fuel wood provides the main source of energy for cooking and space heating for over 80 percent of households living in kenya. the heavy reliance on the biomass energy has exerted an imbalance in demand and supply consequently resulting in adverse environmental effects in kenya. as part of innovation efforts, several energy-conserving technologies have been developed. a unique cook stove named m...

YouTube is one of the world’s most popular web sites and hosts numerous amateur and professional videos. Comments on these videos may be researched to give insights into audience reactions to important issues or particular videos. Yet little is known about YouTube discussions in general: how frequent they are, who typically participates and the role of sentiment. This article fills this gap thr...

Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), along with the cosmic background radiation and the Hubble expansion, is one of the pillars of the standard, hot, big bang cosmology since the primordial synthesis of the light nuclides (D, He, He, Li) must have occurred during the early evolution of a universe described by this model. The overall consistency between the predicted and observed abundances of the li...

The rapid adoption of Linux servers by organizations in recent years begs the question of whether the adoption is driven by careful considerations of organizational needs or by bandwagon phenomena. Drawing from the institutional perspective of Tolbert and Zucker (1983), this paper presents a two-stage adoption model for Linux servers and examines systematically the determinants of organizationa...

New Planck scale physics may solve the singularity problems of classical general relativity and may lead to interesting consequences for very early Universe cosmology. Two approaches to these questions are reviewed in this article. The first is an effective action approach to including the effects of Planck scale physics in the basic framework of general relativity. It is shown that effective a...

This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four...

We study homogeneous isotropic universe in a graviton-dilaton theory obtained, in a previous paper, by a simple requirement that the theory be able to predict non trivial values for β and/or γ for a charge neutral point star, without any naked singularities. We find that in this universe the physical time can be continued indefinitely into the past or future, and that all the physical curvature...

We describe the current situation concerning methods to search for relic neutrinos from the Big Bang and from all past supernovae (SNs). The most promising method for Big Bang neutrinos is by the interaction of ultra-high-energy (UHE) neutrinos. For supernova neutrinos, both Super Kamiokandeand ICARUS-type detectors will be important to study both *e and e fluxes. We also discuss a dedicated su...

We present precision measurements of the 3 He + 4 He → 7 Be reaction in the range Ec.m. = 0.33 to 1.23 MeV using a small gas cell and detection of both prompt γ rays and 7 Be activity. Our prompt and activity measurements are in good agreement within the experimental uncertainty of several percent. We find S(0) = 0.595 ± 0.018 keV b from fits of the Kajino theory to our data. We compare our res...

In both the Sun and the early universe, the He(α,γ)Be reaction plays a key role. The rate of this reaction is the least certain nuclear input needed to calculate both the primordial Li abundance in big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the solar neutrino flux. Taking advantage of several recent highly precise experiments, we analyse modern He(α,γ)Be data using a robust and minimally model dependen...