Polymeric membranes are an energy‐efficient means of purifying water, but they suffer from fouling during filtration. Modification of the membrane surface is one route to mitigating membrane fouling, ...as it helps to maintain high levels of water productivity. Here, a series of common techniques for modification of the membrane surface are reviewed, including surface coating, grafting, and various treatment techniques such as chemical treatment, UV irradiation, and plasma treatment. Historical background on membrane development and surface modification is also provided. Finally, polydopamine, an emerging material that can be easily deposited onto a wide variety of substrates, is discussed within the context of membrane modification. A brief summary of the chemistry of polydopamine, particularly as it may pertain to membrane development, is also described.
Cleaning up: The efficiency of polymeric water purification membranes, which are capable of removing many impurities from water but frequently suffer from fouling, can be improved by surface modification. Common techniques used to modify membrane surfaces, including grafting, coating, chemical treatment, UV irradiation, plasma treatment, and polydopamine application, are reviewed.
There is little systematic knowledge about the nature, extent, and trends of international aid for projects that link biodiversity conservation and development goals. This study uses a new dataset to ...analyze spatial and temporal patterns of such aid globally over the past three decades. Results reveal significant donor selectivity in aid allocation, though linked conservation and development aid comprised more than two-thirds of all biodiversity-related assistance. Biodiversity aid generally was directed to biodiversity-rich, well-governed countries, but countries able to exert greater political leverage secured more linked aid than aid targeted to conservation without a stated development objective.
Membrane fouling is often characterized in the laboratory by flux decline experiments, where an increase in transport resistance due to accumulation of foulants on and/or in a membrane is manifested ...as a decrease in permeate flux with filtration time at fixed transmembrane pressure. However, many industrial microfiltration and ultrafiltration applications operate at constant permeate flux, and there are few reports comparing these modes of operation. In this study, emulsified oil fouling of polysulfone ultrafiltration membranes was studied using both constant permeate flux and constant transmembrane pressure experiments. Mass transfer resistance changes during fouling were compared between constant flux experiments and constant transmembrane pressure experiments performed at an initial flux equal to the flux imposed during the constant flux experiment. At low fluxes, the transport resistance and its change with permeate volume per unit area agreed within experimental error regardless of operational mode. In contrast, at high fluxes, the change in membrane resistance with permeate volume per unit area was much higher in constant flux than in constant transmembrane pressure experiments. The threshold flux, defined recently as the flux at which the rate of fouling begins to increase rapidly, separates the regimes of good and poor agreement between the two types of experiments. The weak form of the critical flux, below which spontaneous adsorption is the only significant resistance imposed by foulant, was also observed.
This introduction provides a basic description of the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA) project, including the project’s range of field sites, methods, and ethics. I compare this ...project with prior comparative studies in the anthropology of ageing. I also discuss certain other findings of the ASSA project as they relate to the ASSA researchers’ re-conceptualisation of the smartphone and our work on mHealth. I then consider how an anthropological approach to comparison differs from that of other disciplines, partly through examining methods of comparison found within the articles in this Special Issue. In particular, I contrast the idea that anthropologists can compare data regarded as commensurable because of a standardisation in how they were collected, to a view that anthropologists mostly do not collect commensurable data at all; in which case, perhaps anthropologists are best at making comparison at the level of implied causation, sometimes developing a spectrum of field sites where implied causation can itself act as a parameter of difference.
Improved knowledge of long-term social and environmental trends and their drivers in coupled human and natural systems is needed to guide nature and society along a more sustainable trajectory. Here ...we combine common property theory and experimental impact evaluation methods to develop an approach for analyzing long-term outcome trajectories in social-ecological systems (SESs). We constructed robust counterfactual scenarios for observed vegetation outcome trajectories in the Indian Himalaya using synthetic control matching. This approach enabled us to quantify the contribution of a set of biophysical and socioeconomic factors in shaping observed outcomes. Results show the relative importance of baseline vegetation condition, governance, and demographic change in predicting long-term ecological outcomes. More generally, the findings suggest the broad potential utility of our approach to analyze long-term outcome trajectories, target new policy interventions, and assess the impacts of policies on sustainability goals in SESs across the globe.
Herein we propose a new structure for poly(dopamine), a synthetic eumelanin that has found broad utility as an antifouling agent. Commercially available 3-hydroxytyramine hydrochloride (dopamine HCl) ...was polymerized under aerobic, aqueous conditions using tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane (TRIS) as a basic polymerization initiator, affording a darkly colored powder product upon isolation. The polymer was analyzed using a variety of solid state spectroscopic and crystallographic techniques. Collectively, the data showed that in contrast to previously proposed models, poly(dopamine) is not a covalent polymer but instead a supramolecular aggregate of monomers (consisting primarily of 5,6-dihydroxyindoline and its dione derivative) that are held together through a combination of charge transfer, π-stacking, and hydrogen bonding interactions.
