Technical Efficiency of Freshwater Aquaculture and its Determinants in Tripura, India

Freshwater aquaculture is an important and promising sector of the economy of Tripura State. The biophysical potential for growth in freshwater aquaculture in the state is still far from exhaustion and a faster development is required to meet the growth in demand for fish. This paper has assessed the level of technical efficiency and its determinants of small-scale fish production in the West Tripura district of the state of Tripura, India. The study is based on the cross-sectional primary data collected from 101 fish farmers through a multi-stage random sampling method. The paper has employed stochastic production frontier approach, and has followed both one-stage and two-stage procedures to analyze the determinants of TE. The TE ranges between 0.21 and 0.96 with mean of 0.66 and median of 0.71. The study has revealed the Cobb-Douglas form of stochastic frontier production function is more dependable than that of translog form under the farming conditions in the West Tripura district of Tripura state. One-stage procedure with technical inefficiency model gives reliable estimates of coefficients of stochastic frontier production function than that of two-stage procedure. Seed quality has been found as an important determinant of TE. The study has suggested that the state government needs to play a role to ascertain the supply of quality fish fingerlings at adequate time and quantity to the farmers in the study area.Agricultural and Food Policy,

MonALISA : A Distributed Monitoring Service Architecture

The MonALISA (Monitoring Agents in A Large Integrated Services Architecture) system provides a distributed monitoring service. MonALISA is based on a scalable Dynamic Distributed Services Architecture which is designed to meet the needs of physics collaborations for monitoring global Grid systems, and is implemented using JINI/JAVA and WSDL/SOAP technologies. The scalability of the system derives from the use of multithreaded Station Servers to host a variety of loosely coupled self-describing dynamic services, the ability of each service to register itself and then to be discovered and used by any other services, or clients that require such information, and the ability of all services and clients subscribing to a set of events (state changes) in the system to be notified automatically. The framework integrates several existing monitoring tools and procedures to collect parameters describing computational nodes, applications and network performance. It has built-in SNMP support and network-performance monitoring algorithms that enable it to monitor end-to-end network performance as well as the performance and state of site facilities in a Grid. MonALISA is currently running around the clock on the US CMS test Grid as well as an increasing number of other sites. It is also being used to monitor the performance and optimize the interconnections among the reflectors in the VRVS system.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 8 pages, pdf. PSN MOET00

What we cannot learn from analogue experiments

Analogue experiments have attracted interest for their potential to shed light on inaccessible domains. For instance, `dumb holes' in fluids and Bose-Einstein condensates, as analogues of black holes, have been promoted as means of confirming the existence of Hawking radiation in real black holes. We compare analogue experiments with other cases of experiment and simulation in physics. We argue---contra recent claims in the philosophical literature---that analogue experiments are not capable of confirming the existence of particular phenomena in inaccessible target systems. As they must assume the physical adequacy of the modelling framework used to describe the inaccessible target system, arguments to the conclusion that analogue experiments can yield confirmation for phenomena in those target systems, such as Hawking radiation in black holes, beg the question.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures; forthcoming in Synthes

Effects of Anticipation in Individually Motivated Behaviour on Control and Survival in a Multi-Agent Scenario with Resource Constraints

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 3.0 which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Self-organization and survival are inextricably bound to an agent’s ability to control and anticipate its environment. Here we assess both skills when multiple agents compete for a scarce resource. Drawing on insights from psychology, microsociology and control theory, we examine how different assumptions about the behaviour of an agent’s peers in the anticipation process affect subjective control and survival strategies. To quantify control and drive behaviour, we use the recently developed information-theoretic quantity of empowerment with the principle of empowerment maximization. In two experiments involving extensive simulations, we show that agents develop risk-seeking, risk-averse and mixed strategies, which correspond to greedy, parsimonious and mixed behaviour. Although the principle of empowerment maximization is highly generic, the emerging strategies are consistent with what one would expect from rational individuals with dedicated utility models. Our results support empowerment maximization as a universal drive for guided self-organization in collective agent systemsPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Linking Farmers to Markets Through Cooperatives Vegetables Supply Chain Redesign Options for Kapatagan, Mindanao, Philippines

The paper looks into the temperate vegetable industry in Kapatagan, an upland community in Mindanao, the Southern part of the Philippines. The intention in general is to identify ways by which smallholder vegetable producers are appropriately linked to markets through cooperatives with the end in view of increasing farmers’ income. Specifically the paper documented existing vegetable supply chains in Kapatagan as well as other relevant chains, assessed the various chains’ gaps and potentials in view of changing concepts and market requirements with supply chain and agro-industrial concepts as bases and identified entry points for chain enhancements.Farm Management, Production Economics,

Using simulation gaming to validate a mathematical modeling platform for resource allocation in disasters

The extraordinary conditions of a disaster require the mobilisation of all available resources, inducing the rush of humanitarian partners into the affected area This phenomenon called the proliferation of actors, causes serious problems during the disaster response phase including the oversupply, duplicated efforts, lack of planning In an attempt to reduce the partner proliferation problem a framework called PREDIS (PREdictive model for DISaster response partner selection) is put forward to configure the humanitarian network within early hours after disaster strike when the information is scarce To verify this model a simulation game is designed using two sets of real decision makers (experts and non-experts) in the disaster Haiyan scenario The result shows that using the PREDIS framework 100% of the experts could make the same decisions less than six hours comparing to 72 hours Also between 71% and 86% of the times experts and non-experts decide similarly using the PREDIS framewor

Instrumental rationality in psychopathy: implications from learning tasks

The issue whether psychopathic offenders are practically rational has attracted philosophical attention. The problem is relevant in theoretical discussions on moral psychology and in those concerning the appropriate social response to the crimes of these individuals. We argue that classical and current experiments concerning the instrumental learning in psychopaths cannot directly support the conclusion that they have impaired instrumental rationality, construed as the ability for transferring the motivation by means-ends reasoning. In fact, we defend the different claim that these experiments appear to show that psychopaths in certain circumstances are not aware of the relevant means for their ends. Moreover, we suggest how further empirical research could help to settle the issue