Explore the vast range of titles available.

Despite substantial growth in the field of conservation planning, the speed and success with which conservation plans are converted into conservation action remains limited. This gap between science and action extends beyond conservation planning into many other applied sciences and has been linked to complexity of current societal problems, compartmentalization of knowledge and management sectors, and limited collaboration between scientists and decision makers. Transdisciplinary approaches have been proposed as a possible way to address these challenges and to bridge the gap between science and action. These approaches move beyond the bridging of disciplines to an approach in which science becomes a social process resolving problems through the participation and mutual learning of stakeholders. We explored the principles of transdisciplinarity, in light of our experiences as conservation-planning researchers working in South Africa, to better understand what is required to make conservation planning transdisciplinary and therefore more effective. Using the transdisciplinary hierarchy of knowledge (empirical, pragmatic, normative, and purposive), we found that conservation planning has succeeded in integrating many empirical disciplines into the pragmatic stakeholder-engaged process of strategy development and implementation. Nevertheless, challenges remain in engagement of the social sciences and in understanding the social context of implementation. Farther up this knowledge hierarchy, at the normative and purposive levels, we found that a lack of integrated land-use planning and policies (normative) and the dominant effect of national values (purposive) that prioritize growth and development limit the effectiveness and relevance of conservation plans. The transdisciplinary hierarchy of knowledge highlighted that we need to move beyond bridging the empirical and pragmatic disciplines into the complex normative world of laws, policies, and planning and become engaged in the purposive processes of decision making, behavior change, and value transfer. Although there are indications of progress in this direction, working at the normative and purposive levels requires time, leadership, resources, skills that are absent in conservation training and practice, and new forms of recognition in systems of scientific reward and funding.

Fil: Balvanera, Patricia. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; México

This paper analyses the demand by manufacturers in Scotland and South East England for key strategic business services during the three years 1988–19901 within the framework of the flexible firm paradigm. A series of hypotheses concerning the demand for business services is developed and tested. Evidence suggests that expansion of demand is the primary cause of increasing business service output and not restructuring strategies as predicted by the flexible firm model. Both externalisation and internalisation of business services are occurring simultaneously; the net balance is consistent with a marginal trend towards vertical integration in manufacturing and a stronger one in business services.

A regulatory cascade, initiated during the syncytial stage of embryogenesis, culminates in the striped pattern of engrailed gene expression at the cellular blastoderm stage. The early regulatory genes, for example the pair-rule genes, are expressed transiently and as their products decay a distinct regulatory programme involving segment polarity genes takes over. This late programme maintains and perhaps modifies the striped pattern of engrailed expression through interactions that may involve cell communication.

Several evolutionarily conserved proteins constitute a universal mitotic trigger that is precisely controlled during the orderly cell divisions of embryogenesis. As development progresses, the mechanisms controlling this trigger change. Early divisions are executed by maternally synthesized gene products, and in Xenopus they are timed by the accumulation and periodic degradation of cyclin, a trigger component. Later, the zygotic genome assumes control, and in Drosophila, zygotic transcription is required for production of another trigger protein, the product of string. After this transition to zygotic control, pulses of string transcription define the timing of highly patterned embryonic cell divisions and cyclin accumulation is not rate limiting.

The product of the fushi tarazu (ftz) gene is shown to be a site-dependent activator of transcription. In vitro-defined binding sites act as ftz-dependent enhancers in cultured cells. Another homoeodomain-containing protein, the engrailed gene product, competes for homoeodomain-binding sites and counteracts ftz activation.