From cultural studies, sociology, media studies gender studies and elsewhere there bas been a spate of books recently which bave attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have ...also argued that what is required is ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Carribean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study, given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture, and the subsequent development of creolisation, the transnational tamily and economic dependency.
The particular focus of this book is on mass consumption and the way goods and imported images such as the soap opera have been used to express and develop a number of key contradixtions of modernity. Trinidad also provides considerable material for qualifying and disputing many of the generalisations made in the literature of modernity and postmodernism, for example, the use of concepts such as superficiality, individualism and style.
•Major thematic and geographical biases characterize the forest livelihoods literature.•Current forest-poverty research concentrates almost exclusively on economic and material dimensions.•We develop ...a conceptual framework for analyzing forests as pathways to prosperity.•Wider perspective is needed to account for diverse ways forests contribute to human well-being.
The role of forests in supporting current consumption and helping people cope with seasonal, climatic, and other stressors is increasingly well understood. But can forests help rural households climb out of poverty? And can forests provide a pathway to prosperity that includes more widely shared economic benefits and improvements in other aspects of human well-being? This introduction to the Special Issue on “Forests as Pathways to Prosperity” reviews the literature on forest livelihoods in developing countries to synthesize evidence relating to these questions. We find that available research primarily examines poverty mitigation aspects of forests rather than the potential role of forest conservation, management, and use in alleviating poverty or promoting broader prosperity. To increase understanding of forest-livelihood relationships we propose a framework based on the concept of prosperity, which draws particular attention to human well-being beyond economic and material dimensions. We argue that explicitly taking a more expansive view can enable better accounting for the diverse ways forests contribute to human welfare, expand the constituency for forests, and inform policies to more sustainably manage forests within wider landscapes. Together, our review and the other articles in this volume advance these objectives by providing new analytical frameworks, empirical insights, and theoretical understanding to build knowledge on linkages between forests, poverty, and broader prosperity.
Blue jeans Miller, Daniel
2012., 20120102, 2012, 2012-02-01
eBook
This fresh and accessible ethnography offers a new vision of how society might cohere, in the face of on-going global displacement, dislocation, and migration. Drawing from intensive fieldwork in a ...highly diverse North London neighborhood, Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward focus on an everyday item—blue jeans—to learn what one simple article of clothing can tell us about our individual and social lives and challenging, by extension, the foundational anthropological presumption of "the normative." Miller and Woodward argue that blue jeans do not always represent social and cultural difference, from gender and wealth, to style and circumstance. Instead they find that jeans allow individuals to inhabit what the authors term "the ordinary." Miller and Woodward demonstrate that the emphasis on becoming ordinary is important for immigrants and the population of North London more generally, and they call into question foundational principles behind anthropology, sociology and philosophy.
•Uptake of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in low-income countries remains low despite considerable international investments.•We develop a farm-level typology of CSA practices to provide conceptual ...clarity on CSA adoption.•We test hypotheses about the impacts of external funding on CSA adoption through a case study in southern Malawi.•CSA funding increased the adoption probability of more resource-intensive CSA categories.
Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is increasingly important for advancing rural development and environmental sustainability goals in developing countries. Over the past decade, the international community has committed billions of dollars to support various practices under the banner of CSA. Despite this effort, however, CSA adoption remains low in many contexts. Lack of conceptual clarity about the range of potential farm-level CSA practices across contexts impedes understanding of CSA adoption in developing countries. Here we review relevant literature to develop a typology of farm-level CSA practices to facilitate analyses of CSA adoption. The typology consists of six categories, organized from least to most resource intensive: (1) residue addition, (2) non-woody plant cultivation, (3) assisted regeneration, (4) woody plant cultivation, (5) physical infrastructure, and (6) mixed measures. We use the typology to generate and test hypotheses about CSA adoption using primary household survey data from a large aid-funded CSA intervention area in southern Malawi. We then use recursive bivariate probit regression (controlling for endogeneity and selection bias) to estimate the effect of program participation on adoption across CSA categories. We find positive and statistically significant effects of program participation on adoption of CSA practices generally with the strongest effects on resource-intensive CSA categories. Results demonstrate the potential for wider application of the typology to build knowledge of the effectiveness of CSA promotion efforts across different social and environmental contexts. Our findings also suggest the importance of external support for the adoption of more resource-intensive CSA practices among rural households and communities in Malawi and elsewhere in the developing world.
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