Social Challenges and Opportunities in Agroforestry:Cocoa Farmers’ Perspectives

Agroforestry practices in cocoa cultivation have historical roots going back to the Mayan sacred groves in Mesoamerica. Today, agroforestry cocoa, i.e., the integration of shade trees, plants and crops in cocoa systems, is promoted as a climate smart practice by public and private institutions. Shaded cocoa can sustain or even increase cocoa yields and the agroforestry systems may provide additional output for household consumption and sale as well as improve the microclimate and soil conditions on the farm. Despite these promising features, cocoa agroforestry systems are far from the norm in producing countries like Ghana. Based on discussions with groups of farmers across the Ghanaian cocoa belt, this chapter shows that while farmers are well aware of the positive aspects of shaded cocoa systems, traditional cocoa practices, village chiefs’ command of local land uses, land and tree tenure systems, alternative land uses and inability to access inputs and extension services limit the adoption and constrain the management of shade trees. As still more policies are developed to improve the Ghanaian cocoa sector, policymakers must consider these often overlooked social and institutional factors that prevent cocoa farmers from engaging in longer-term agroforestry practices and thereby benefiting from the opportunities they present

Some Objects Are More Equal Than Others: Measuring and Predicting Importance

We observe that everyday images contain dozens of objects, and that humans, in describing these images, give different priority to these objects. We argue that a goal of visual recognition is, therefore, not only to detect and classify objects but also to associate with each a level of priority which we call 'importance'. We propose a definition of importance and show how this may be estimated reliably from data harvested from human observers. We conclude by showing that a first-order estimate of importance may be computed from a number of simple image region measurements and does not require access to image meaning

Household Economics of Cocoa Agroforestry:Costs and Benefits

Current research suggests that cocoa agroforestry systems could offer stable yields, additional benefits and income from shade trees, despite potential added costs, such as from the purchase of insecticides. There is a paucity of profitability studies of different cocoa agroforestry systems. Only few of them go beyond a narrow focus on cocoa yields to model the entire agroforestry system and thus do not advance our understanding of the socio-economic value of other ecosystem goods. Based on survey data covering a thousand cocoa plots and group interviews with cocoa farmers, we explore the costs and benefits at the household level of including trees in cocoa systems. Comparing low and medium tree diversity systems, we find that income from cocoa beans, timber and fruit trees are higher and labour costs are lower in plots with medium diversity, while insecticide costs are lower on low-diversity plots. Overall, net benefits were higher on cocoa plots with higher tree diversity. Thus, cocoa agroforestry systems offer cost-reduction and income-improving advantages. Since cocoa systems vary among different agro-ecological zones in Ghana, we recommend that interventions aimed at increasing tree diversity consider the specific management practices of each farming household and the location in question

Patient reported upper gastro-intestinal symptoms associated with fractionated image-guided conformal radiotherapy for metastatic spinal cord compression

Background and purpose Palliative radiotherapy is given to sustain or improve quality of life for patients with advanced cancer. Radiotherapy may however result in symptomatic side effects, which may affect the patient negatively. This prospective longitudinal study of 30 patients aimed at investigating the incidence and severity of early toxicity, particularly focusing on dysphagia, esophagitis and mucositis, following fractionated radiotherapy for cervical and thoracic metastatic spinal cord compression (MSCC), as well as determining the relationship between esophageal dose and early upper gastro-intestinal symptoms. Materials and methods Thirty patients receiving radiotherapy of 3Gyx10 for MSCC were included in the study. Patients were assessed for a total of 7 weeks from onset of radiotherapy using the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS) questionnaire. Upper gastro-intestinal symptoms and severity were assessed from the tenth and eleventh question section of the ESAS questionnaire of “other problems” and how much this affected them. The relationships between the mean and maximum esophageal doses and incidence of dysphagia, esophagitis or mucositis were estimated and dose response curves determined. Results Eleven patients reported esophageal symptoms (average duration eleven days, range 1–18 days). Incidence of esophageal toxicity in patients treated at Th8 or above was 79 percent, while no patients treated below Th8 reported any symptoms (p < 0.001). Furthermore, 2 out of 3 patients irradiated at the cervical region reported substantial changes in taste sensation. Risk of symptoms correlated with both mean and maximum esophageal dose and may be a useful tool in planning radiotherapy for MSCC, potentially reducing early upper gastro-intestinal toxicity

From Relational Data to Graphs: Inferring Significant Links using Generalized Hypergeometric Ensembles

The inference of network topologies from relational data is an important problem in data analysis. Exemplary applications include the reconstruction of social ties from data on human interactions, the inference of gene co-expression networks from DNA microarray data, or the learning of semantic relationships based on co-occurrences of words in documents. Solving these problems requires techniques to infer significant links in noisy relational data. In this short paper, we propose a new statistical modeling framework to address this challenge. It builds on generalized hypergeometric ensembles, a class of generative stochastic models that give rise to analytically tractable probability spaces of directed, multi-edge graphs. We show how this framework can be used to assess the significance of links in noisy relational data. We illustrate our method in two data sets capturing spatio-temporal proximity relations between actors in a social system. The results show that our analytical framework provides a new approach to infer significant links from relational data, with interesting perspectives for the mining of data on social systems.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted at SocInfo201

Decision aids linked to evidence summaries and clinical practice guidelines : results from user-testing in clinical encounters

Acknowledgements We thank Frankie Achille (interaction designer/developer), Rob Fracisco (designer/developer), and Deno Vichas and Chris Degiere (developers) for their contributions in development of the online authoring and publication platform (www.magicevidence.org). Funding AFH was fnancially supported by a PhD fellowship from Innlandet Hospital Trust and have received innovation grants from South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority. TA was fnancially supported by a fellowship for prospective researchers Grant No P3SMP3-155290/1 from the Swiss National Science Foundation. The funding body had no role in design of the study, collection, analysis, and interpretation of data or in writing the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The reaction γp→π∘γ′p\gamma p \to \pi^\circ \gamma^\prime p and the magnetic dipole moment of the Δ+(1232)\Delta^+(1232) resonance

The reaction $\gamma p \to \pi^\circ \gamma^\prime p$ has been measured with the TAPS calorimeter at the Mainz Microtron accelerator facility MAMI for energies between $\sqrt{s}$ = 1221--1331 MeV. Cross sections differential in angle and energy have been determined for all particles in the final state in three bins of the excitation energy. This reaction channel provides access to the magnetic dipole moment of the $\Delta^{+}(1232)$ resonance and, for the first time, a value of $\mu_{\Delta^+} = (2.7_{-1.3}^{+1.0}(stat.) \pm 1.5 (syst.) \pm 3(theo.)) \mu_N$ has been extracted