Animal health and the role of communities: an example of trypanasomosis control options in Uganda

In many African countries, governments are re-thinking the role of the state in centrally providing certain goods and services. The rights and responsibilities for providing various public goods are being decentralized to lower levels of government administration, and/or being devolved directly to local citizens or user groups themselves. It is thus critical to ask: under what circumstances will local groups provide the socially optimal level of the public good? In this paper, we apply this question to the case of controlling an important vector-borne livestock disease in Uganda, trypanosomosis, which is transmitted by the tsetse fly. We investigate the underlying epidemiology of transmission and different options for control, and the implications for group provision of control, within the framework of a game-theoretic model. Results indicate that individual incentives to uptake tsetse and trypanosomosis control differ widely across different control methods. Since the costs of successfully implementing collective action are affected by individual incentives to participate in collective action, the model predicts which method/s are likely to be successfully implemented at the community level. More broadly, the model highlights under what circumstances community-provision is not likely to be optimal, depending on the underlying epidemiology of the disease, technological parameters, prevailing market characteristics, and socio-cultural conditions.

A Preliminary Study of the Benefication of Montana Kyanite

This investigation is a preliminary study of the beneficiation of Montana kyanite, and while preliminary in degree the information gained may serve as a guide for the eventual exploitation of this Montana resource

Improvement of oral reports through the students' use of audio-visual aids

Author misnumbered thesis. Please note that there are TWO page 108s, but the continuity is the same. Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Anomalous scattering of light on Triton

Researchers report here the discovery of an isolated region of anomalously forward scattering materials on the surface of Triton. The researchers' best-fit Hapke parameters indicate that regolith particles in the anomalous scattering region are not only less backward scattering, but also slightly lower in single scattering albedo than average materials on Triton's surface. While it might be possible to account for such differences in terms of differences in particle size and transparency, it is also possible that the anomalous region is compositionally distinct from other terrains. It is noteworthy that, for the anomalous region, there exists a distinctively strong spatial correlation between the photometric ratios at different phase angles, and that, relative to other terrains, the anomalous region reddens at a different rate with increasing phase angle

Climatic variability and cooperation in rangeland management: a case study from Niger

In this paper, we develop an empirical model of an agro-pastoral system subject to high climatic risk to test the impact of rainfall variability on livestock densities, land allocation patterns and herd mobility observed at the community level. Also, because grazing land is a common-pool resource, we determine the impact of cooperation on these decision variables. To capture different abilities of communities to manage these externalities, we construct indices comprised of factors considered to affect the costliness of achieving successful cooperation found in the collective action literature. We then test hypotheses regarding the impact of rainfall variability and cooperation using data collected in a semi-arid region of Niger. Results indicate that rainfall variability first leads to higher and then lower stock densities, indicating that benefits of accumulating large herds in variable environments are eventually offset by the higher risks of low production and higher mortality. Communities with characteristics hypothesized to favor cooperation have lower stock densities and greater herd mobility. Neither cooperation nor rainfall variability has a significant impact on the proportion of land allocated to crops vs. common pastures.Environmental management,

Comparative genomics of Shiga toxin encoding bacteriophages

Background Stx bacteriophages are responsible for driving the dissemination of Stx toxin genes (stx) across their bacterial host range. Lysogens carrying Stx phages can cause severe, lifethreatening disease and Stx toxin is an integral virulence factor. The Stx-bacteriophage vB_EcoP-24B, commonly referred to as 24B, is capable of multiply infecting a single bacterial host cell at a high frequency, with secondary infection increasing the rate at which subsequent bacteriophage infections can occur. This is biologically unusual, therefore determining the genomic content and context of 24B compared to other lambdoid Stx phages is important to understanding the factors controlling this phenomenon and determining whether they occur in other Stx phages. Results The genome of the Stx2 encoding phage, 24B was sequenced and annotated. The genomic organisation and general features are similar to other sequenced Stx bacteriophages induced from Enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC), however 24B possesses significant regions of heterogeneity, with implications for phage biology and behaviour. The 24B genome was compared to other sequenced Stx phages and the archetypal lambdoid phage, lambda, using the Circos genome comparison tool and a PCR-based multi-loci comparison system. Conclusions The data support the hypothesis that Stx phages are mosaic, and recombination events between the host, phages and their remnants within the same infected bacterial cell will continue to drive the evolution of Stx phage variants and the subsequent dissemination of shigatoxigenic potentia

CLARITY at the TREC 2011 microblog track

For the first year of the TREC Microblog Track the CLARITY group concentrated on a number of areas, investigating the underlying term weighting scheme for ranking tweets, incorporating query expansion to introduce new terms into the query, as well as introducing an element of temporal re-weighting based on the temporal distribution of assumed relevant microblogs