at home; involvement of family; and the integration of cultural practices. Barriers identified included inaccessibility, affordability, lack of awareness of services, perceptions of palliative care, and inappropriate services. Identified models attempted to address these gaps by adopting the following strategies: community engagement and ownership; flexibility in approach; continuing education and training; a whole-of-service approach; and local partnerships among multiple agencies. Better engagement with Indigenous clients, an increase in number of palliative care patients, improved outcomes, and understanding about palliative care by patients and their families were identified as positive achievements. Conclusions: The results provide a comprehensive overview of identified effective practices with regards to palliative care delivered to Indigenous populations to guide future program developments in this field. Further research is required to explore the palliative care needs and experiences of Indigenous people living in urban areas

Comparative Study on the Performance of Web Application Engines Under Concurrent Load

Current trends indicate the continued proliferation of cloud technologies in hosting web services and content for consumers, as well as service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS) due to the advantages these paradigms offer. With the proven efficacy and increasing popularity of these cloud technologies, great scrutiny is now being applied to the performance characteristics of these technologies at scale, where their weaknesses tend to be revealed. Most early studies on cloud benchmarking and system analysis have focused on scale-up and scale-out paradigms and the topic of database performance. However, the server-side runtime environments supporting these paradigms have largely escaped the focus of formal benchmarking efforts, with greater focus remaining on hardware scaling and integration techniques. This thesis therefore attempts to help fill that void with an experimental performance study centered on one rising star among server-side platforms, the Node.js runtime environment. We herein describe and justify the design, execution, and results of a number of benchmark tests constructed and carried out to facilitate direct comparison between Node.js and its most popular competitor on the market, the LAMP stack. Further, we attempt to develop an understanding of where the strengths and limitations of these two technologies can be found when under heavy concurrent load. In particular, we investigate a server's ability to handle heavy static file service, remote database interaction, and computation. Analysis of our results indicates that Node.js outperforms the LAMP stack by a considerable margin in most situations.California State University, Northridge. Department of Computer Science.Includes bibliographical references (pages 80-81

A physical supply-use table framework for energy analysis on the energy conversion chain

In response to the oil crises of the 1970s, energy accounting experienced a revolution and became the much broader field of energy analysis, in part by expanding along the energy conversion chain from primary and final energy to useful energy and energy services, which satisfy human needs. After evolution and specialization, the field of energy analysis today addresses topics along the entire energy conversion chain, including energy conversion systems, energy resources, carbon emissions, and the role of energy services in promoting human well-being and development. And the expanded field would benefit from a common analysis framework that provides data structure uniformity and methodological consistency. Building upon recent advances in related fields, we propose a physical supply-use table energy analysis framework consisting of four matrices from which the input-output structure of an energy conversion chain can be determined and the effects of changes in final demand can be estimated. Real-world examples demonstrate the physical supply-use table framework via investigation of energy analysis questions for a United Kingdom energy conversion chain. The physical supply use table framework has two key methodological advances over the building blocks that precede it, namely extending a common energy analysis framework through to energy services and application of physical supply-use tables to both energy and exergy analysis. The methodological advances enable the following first-time contributions to the literature: (1) performing energy and exergy analyses on an energy conversion chain using physical supply-use table matrices comprised of disaggregated products in physical units when the last stage is any of final energy, useful energy, or energy services; (2) performing structural path analysis on an energy conversion chain; and (3) developing and utilizing a matrix approach to inhomogeneous units. The framework spans the entire energy conversion chain and is suitable for many sub-fields of energy analysis, including net energy analysis, societal energy analysis, human needs and well-being, and structural path analysis, all of which are explored in this paper