The genetic history of African cattle pastoralism is controversial and poorly understood. We reveal the genetic signatures of its origins, secondary movements, and differentiation through the study of 15 microsatellite loci in 50 indigenous cattle breeds spanning the present cattle distribution in Africa. The earliest cattle originated within the African continent, but Near East and European ge...

INTRODUCTION Nomadic pastoralism was once a dominant feature on the North African landscape. Since the end of World War II, however, extensive nomadic herding has steadily shifted toward more intensive agro-pastoral production on marginal grazing lands (Bencherifa and Johnson 1990). This trend raises concerns about the social consequences of cumulative land-cover change, particularly land-use i...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in the Horn of Africa with Ethiopia being the most affected where TB cases increase at the rate of 2.6% each year. One of the main contributing factors for this rise is increasing transmission due to large number of untreated patients, serving as reservoirs of the infection within the communities. Reduction of the time between onset ...

Nomadic pastoralists live at the northern extent o f human habitation within the ca. 5000 m elevation A r u basin, in the nortwestern part o f the Chang Tang Nature Preserve, Tibet. These nomads herd primarily sheep and goats, a lesser number o f yaks, and a few horses. Goats are increasing in importance because o f the value o f cashmere woo l i n national and international markets. Al though ...

The success of applying model-checking to large systems depends crucially on the choice of good abstractions. In this work we present an approach for constructing abstractions when checking Nextfree universal CTL properties. It is known that functional abstractions are safe and that Next-free universal CTL is insensitive to finite stuttering. We exploit these results by introducing a safe Next-...

This article offers a dynamic model of opaque over-the-counter markets. A seller searches for an attractive price by visiting multiple buyers, one at a time. The buyers do not observe contacts, quotes, or trades elsewhere in the market. A repeat contact with a buyer reveals the seller’s reduced outside options and worsens the price offered by the revisited buyer. When the asset value is uncerta...

Construal Level Theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2003) proposes that pro-arguments (pros) constitute high-level construals and counter-arguments (cons) low-level construals. Therefore, pros are more salient for distant-future actions than are cons and the reverse holds for near-future actions (Eyal, Liberman, Trope, & Walther, 2004). We further predicted and results from one experiment show that ...

Who is in favour of domination? Surely some people have a strong interest in preserving it, but as this is not publicly confessable and people enjoy picturing themselves as moral, everyone will officially support a non-domination programme. What is more, Ian Shapiro suggests, in circumstances where ‘you cannot be confident of your ability to dominate others’, it is in your interest ‘to create a...

While in the past design focused on products, our new challenge is to focus on people. An understanding of perceptions and the emotional connections people form with products and services is critical factors in advancing the practice of design. This paper will begin by discussing our background at Smart Design in exploring design and perception. It will then discuss our current methods that hel...

People are often more confident than accurate. Past accounts of this overconfidence effect have focused on social-cognitive mechanisms, such as the biasing effects of judgmental heuristics and the faulty integration of relevant information. The current studies tested the idea that overconfidence is also a product of dissonance reduction. Specifically, we argue that overconfidence can result fro...