Land Administration for Sustainable Development

Free ESRI book:  Land Administration for Sustainable Development – Click HERE to download

Land Administration for Sustainable Development examines global land administration systems and outlines basic principles applicable to all countries.

This book shows how to help ensure social equality, economic growth, and environmental protection through holistic land management. Professors, government officials, and students of land planning, land administrators, land planning managers will find this an invaluable resource.

• US Coral Triangle Initiative Support Program •

The Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security CTI-CFF is a multilateral partnership of six countries working together to sustain extraordinary marine and coastal resources by addressing crucial issues such as food security, climate change and marine biodiversity.

via • US Coral Triangle Initiative Support Program •.

International Conference on Extended Mega Urban Regions : The Changing Face of South East Asia and the World | 19-21 November 2013 | Pullman Lakeside Hotel, Putrajaya , Malaysia

The world’s urban landscape is changing. While the most rapid changes can be seen in Asia, countries elsewhere are also experiencing transformations that impact upon economic and social development. New problems that require new solutions, framed within a sustainability agenda, are needed. Asia, in particular, faces problems in quality of life, housing, urban transportation, environmental pollution, food security and ethnic relations. The problems and solutions are being demarcated within newly formed extended mega urban regions.

These regions resulted from the coalescing of drivers that transcended traditional urban–rural boundaries, changing both the faces of city and country. These changes call for sustainable management of the extended mega urban regions. This conference provides a platform to discuss the experiences of extended mega urban regions from across the world with an emphasis on the Southeast Asian region. These include the drivers of change, design, pattern, process and accumulative impacts towards the extended mega urban regions.

Detail: HERE

‘Geography of Hate’ to map Maps Racist

I am a GEOGRAPHER and proud of it, but I did not know that there are such thing as Geography of HATE to map out RECIST…

Floating Sheep, a group of geography academics, created the “Geography of Hate,” which maps racist, homophobic and ableist tweets in the U.S. After searching for all geotagged tweets in North America between June 2012 and April 2013, students at Humboldt State University manually read and coded the sentiment of each tweet to determine if a specific word was used in a positive, negative or neutral way. In a blog post, Floating Sheep cited “dyke” as an example: While the word is a homophobic slur against lesbian people, it can also be used positively.

In total, over 150,000 geotagged tweets contained a hateful slur that was deemed negative. Using the data, Floating Sheep determined the ratio of hateful tweets to overall tweets in each county.

“Hateful tweets were aggregated to the county level and then normalized by the total number of tweets in each county. This then shows a comparison of places with disproportionately high amounts of a particular hate word relative to all tweeting activity,” the group said.

Orange County, Calif., for example, has the highest absolute number of tweets containing slurs, but due to its high level of overall Twitter activity, the hateful tweets are less prominent, and therefore are not that conspicuous on the map.

Find out MORE:  HERE

Obama: Important for Malaysia to address concerns of reported irregularities in GE13

I am not in politic and never will but this is interesting coming from the big boss… don’t you think so?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House on Wednesday congratulated Malaysia’s prime minister on his coalition’s election victory but urged the government to address concerns about election irregularities.

“We note concerns regarding reported irregularities in the conduct of the election, and believe it is important that Malaysian authorities address concerns that have been raised,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement. “We look forward to the outcome of their investigations.”

Prime Minister Najib Razak’s Barisan Nasional coalition extended its 56-year rule but recorded its worst-ever election performance in Sunday’s election. His party won 133 seats in Malaysia’s 222-member parliament, seven fewer than in 2008 and short of the two-thirds majority it had hoped for.

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s People’s Alliance won 89 seats, a big increase from seven in 2008. Anwar has said the result was tainted by electoral fraud and scheduled a large rally in Kuala Lumpur to press for electoral reforms.

The Malaysian government rejected charges of electoral fraud and has accused Anwar of seeking to cause unrest with the rally. The election was one of the most closely contested in Malaysia in years and Najib is expected to face a party leadership challenge that may cost him his leadership by the end of the year because of the weak showing.

He had hoped to strengthen the ruling coalition’s majority in parliament with the help of a strong economy, reforms to roll back race-based policies and $2.6 billion in spending programs benefiting poor families. Najib is now seeing as having a difficult time in persuading his allies to press ahead with economic reforms and the phasing out of policies favoring ethnic Malays over other groups.

Read More:  Here.

Call for Papers and Participation – BIMP-EAGA CONFERENCE (BEC) 2013

“Strengthening Sub-regional Socioeconomic, Institutional and
Environmental Cooperation:
Towards ASEAN Community by 2015”
16-17 December 2013
A&A Plaza Hotel, Puerto Princesa City, Palawan, Philippines

The Palawan State University and BIMP-EAGA Unit for Tourism Development, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, will co-organize the BEC2013 on 16-17 December 2013 in Puerto Princesa City, Palawan, Philippines with a conference theme “Strengthening Sub-regional Socio-economic, Institutional and Environmental Cooperation; Towards ASEAN Community by 2015″.

