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Restoration is a key component of global and national efforts to combat ecosystem degradation, reduce biodiversity loss, and adapt to climate change, and there is currently an impetus to scale up restoration efforts. However, our ability to track progress toward restoration targets is limited by the lack of consistent and standardized data on objectives, interventions, and outcomes. To address this, a collaboration of conservation practitioners and scientists from around the world have developed the Mangrove Restoration Tracker Tool (MRTT), an application to record and track outcomes from mangrove restoration projects. The MRTT records information across the lifetime of a project, capturing data describing the site background and pre-restoration baseline and the restoration interventions and costs, as well as post-restoration monitoring that incorporates both socioeconomic and ecological factors. The MRTT allows decision makers, practitioners, and site managers to access information that is essential in making informed, evidence-based decisions on restoration interventions to maximize impact and success.

Aquatic foods are a vital source of nutrients for coastal communities around the world. The global commitment to expand marine protected areas (MPAs) means it is critical to understand how MPAs affect human nutrition and health. Here, we perform a literature review to identify the major pathways through which sustainable-use MPAs, those that allow for fishing activities within their borders, affect human nutrition and health. We found that sustainable-use MPAs often affect nutrition through three main pathways: (1) changes in fisheries catch, (2) changes in tourism activity, and (3) changes in ancillary programs. We also quantitatively analyze the contribution of sustainable-use MPAs to global catch, revenue, and nutrient supply. We estimate that sustainable-use MPAs contribute an average of 13.6% of global catch, 14% of fisheries revenue, and 13.7% of nutrient supply. Given dire global nutritional vulnerabilities, the potential impacts of MPAs on diets should be a key consideration in MPA expansion discussions.

The article focuses on the root causes of South Africa's chronic mass unemployment, attributing it largely to government policies rather than a lack of skills among workers. Topics include the impact of neoliberal economic policies, the decline of manufacturing and other labor-intensive sectors, and the necessity for increased state investment to foster job creation and economic stability.

This paper reports the attitudes and experiences of project stakeholders working on a contract in the United Kingdom (UK) for the Highways Agency (HA). The agency used these stakeholders to procure construction services for maintaining its roads. During the course of the project, the HA changed its focus from a traditional, compulsory competitive tendering-type (CCT) strategy to one based on the HA's Construction Management Pilot (CMP) scheme. Part of the change involved the HA's introduction of a performance management system (PMS); this system offers a multi-dimensional and multi-observational perspective of success. This paper discusses the benefits of the new strategy and the issues and problems encountered by the HA while implementing the project plan. It also analyzes the contribution of the new PMS to the project strategy. Keywords: performance: measurement; stakeholders; strategy.

Atypical small acinar proliferation is a histopathological diagnosis of unspecified importance in prostate needle-biopsy reports, suggestive but not definitive for cancer. The terminology corresponds to some uncertainty in the biopsy report, as the finding might represent an underlying non-cancerous pathology mimicking cancer or an under-sampled prostate cancer site. Therefore, traditional practice favors an immediate repeat biopsy. However, in modern urological times, the need of urgent repeat biopsy is being challenged by some authors as in the majority of cases, the grade of cancer found in subsequent biopsy is reported to be low or the disease to be non-significant. On the other hand, high risk disease cannot be excluded, whereas no clinical or pathological factors can predict the final outcome. In this review, we discuss the significance of the diagnosis of atypical small acinar proliferation in the biopsy report, commenting on its importance in modern urological practice.

Mangrove forests are found on sheltered coastlines in tropical, subtropical, and some warm temperate regions. These forests support unique biodiversity and provide a range of benefits to coastal communities, but as a result of large-scale conversion for aquaculture, agriculture, and urbanization, mangroves are considered increasingly threatened ecosystems. Scientific advances have led to accurate and comprehensive global datasets on mangrove extent, structure, and condition, and these can support evaluation of ecosystem services and stimulate greater conservation and rehabilitation efforts. To increase the utility and uptake of these products, in this Perspective we provide an overview of these recent and forthcoming global datasets and explore the challenges of translating these new analyses into policy action and on-the-ground conservation. We describe a new platform for visualizing and disseminating these datasets to the global science community, non-governmental organizations, government officials, and rehabilitation practitioners and highlight future directions and collaborations to increase the uptake and impact of large-scale mangrove research.

