Do rituals serve as a brake on innovation in staple food cropping in Timor-Leste?

Ritual practices from Christian and older animist belief systems persist across Timor-Leste (T-L). Significant events such as deaths and marriages include elements from both beliefs, and resources to conduct the associated ceremonies can affect agricultural production. In addition, ceremonies based on family lineage groups - lisan - are conducted for numerous purposes, with many related to food production and consumption. To investigate such rituals from a food security perspective, interviews on ritual practices were conducted in a longitudinal study among 18 households in four municipalities in 2006–2007 and among 56 respondents in three municipalities in 2015. Time and resources dedicated to ritual practices varied significantly across respondents, localities and crops. Despite extensive rural poverty, almost all communities dedicated significant resources and time to conduct ceremonies, particularly for maize and rice. Importantly, innovation in cropping was not stifled by rituals. Rituals reinforce social networks that have already been found to be important to food security, so in a broad sense rituals may even contribute to crop production. There was wide overlap between the composition of lineage lisan and mutual labour groups, which can be critical in T-L where, with limited availability of farm mechanization, the household unit of labour is insufficient for some agricultural tasks. A reallocation of resources from rituals to other objectives such as education and home maintenance is now gradually occurring. Looking ahead, respondents indicated that, while rituals could become less elaborate, continuance of the traditions was essential. Agricultural rituals contribute to the social capital needed for crop production and food security in T-L.     

Black-, gray-, and white-box modeling of biogas production rate from a real-scale anaerobic sludge digestion system in a biological and advanced biological treatment plant

Neural Computing and Applications - Artificial intelligence-based methodology [artificial neural network (ANN) and fuzzy logic] and a multiple regression-based analysis were conducted for modeling...     

Development of antifouling ultrafiltration PES membranes for concentration of hemicellulose

A new approach for one-stage facile membrane modification during non-solvent induced phase separation (NIPS)-process is proposed. The novelty of this study is that cheap and commercially available anionic high molecular polyacrylamide-based flocculant (AHMPF) is applied for the first time as an additive to coagulation bath (CB). The series of polyethersulfone membranes were prepared using 0.05–0.3 wt% AHMPF aqueous solution as CB at different temperatures (25–50°C) via NIPS. The effect of AHMPF concentration on the structure, composition and hydrophilicity of membranes was investigated. The separation and antifouling performance were evaluated during filtration of bovine serum albumin (BSA) solution and thermomechanical pulp mills process water (ThMP) in order to concentrate hemicellulose. The successful immobilization of AHMPF into the structure of membranes selective layer (not bottom layer) was confirmed by FTIR spectroscopy. It was established that despite the similar rejection of hemicellulose (88.8–93%) and lignin (20–21.4), modified membranes demonstrate 3–8 times higher flux and 2 times higher FRR (43.8% for reference membrane and 86.5% for modified one) in ThMP ultrafiltration. The developed membrane was found to be highly efficient in hemicellulose concentration and purification in pulp industry.