Interested individuals can expect a dynamic engagement by and among scientists, researchers, engineers, educators, planners, policy makers, businessmen and devel-opment workers who will present their research outcomes, observations, case stud-ies, findings and innovative ideas in the following topic strands: (1) enhanced con-nectivity, (2) food basket strategy, (3) tourism development, and (4) environment. Although papers addressing the theme are highly encouraged, theoretical, applied, and empirical papers as well as case studies along the four conference tracks are likewise welcome.

Journal Publication
Papers which are regional in nature are preferred, especially those with BIMP-EAGA perspective. Well-written and outstanding papers will be given awards and published in the BIMP-EAGA Journal for Sustainable Tourism Development ISSN No: 2232-10603 without further costs.

Refereed Conference Proceedings
All accepted full papers will be published in the refereed conference proceedings with ISBN and additionally, electronically published via the BIMP-EAGA Unit for Tourism Development (BE-UTD) website.

Important Dates:
Deadline for Submission of Abstract – May 31, 2013
Notification of Acceptance of Abstract – June 30, 2013
Deadline for the Submission of Full Paper – Aug 16, 2013
Early Bird Registration – Sept 16, 2013
Normal Registration – After Sept 16, 2013
Notification of Acceptance of Full Paper – Oct 16, 2013
BEC 2013 – Dec 16-17, 2013
Conference Fees:
Local Participants – PhP10,700 (Additional Paper – PhP1,320)
Local Students – PhP5,500
Early Bird – USD 350 (Additional Paper – USD 50)
International Participants – USD 400

Interested parties can leave messages BELOW. Will post more once we have more info especially where to send your paper/abstract

Window Socket – Solar Energy Powered Socket

The portable socket attaches to a window like a leech to human skin. The solar panels suck energy from the sun.

The charger converts that energy into electricity. You plug in to the charger. Even better, the charger stores that energy. After five to eight hours of charging, the socket provides 10 hours of use. You can pop it off the window, stick it in your bag, and use it to charge up your phone with solar energy, even if you’re sitting in a dark room.

The Window Socket offers a neat way to harness solar energy and use it as a plug socket. So far we have seen solutions that act as a solar battery backup, but none as a direct plug-in. Simple in design, the plug just attaches to any window and does its job intuitively.

Read More: HERE

Seaweed could help weight loss treatments

Source:   Health | The Earth Times. Seaweed could help you lose weight – not with some magical calorie-shrinking chemical reaction but by making you feel fuller. The research was carried out by scientists at the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Copenhagen who used fibers from the un-appetising sounding brown algae in their tests. High fibre diets are known to be good for keeping weight steady and this study shows that alginates, which are extracted from brown algae, help people feel fuller quicker thus reducing the amount they eat.

Morten Georg Jensen, a PhD student who made the findings, said: “Over a three-year period, we have studied the effect of taking different alginate doses. We are able to demonstrate that the healthy subjects who took alginates and were also allowed to eat as much as they wanted felt less hungry and ate less than the subjects not drinking fibre drinks with alginates.”

In a study lasting 12 weeks, 96 men and women who were overweight were put under the microscope. Half of them drank an alginate drink, while the others were given a placebo drink. Not all the subjects finished the study, but of the 80 who did, those who had drink alginates showed much greater weight loss and the researchers found the loss was down to a reduction in the percentage of body fat.

The seaweed drinkers lost, on average, 1.7kg more than their placebo drinking counterparts. “A probable explanation of the weight loss is that the alginates form a gel in the stomach which strengthens the gastrointestinal satiety signals to the brain because the gel takes up space in the stomach,” Jensen said. “The overweight subjects thus ate less than usual.”

The developed world is going through an obesity epidemic and Jensen and his colleagues hope in time to use their research to help treat overweight patients with the first seaweed drink.

WHO | 10 facts on malaria

About 3.3 billion people – half of the world’s population – are at risk of malaria. In 2010, there were about 219 million malaria cases (with an uncertainty range of 154 million to 289 million) and an estimated 660 000 malaria deaths (with an uncertainty range of 490 000 to 836 000). Increased prevention and control measures have led to a reduction in malaria mortality rates by more than 25% globally since 2000 and by 33% in the WHO African Region. People living in the poorest countries are the most vulnerable to malaria. In 2010, 90% of all malaria deaths occurred in the WHO African Region, mostly among children under five years of age.

Read More:  HERE