The present paper examines alternative conceptions of what it means for individuals to be considered legitimate members in a global order. First, I will adopt a convergence view that takes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a de facto cosmopolitan reference for a wide plurality of conceptions. Within this framework, I will contrast two main cosmopolitan conceptions, each of them pivot...

A proposal for energy management in an off-grid photovoltaic pumping and irrigation system is presented and evaluated for a specific case study. The system is assumed to be based on off-the-shelf components (photovoltaic panels, battery banks, DC/AC converters, relays, submergible pumps, etc.), with a microcontroller-based energy management system, deciding when to disconnect the load from the ...

Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of how people acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve, archive and discard information for various reasons in physical and digital worlds. Many PIM tools are available for managing information on our desktop computers while many research prototypes tried to augment or replace them. The development of these tools was based ...

Population and urban growth is one of the major challenges facing Africa. Rapid urbanization poses major infrastructure, economic, environmental and social problems. Total water supply and sanitation coverage is extremely low particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and cities are becoming to a large extent informal. Untreated urban wastewater is polluting water sources throughout SSA changing ...

This article presents a mechanism, denoted Proactive Index Maintenance (PIM, for short), for proactive index management based on the use of prediction models. The main objective of the proposed mechanism is to predict when a time-consuming query q will be executed, in order to proactively create index structures which reduce q′s response time. After q is executed, PIM drops the created indexes ...

Current personal information management (PIM) tools do not sufficiently recognize the spatio-temporal, hierarchical, or conceptual relations of tasks that constitute our plans. Using behavioral observation methods we analyzed people planning a trip to attend a conference taking place in a region they had little or no prior familiarity with. The resulting open-ended records were coded into highe...

Despite of the water use increment for other sectors than agriculture, the water use for irrigation is the main water consumer in global scale. However, irrigation has been pressured by the civil society to improve water use efficiency in agriculture, to prevent water scarcity for human population that grows continuously, mainly in developing areas of the planet. On the other hand, the irrigati...

Participatory Irrigation Management is an important concept in the management of water resources. It fosters collective responsibility and rule compliance, lack which creates a weak environment for sustainable use. This study adopted Principal Components Analysis Structural Equation Modelling to evaluate determinants farmer’s participation four smallholder irrigations schemes KwaZulu-Natal Prov...

Steady advances in VLSI technology and, in particular, Merged Logic and DRAM (MLD) technology are helping Processor-In-Memory (PIM) chips become more feasible and attractive. FlexRAM is an ongoing PIM project at the University of Illinois. In this report, we summarize some architectural aspects of the system and provide a detailed study of the energy consumption of the chip. In our analysis, we...