Overcoming Constraints to Agricultural Innovation Through the Market: Insights from the Peruvian Andes

This paper discusses possible ways to overcome the situation of physical isolation and the multiple failures that pervade Andean villages. Specifically, it studies a training program developed by a Peruvian NGO, which aims at triggering the development of a market for agricultural services that reach the rural poor. First-hand data is used to identify the scope of the market so-created. It is then looked at determinants of successful intervention, through different indicators. The empirical tests developed show that training farmers as on-the-field consultants is a relevant strategy in the adverse environment under study, provided that the practical implementation is well designed and that some particular constraints are properly taken into account. In particular, training specialists on one relevant topic is much more effective than training generalists. Hence, our results should be viewed as one building block in the debate over the design of successful innovative schemes for agrarian extension in the context of isolation traps and cultural constraints.poverty reduction, agrarian extension, community-based consultants, market failures.

Overcoming constraints to agricultural innovation through the market: insights from the Peruvian Andes

This paper discusses possible ways to overcome the situation of physical isolation and the multiple failures that pervade Andean villages. Specifically, it studies a training program developed by a Peruvian NGO, which aims at triggering the development of a market for agricultural services that reach the rural poor. First-hand data is used to identify the scope of the market so-created. It is then looked at determinants of successful intervention, through different indicators. The empirical tests developed show that training farmers as on-the-field consultants is a relevant strategy in the adverse environment under study, provided that the practical implementation is well designed and that some particular constraints are properly taken into account. In particular, training specialists on one relevant topic is much more effective than training generalists. Hence, our results should be viewed as one building block in the debate over the design of successful innovative scagrarian extension in the context of isolation traps and cultural constraints.poverty reduction, agrarian extension, community-based consultants, market failures

The Commodification of the Celebrity Portrait: An Analysis of Photographic Business Practice in Relation to Image Mass Production in London c.1857-1880

The mass-produced carte de visite was a new kind of celebrity portrait. It was affordable and available to a wide middle-class market, and it was hugely popular in the 1860s and 1870s. The cartes are extant in large numbers today and offer a valuable Victorian archive ripe for investigation, yet they have, so far, been deemed of little historical value, and consequently have been under-researched in the history of photography. This thesis is centred around a large collection of over one thousand celebrity cartes de visite in the author’s possession. Patterns running through the archive have been identified, and show that a great deal can be learnt about photographers’ business strategies and middle-class society from the images. The first half of the thesis explores the structure of the new carte de visite business in two chapters: in its commercial organisation and in the construction and presentation of the product to a target middle-class market. The establishment of a new profession is highlighted in which commercial activity was displayed more openly on the product as the century progressed, and in which widened middle-class interests were presented in content. Three following case studies provide a deeper investigation in relation to particular subject areas, those of monarchy, government and Church, chosen especially as they were traditional portrait areas used to define the British constitution. These case studies show that studios adapted their output to meet collectors’ changing views on the role of celebrity whilst retaining an underlying representation of the ‘character’ of a new enlightened society. The thesis spotlights a new archive through which a clearer understanding of mid-Victorian business and society can be gained: the research therefore not only fills a gap in photographic history, but adds to knowledge on mid-Victorian middle-class culture

Semantic parsing for named entities

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 123-129).People's names, dates, locations, organizations, and various numeric expressions, collectively called Named Entities, are used to convey specific meanings to humans in the same way that identifiers and constants convey meaning to a computer language interpreter. Natural Language Question Answering can benefit from understanding the meaning of these expressions because answers in a text are often phrased differently from questions and from each other. For example, "9/11" might mean the same as "September 11th" and "Mayor Rudy Giuliani" might be the same person as "Rudolph Giuliani". Sepia, the system presented here, uses a lexicon of lambda expressions and a mildly context-sensitive parser to create a data structure for each named entity. The parser and grammar design are inspired by Combinatory Categorial Grammar. The data structures are designed to capture semantic dependencies using common syntactic forms. Sepia differs from other natural language parsers in that it does not use a pipeline architecture. As yet there is no statistical component in the architecture. To evaluate Sepia, I use examples tp illustrate its qualitative differences from other named entity systems, I measure component performance on Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) competition held-out training data. and I assess end-to-end performance in the Infolab's TREC-12 Question Answering competition entry. Sepia will compete in the ACE Entity Detection and Tracking track at the end of September.by Gregory A. Marton.S.M

Boundaries unbound: Jude, adaptation and assemblages

Most commercial films are hybrid, at the boundaries of two or more genres. Literary adaptations, furthermore, seemingly straddle two media and their study crosses disciplines. Analysis here of Jude (Winterbottom, 1996) examines paratextual and peritextual features to account for its emergence and subsequent fortunes. These involve not only directorial vision, conscious conflation of filmmaking styles, and ‘fidelity’ or otherwise to its ‘source’, but conjunction of particular taste formations, conflicting commercial strategies, contrasting audiences and modes of address, and yoking together of institutional models, each with its distinctive ethos, of financing, production, and distribution. Like any text, Jude is a contingent product of time and place. Its disappointing takings, despite critical praise and enduring admiration, are, this paper contends, explained by its positioning at the boundary of two markets; months earlier this would have been refreshing and radical, but in the brief period between conception and release its commercial context altered irrevocably

Developing Middlebrow Culture in Fascist Italy: The Case of Rizzoli’s Illustrated Magazines

Angelo Rizzoli was one of Italy\u2019s leading publishers in the interwar period and beyond, thanks to his business intuition and daring investments in the popular periodicals sector. In the 1920s and 1930s he published a galaxy of illustrated magazines aimed at the urban middle classes, which prove paradigmatic of a new form of Italian weeklies. The article posits that Rizzoli\u2019s rotocalchi, based on entertaining content and photojournalism, were mediators par excellence in three areas. First, in publishing middlebrow fiction. Second, in translating short stories from linguistic and cultural milieus with a deliberate selection of specific literary genres, settings, and character types \u2014 a branding that emerges from investigating the weeklies Novella and Lei. Third, in the creation of a platform for interchange between literature, photography, and cinema, mainly in Cinema Illustrazione Presenta. Notwithstanding the obstacles put in their way by the Fascist regime and the censorship system, Rizzoli\u2019s illustrated magazines introduced and spread models of female conduct that did not coincide with those proposed by the Fascists, while adapting them to common Italian cultural values and exploiting them for commercial purposes. As a typical expression of middlebrow culture based on leisure, respectability, and consumption, they repurposed messages from other media and foreign contexts, facilitating the penetration of modern behaviour patterns in Italy