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The Philippine crocodile is a critically endangered species, endemic to the Philippine Islands. Indiscriminate hunting, the use of destructive fishing practices and the conversion of wetland habitat into rice fields continue to threaten the few remaining Philippine crocodile populations in the wild. This thesis describes the in-situ conservation efforts for the species in the northern Sierra Madre on Luzon by the Mabuwaya Foundation. Traditions, emotions and ethics form important reasons for rural communities in the northern Sierra Madre to support the conservation of the Philippine crocodile in their surroundings. But in contemporary conservation discourses such an argument is easily dismissed as hopelessly romantic, elitist or even irrational. In fact raising awareness, fostering pride and empowering rural communities to protect the resources they need and value is, in the end, a more pragmatic, pro-poor and rea listic strategy to mobilize local support for the protection of the Philippine crocodile than a narrow focus on generating economic incentives. Conservation efforts can be significantly strengthened if cultural and intrinsic values are taken into account. Pride, interest and respect offer the best hope for the survival of the Philippine crocodile in the 21st century.

Er wordt verslag gedaan van 3 jaar milieubeleidsanalyse voor de milieubalans, met nadruk op de onderbouwing van de in MB95, MB96 en MB97 getrokken conclusies. Samen met de RUU en CSTM zijn kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve methoden ontwikkeld. Aan de hand van een instrumententheorie van Glasbergen is een inventarisatie en karakterisering van beleidsinstrumenten uitgevoerd. De beleidsmixen zijn geanalyseerd per doelgroep en per thema. In de vergelijkende beleidsanalyse zijn voor een groot aantal kwantitatieve en meer kwalitatieve factoren tijdseries opgesteld voor 44 cases (doelgroep-stof-combinaties) over de periode tussen 1970 en 1995. Met behulp van het zo opgebouwde gegevensbestand was het mogelijk kwantitatieve relaties te leggen tussen de beleidsimpuls, maatschappelijke aandacht, kosten van maatregelen enerzijds en de emissiefactor anderzijds. Inzicht is verkregen in het verloop en de duur van beleidsprocessen en het effect van het aandeel juridische, financiele en communicatieve instrumenten in de beleidsmix. Een aparte analyse is gewijd aan de milieu-convenanten en meerjarenafspraken over energie met de industrie.

Background: Failure to sustain guideline-based organizational change at two-years is 41-70% with limited evaluation of prospective theory-based sustainability-oriented guideline implementation. The NHS sustainability model was developed by 250 experts in the UK with 10 factors clustered about process,[for full text, please go to the a.m. URL], G-I-N Conference 2012

We present a survey on traffic management and control frameworks for Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS). First, we give a short overview of the main currently used traffic control methods that can be applied in IVHS. Next, various traffic management architectures for IVHS such as PATH, Dolphin, Auto21 CDS, etc., are briefly discussed and a comparison of the various frameworks is presented. Subsequently, we focus on control of vehicles inside a platoon, and we present a detailed discussion on the notion of string stability. Next, we consider higher-level control of platoons of vehicles. Finally, we present an outlook on open problems and topics for future research.

In recent years, highway capacity has become a limiting factor, regularly causing traffic jams. Obviously, the road capacity can be increased by decreasing the inter-vehicle following distance di . As a consequence, however, vehicle automation in longitudinal direction is required in order to still guarantee safety. To this end, Adaptive Cruise Control could be used, which is based on measurement of the inter-vehicle distance and the relative velocity by means of radar. It has however been shown [1] that this will amplify disturbances in upstream direction at short time gaps, causing so-called ghost traffic jams. Application of data exchange by means of wireless communication in addition, is shown to be able to attenuate these disturbances. This is called Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), illustrated in Figure 1 for a one-vehicle look-ahead communication structure.

Road throughput can be increased by driving at small inter-vehicle time gaps. The amplification of velocity disturbances in upstream direction, however, poses limitations to the minimum feasible time gap. This effect is covered by the notion of string stability. String-stable behavior is thus considered an essential requirement for the design of automatic distance control systems, which are needed to allow for safe driving at time gaps well below 1 s. Using wireless inter-vehicle communications to provide real-time information of the preceding vehicle, in addition to the information obtained by common Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) sensors, appears to significantly decrease the feasible time gap, which is shown by practical experiments with a test fleet consisting of six passenger vehicles. The large-scale deployment of this system, known as Cooperative ACC (CACC), however, poses challenges with respect to the reliability of the wireless communication system. A solution for this scalability problem can be found in decreasing the transmission power and/or beaconing rate, or adapting the communications protocol. Although the main CACC objective is to increase road throughput, the first commercial application of CACC is foreseen to be in truck platooning, since short distance following is expected to yield significant fuel savings in this case.

