15,800 research outputs found
De-commoditizing Ethiopian coffees after the establishment of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange : an empirical investigation of smallholder coffee producers in Ethiopia
The repercussions of reforming an agricultural market are mainly observed at the most vulnerable segment of the value chain, namely, the producers. In the current commodity market created with trade through the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), coffee is less traceable to its producers. Only cooperatives that sell certified coffee through the unions they belong to, are allowed to bypass the more commodified ECX market. This study aims to investigate if small-scale coffee producers in southwestern Ethiopia that sell coffee through the certified cooperative are better off. It is assumed that the coffee sales through, and membership of, a cooperative, allows farmers to improve their coffee production as well as to improve other aspects of their livelihood. A sustainable livelihood approach was used as the inspiration for the welfare indicators that needed to be considered, data collected amongst members and non-members of certified cooperatives, and a propensity score model to investigate the impact of cooperative membership on the livelihood indicators. Results suggest that members of certified cooperatives indeed receive, on average, better prices. Yet, no evidence was found that indicates that the higher price is translated into better household income. Furthermore, coffee plantation productivity of those members who were interviewed was lower than that of the non-members. This finding could explain the failure to find an overall effect. Since the majority of the producers' income emanate from coffee, a sustainable way of enhancing the productivity of the coffee could revitalize the welfare of the coffee producers
Tactics for Reasoning modulo AC in Coq
We present a set of tools for rewriting modulo associativity and
commutativity (AC) in Coq, solving a long-standing practical problem. We use
two building blocks: first, an extensible reflexive decision procedure for
equality modulo AC; second, an OCaml plug-in for pattern matching modulo AC. We
handle associative only operations, neutral elements, uninterpreted function
symbols, and user-defined equivalence relations. By relying on type-classes for
the reification phase, we can infer these properties automatically, so that
end-users do not need to specify which operation is A or AC, or which constant
is a neutral element.Comment: 16
Globally reasoning about localised security policies in distributed systems
In this report, we aim at establishing proper ways for model checking the
global security of distributed systems, which are designed consisting of set of
localised security policies that enforce specific issues about the security
expected.
The systems are formally specified following a syntax, defined in detail in
this report, and their behaviour is clearly established by the Semantics, also
defined in detail in this report. The systems include the formal attachment of
security policies into their locations, whose intended interactions are trapped
by the policies, aiming at taking access control decisions of the system, and
the Semantics also takes care of this.
Using the Semantics, a Labelled Transition System (LTS) can be induced for
every particular system, and over this LTS some model checking tasks could be
done. We identify how this LTS is indeed obtained, and propose an alternative
way of model checking the not-yet-induced LTS, by using the system design
directly. This may lead to over-approximation thereby producing imprecise,
though safe, results. We restrict ourselves to finite systems, in the sake of
being certain about the decidability of the proposed method.
To illustrate the usefulness and validity of our proposal, we present 2 small
case-study-like examples, where we show how the system can be specified, which
policies could be added to it, and how to decide if the desired global security
property is met.
Finally, an Appendix is given for digging deeply into how a tool for
automatically performing this task is being built, including some
implementation issues. The tool takes advantage of the proposed method, and
given some system and some desired global security property, it safely (i.e.
without false positives) ensures satisfaction of it
Nominal C-Unification
Nominal unification is an extension of first-order unification that takes
into account the \alpha-equivalence relation generated by binding operators,
following the nominal approach. We propose a sound and complete procedure for
nominal unification with commutative operators, or nominal C-unification for
short, which has been formalised in Coq. The procedure transforms nominal
C-unification problems into simpler (finite families) of fixpoint problems,
whose solutions can be generated by algebraic techniques on combinatorics of
permutations.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium
on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur,
Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854
A privacy-preserving fuzzy interest matching protocol for friends finding in social networks
Nowadays, it is very popular to make friends, share photographs, and exchange news throughout social networks. Social networks widely expand the area of people’s social connections and make communication much smoother than ever before. In a social network, there are many social groups established based on common interests among persons, such as learning group, family group, and reading group. People often describe their profiles when registering as a user in a social network. Then social networks can organize these users into groups of friends according to their profiles. However, an important issue must be considered, namely many users’ sensitive profiles could have been leaked out during this process. Therefore, it is reasonable to design a privacy-preserving friends-finding protocol in social network. Toward this goal, we design a fuzzy interest matching protocol based on private set intersection. Concretely, two candidate users can first organize their profiles into sets, then use Bloom filters to generate new data structures, and finally find the intersection sets to decide whether being friends or not in the social network. The protocol is shown to be secure in the malicious model and can be useful for practical purposes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Effect of oil palm sustainability certification on deforestation and fire in Indonesia.
Many major corporations and countries have made commitments to purchase or produce only "sustainable" palm oil, a commodity responsible for substantial tropical forest loss. Sustainability certification is the tool most used to fulfill these procurement policies, and around 20% of global palm oil production was certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2017. However, the effect of certification on deforestation in oil palm plantations remains unclear. Here, we use a comprehensive dataset of RSPO-certified and noncertified oil palm plantations (∼188,000 km2) in Indonesia, the leading producer of palm oil, as well as annual remotely sensed metrics of tree cover loss and fire occurrence, to evaluate the impact of certification on deforestation and fire from 2001 to 2015. While forest loss and fire continued after RSPO certification, certified palm oil was associated with reduced deforestation. Certification lowered deforestation by 33% from a counterfactual of 9.8 to 6.6% y-1 Nevertheless, most plantations contained little residual forest when they received certification. As a result, by 2015, certified areas held less than 1% of forests remaining within Indonesian oil palm plantations. Moreover, certification had no causal impact on forest loss in peatlands or active fire detection rates. Broader adoption of certification in forested regions, strict requirements to avoid all peat, and routine monitoring of clearly defined forest cover loss in certified and RSPO member-held plantations appear necessary if the RSPO is to yield conservation and climate benefits from reductions in tropical deforestation
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