There is a great amount of effort worldwide to understand the problems of shelter, access to land and security of tenure for the urban poor, but very little attention to the mechanics of policy implementation. In other words there is little attention to the practical or “engineering” side of designing, building and managing land administration infrastructures which facilitate shelter, security ...

Current land administration systems are the product of 19th century economic and land market paradigms and have failed to properly support sustainable development. The need for urgent reform is accepted, but the way forward unclear in many jurisdictions. This paper will discuss current international initiatives and research to develop a new land administration vision to promote sustainable deve...

Globalization is being driven by global economic integration, the spread of technology and the democratization of information. In the process it is fundamentally altering the way we think about economic, social and cultural development. This paper reviews what is meant by globalization from a variety of perspectives and then briefly examines the impact it is having on the land administration fi...

Currently there are no internationally accepted methodologies to evaluate and compare the performance of land administration systems. To engage in this discussion, the authors published a previous article proposing an evaluation framework, which – based on a management model – links the operational aspects of land administration with land policy. In this new article, the framework is being appl...

We define the notion of a Kirby element of a ribbon category C (not necessarily semisimple). Kirby elements lead to 3-manifolds invariants. We characterize a set of Kirby elements (in terms of the structural morphisms of a Hopf algebra in C) which is sufficiently large to recover the quantum invariants of 3-manifolds of Reshetikhin-Turaev, of Hennings-Kauffman-Radford, and of Lyubashenko. The c...

In this work, cold bulge forming of an Aluminium-Magnesium (Al-Mg) sheet with a solid bulging medium is performed experimentally and numerically.  Mechanical properties and thickness variations of Al-Mg sheet are evaluated before and after the forming process.  The results indicated that the Al-Mg sheet has taken the desired shape without necking using the cold bulge forming process.  Also, the...

We introduce a very deep, Rlim∼27, multicolor imaging survey of very faint star-forming galaxies at z∼4, z∼3, z∼2.2, and z∼1.7. This survey, carried out on the Keck I telescope, uses the very same UnGRI filter system that is employed by the Steidel team to select galaxies at these redshifts, and thus allows us to construct identically-selected, but much fainter, samples. However, our survey rea...

Background The dirigent proteins (DP) families and resembling the DP (DP-like) are exclusive in land plants and related to plants defense and forming phenylpropanoids compounds optically active, mainly pinoresinol [1]. Pinoresinol is converted into a variety of lignans. The dirigent protein involvement is not confirmed in lignin formation, a biopolymer which is a negative factor for the ethanol...