Well leg compartment syndrome is a rare complication of orthopaedic surgery, especially in paediatric patients. The aim of this study is to present a single case of this disease and to provide recommendations for its management.

Consumption of chicken cuts and chicken dishes fell 0.3% last year but it is still a staple of the British diet, featuring in one in every 16 meals last year. [...]

The article focuses on the population growth in the Gold Coast. The increase in population is attributed to net migration and natural increase consisting of retirees and persons aged 30 to 44 years. The benefits and disadvantages of the population growth are explored in detail. Also noted are the challenges of housing and infrastructure development.

Abstract: A novel combination of the adaptive function neural network (ADFUNN) and on-line snap–drift learning is presented in this paper and applied to optical and pen-based recognition of handwritten digits [E. Alpaydin, F. Alimoglu for Optical Recognition of Handwritten Digits and E. Alpaydin, C. Kaynak for Pen-Based Recognition of Handwritten Digits http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/databases/optdigits/ http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/databases/pendigits/]. Snap–drift [S.W. Lee, D. Palmer-Brown, C.M. Roadknight, Performance-guided neural network for rapidly self-organising active network management (Invited Paper), Journal of Neurocomputing, 61C, 2004, pp. 5–20] employs the complementary concepts of common (intersection) feature learning (called snap) and LVQ (drift towards the input patterns) learning, and is a fast, unsupervised method suitable for on-line learning and non-stationary environments where new patterns are continually introduced. ADFUNN [M. Kang, D. Palmer-Brown, An adaptive function neural network (ADFUNN) for phrase recognition, in: The International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN05), Montréal, Canada, 2005, D. Palmer-Brown, M. Kang, ADFUNN: An adaptive function neural network, in: The 7th International Conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms (ICANNGA05), Coimbra, Portugal, 2005] is based on a linear piecewise neuron activation function that is modified by a novel gradient descent supervised learning algorithm. It has recently been applied to the Iris dataset, and a natural language phrase recognition problem, exhibiting impressive generalisation classification ability with no hidden neurons. The unsupervised single layer snap–drift is effective in extracting distinct features from the complex cursive-letter datasets, and the supervised single layer ADFUNN is capable of solving linearly inseparable problems rapidly. In combination within one network (SADFUNN), these two methods are more powerful and yet simpler than MLPs, at least on this problem domain. We experiment on SADFUNN with two handwritten digits datasets problems from the UCI Machine Learning repository. The problems are learned rapidly and higher generalisation results are achieved than with a MLP. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Nearly one million Australians (one in 20) were away from home on census night in 2006. Thus population estimates based on people's usual place of residence provide an incomplete picture. This article uses the Australian national visitor survey (NVS) to supplement these estimates and outline a picture of the seasonal undulating movement of Australians across the landscape each year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, with the formation of organisations such as the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre, social science interest in the Australian desert has re-surfaced with a research emphasis that is focused on creating sustainable futures for the region. One consequence of this is a demand for detailed demographic information to allow an assessment of different quanta of need in social and economic policy, and for assessment of the impact of these in environmental policy. However, demographic analysis on human populations in the desert to date has attracted very little research attention. In this paper we begin to address this lack of analysis by focusing on the populations, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, of the arid and semi-arid zones of Australia. We extend earlier analysis by including for the first time demographic information on the semi-arid as well as the arid zone to establish the spatial pattern of population growth within the whole desert area drawing attention to the resulting settlement structure as an outcome of prevailing social, cultural and economic conditions. By examining population structure and demographic components of population change we also present for the first time population projections for the semi-arid zone and, therefore, in combination with the arid zone, for the entire Australian desert. All of this provides a basis for considering social and economic policy implications and the nature of underlying processes that drive change in this region.