Recent development in wireless technology enables communication between vehicles. The concept of Co-operative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) which uses wireless communication between vehicles aims at string stable behaviour in a platoon of vehicles. "String stability" means any non-zero position, speed, and acceleration errors of an individual vehicle in a string do not amplify when they propagate upstream. In this paper, we will discuss the string stability of CACC and evaluate its performance with various packet loss ratios, beacon sending frequencies and time headway in simulations. The simulation framework is built up with a controller prototype, a traffic simulator, and a network simulator. © 2011 IEEE.

Aim.: This paper is a report of a study of the meaning of living alone from the perspective of older people with dementia. Background.: Risks and problems experienced by older women living alone have been investigated mostly through quantitative research. Balancing their safety and autonomy is a serious international community care dilemma. Older people's perspectives have been muted in qualitative research on living alone with dementia. Method.: Using an interpretive phenomenological approach and van Manen's method, 14 interviews were conducted in Ontario, Canada from January 2004 to April 2005 with eight older women diagnosed with Alzheimer disease or a related dementia. Findings.: The theme holding back time expressed the temporal meaning of living alone. Pharmacological treatments represented stored time, offering the opportunity to hold back future dreaded time. Past experience with others with dementia was a context for holding on to now and facing some risks of living alone with memory loss. The women acknowledged the limited time remaining for, and identified endpoints to, living alone. Conclusion.: Insight into the impact of past experience with others with dementia could inform nursing assessment and advocacy for health/social services that are sensitive to the potential emotional impact of mixing people with varied levels of dementia in the same programme. © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The combination of different desirable characteristics and situation-dependent behavior cause the design of adaptive cruise control (ACC) systems to be time consuming and tedious. This chapter presents a systematic approach for the design and tuning of an ACC, based on model predictive control (MPC). A unique feature of the synthesized ACC is its parameterization in terms of the key characteristics safety, comfort and fuel economy. This makes it easy and intuitive to tune, even for nonexperts in (MPC) control, such as the driver. The effectiveness of the design approach is demonstrated using simulations for some relevant traffic scenarios. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London.

In this paper, a collision warning method between the host vehicle and target object(s) is studied. A probabilistic collision warning method is proposed, which is, in particular, useful for objects, e.g. vulnerable road users, which trajectories can rapidly change heading and/or velocity with respect to time. A vehicle is equipped with the probabilistic collision warning system and its functionality is validated in experiments with a bicyclist as target object.

Host and vector distribution of Trypanosoma brucei gambiense was studied in relation to habitat types and seasons. Six (19.35%) of the 31 mammal species recorded in Bipindi were reservoir hosts. Cercopithecus nictitans was confined to the undisturbed forest and the low intensive shifting cultivation zones, while Cephalophus monticola, Cephalophus dorsalis. Cricetomys gambianus, Atherurus africanus and Nandinia binotata occurred in all the habitat types. As for vectors of human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), Glossina palpalis palpalis, was the most abundant (99.13%) among tsetse fly species. It occurs in all biotopes with its highest density recorded in the village-adjacent forest. The village-adjacent forest is therefore the most risky transmission zone for HAT mainly during the short rainy season when G. palpalis palpails density is highest (2.91); while, the high and low intensive shifting cultivation zones are the most important contact zones between humans, G. palpalis palpalis and wild mammals in all seasons.

The rural livelihood framework that has emerged from the debate on sustainable rural development is especially useful for analyzing rural development practices as actively constructed household strategies. Many scientists are finding it difficult to come to grips with the new model of rural development that emerges slowly but persistently in both policy and practice. Interactions with non-specific rural development policies at times are more important for their development. By stressing the dialectics between the real and the potential, rural development theory deviates intrinsically from the determinism of modernization approaches. If convincing and more comprehensive definitions are to emerge, it is essential that rural development be recognized as a multi-level process rooted in historical traditions. It is the complex institutional setting of rural development that makes it a multi-actor process. Perhaps the most dramatic expression of this has been the growing squeeze on agriculture and therefore on the rural economy in general.

This paper presents the synthesis, the implementation and the performance-based tuning of an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) Stop-&-Go (S&G) design. A Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework is adopted to design the controller. Performance of the controller is evaluated, distinguishing between comfort of the resulting longitudinal vehicle behavior and the behavior due to traffic requirements. Corresponding metrics are incorporated in the controller design. Performance functions, relating the metrics explicitly to comfort and traffic requirements enable tuning of the resulting controller. As a result, the performance of the controller can be changed by a single performance-based weight. Simulation results for varying controller performance in various traffic situations are shown. © 2008 IEEE.