Household food security remains a challenge in South Africa. The national government instituted the Integrated Food Security Strategy (IFSS) programme which identifies household agricultural production as an important element of improving household-level food security. Agricultural extension is well positioned to help achieve this aim, but its current contribution is unknown. This study identif...

This paper proposes a new niching method named hierarchical niching, which combines spatial niching in search space and a continuous temporal niching concept. The method is naturally implemented as a new genetic algorithm, QHFC, under a sustainable evolutionary computation model: the Hierarchical Fair Competition (HFC) Model. By combining the benefits of the temporally continuing search capabil...

OBJECTIVE To determine the weekly financial cost of a diet as recommended by national policy in two parents with two children, single parents with one child and single old people with low income, and begin to identify, in a rich country context, variation in food item availability, price and household purchasing capacity. DESIGN Food baskets were developed based on national dietary recommenda...

The financial incentives offered by the risk-based pricing of insurance can stimulate policyholder adaptation to flood risk while potentially conflicting with affordability. We examine the trade-off between risk reduction and affordability in a model of public-private flood insurance in France and Germany estimating household flood adaptation decisions in response to financial insurance incenti...

Household Finances and the ‘Big Five’ Personality Traits We explore the relationship between household finances and personality traits from an empirical perspective. Specifically, using individual level data drawn from the British Household Panel Survey, we analyse the influence of personality traits on financial decisionmaking at the individual level focusing on decisions regarding unsecured d...

The DOCSIS protocol defines the MAC and physical layer operations governing two-way transmission of voice, video and multimedia data over HFC cable networks, thus constituting a complex system with many interdependent parameters. This tutorial employs simulation and analytic methodologies for the performance modelling and optimisation of DOCSIS 1.1/2.0 HFC networks with particular focus on the ...

We report on the experimental and theoretical studies of cooling field (HFC) and temperature (T) dependent exchange bias (EB) in FexAu1-x/Fe19Ni81 spin glass (SG)/ferromagnet (FM) bilayers. When x varies from 8% to 14% in the FexAu1-x SG alloys, with increasing T, a sign-changeable exchange bias field (HE) together with a unimodal distribution of coercivity (HC) are observed. Significantly, inc...

Although it is generally accepted that humans cannot perceive sounds in the frequency range above 20 kHz, the question of whether the existence of such "inaudible" high-frequency components may affect the acoustic perception of audible sounds remains unanswered. In this study, we used noninvasive physiological measurements of brain responses to provide evidence that sounds containing high-frequ...

Chiral tetrakis(β-diketonate) Ln(III) complexes Δ-[NaLa(d-hfc)(4)(CH(3)CN)] (1) and Λ-[NaLa(l-hfc)(4) (CH(3)CN)] (2) (d/l-hfc(-) = 3-heptafluo-robutylryl-(+)/(-)-camphorate) are a pair of enantiomers and crystallize in the same Sohncke space group (P2(1)2(1)2(1)) with dodecahedral (DD) geometry. Typically positive and negative exciton splitting patterns around 320 nm were observed in the solid-...

BACKGROUND Red yeast rice (RYR) is a fermented product used as a food supplement to promote blood circulation and lower blood cholesterol levels in eastern Asia. Interestingly, monacolin K is the most active compound in RYR that proved to inhibit HMG-CoA reductase in the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway. METHODS The hypocholesterolemic effects of oral administration of Thai RYR, produced by f...