Niger—with the world’s fastest growing population, its highest total fertility rate (TFR), a small and diminishing amount of arable land, low annual rainfall, a high level of malnutrition, extremely low levels of education, gross gender inequities and an uncertain future in the face of climate change—is the most extreme example of a catastrophe that is likely to overtake the Sahel. The policies...

From Wright Brothers 1903 to present day 2003, aeronautical technology has made a profound progress. This paper demonstrates the outcome of this progress in weight, wing area, and engine thrust in three categories of transport aircraft of short to long range, regional jets, and turbo-prop commuter aircraft. Also the paper includes those aircraft with distinct jump in aeronautical technology. Fe...

Executive summary We deal with the overall problem of mapping XML schemas to object models, where the resulting object models are meant for pro-grammatic, schema-aware access to XML data. The provision of such 'X-toO mappings' involves various challenges; one of them is variation in style of schema organization. Without appropriate countermeasures, such variation affects the resulting object mo...