The study examined the spatiotemporal distribution of drought in the Maasai rangelands of Kenya. The implications of this distribution, in concert with the documented existing and/or projected social and biophysical factors, on critical rangeland resources in Maasai-pastoralism are discussed using an integrated approach. Participatory interviews with the Maasai, retrieval from archives, and acq...

Most of studies on the video communications are based on an unproved hypothesis: They take it granted that the full-face images of communicators are the 'sine qua non' in video conversations, and profiles are rather confusing or annoying for them. This paper proves the counter hypothesis that profile images are also useful and they can replace the full-faces under some conditions. Psychological...

We carried out a randomized controlled trial in Bogotá, the recipient of Colombia's highest number of internally displaced people (IDP), to assess whether the use of SMS to communicate eligibility to social benefits fosters the welfare of victimized internal refugees. Only a fraction of IDP are eligible to benefits. We inform eligibility via SMS to a random half of such households, and estimate...

T elimination of health disparities in the United States is a national priority and overriding goal for Healthy People 2010 (HP 2010). Surveillance of health indicators among minority populations is essential to eliminating disparities. Surveillance is critical for program planning, policy making, evaluating population-based strategies, and tracking progress toward national and state objectives.

Even when no baseline data are available, the impacts of 150 years of livestock grazing on natural grasslands can be assessed using a combined approach of grazing manipulation and regional-scale assessment of the flora. Here, we demonstrate the efficacy of this method across 18 sites in the semidesert Mitchell grasslands of northeastern Australia. Fifteen-year-old exclosures (ungrazed and macro...

Previous research on education amongst pastoralists has concentrated mainly on the reasons for their comparatively low rates of enrolment and attainment. This thesis examines education in pastoralist areas more critically. It is based on fourteen months of fieldwork carried out between 2003 and 2006 in a predominantly agro-pastoralist Maasai area in Monduli District in northern Tanzania. Quanti...

Abstract: Some people automatically and involuntarily ”see” mental images of numbers in spatial arrays when they think of numbers. This phenomenon, called number forms, shares three key characteristics with the other types of synaesthesiae, within-individual consistency, between-individual variety, and mixture of regularity and randomness. An experiment was conducted to investigate whether ment...

Over the years a number of powerful people detectors have been proposed. While it is standard to test complete detectors on publicly available datasets, it is often unclear how the di erent components (e.g. features and classi ers) of the respective detectors compare. Therefore, this paper contributes a systematic comparison of the most prominent and successful people detectors. Based on this e...

In this paper we give a new approach to the concepts of glyph and character, applied to the study of the Unicode encoding. After a thorough discussion of these two concepts, we describe the other fundamental ingredients of the encoding: privileged glyphs, character descriptions, combining characters, and properties. In each case we try to show the importance of the given notion and at the same ...