The review attempted to evaluate the quality attributes and preferred selected roots, tubers, bananas (RTB) items (gari/eba, lafun, yam flour, pounded yam, boiled plantain flour) among end-users in Nigeria’s rural, peri-urban, urban segments. results showed that depending on location, consumers’ of gari rural area are dry, bright/shiny, white, sweet, dense, fine, cooked aroma sour/sweet gari. C...

Loss of varietal diversity is a worldwide challenge to crop species at risk for genetic erosion, while the loss of biological resources may hinder future breeding objectives. Loss of varieties has been mostly investigated in traditional agricultural systems where variety numbers are dramatically high, or for most economically important crop species for which comparison between pre-intensive and...

BACKGROUND Rural households in the Mahafaly region of semi-arid SW-Madagascar strongly depend on the exploitation of natural resources for their basic needs and income regeneration. An overuse of such resources threatens the natural environment and people's livelihood. Our study focuses on the diversity and use of wild yams and medicinal plants. METHODS We hypothesized that knowledge on the u...

Unlike other animals, humans are heavily dependent on cumulative bodies of culturally learned information. Selective processes operating on this socially learned information can produce complex, functionally integrated, behavioural repertoires-cultural adaptations. To understand such non-genetic adaptations, evolutionary theorists propose that (i) natural selection has favoured the emergence of...

David D. Chinellato, Marcus A.M. de Aguiar, Irving R. Epstein, Dan Braha and Yaneer Bar-Yam Instituto de F́ısica ‘Gleb Wataghin’, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Unicamp 13083-970, Campinas, SP, Brasil New England Complex Systems Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 Department of Chemistry, MS015, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02454, USA University of Massachusetts, Dartmou...

Justin Werfel, Donald E. Ingber, and Yaneer Bar-Yam New England Complex Systems Institute, 238 Main Street, Suite 319, Cambridge, MA, 02142, USA Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA, 02115, USA and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA...

This paper provides a framework for discussing the validity of computer simulation models of market phenomena. It defines functional complexity and derives measures of this for a well known agent-based simulation model and suggests methods to overcome the obstacle of complexity in validating such models.. Acknowledgments: I thank Yaneer Bar-Yam, Ian Wilkinson, and three referees for their assis...