Determinants of Adoption of Improved Crossbred Cattles: A Case Study of Suba and Laikipia Districts, Kenya

Recognizing that more than 10% of the Kenyan GDP and 50% of agricultural GDP are comprised of sales within the livestock subsector; the purpose of this research is to identify the determinants of adoption of improved crossbred cattle in rural Kenya. This research has important implications for increasing the dairy subsectors’ productivity, improving nutrient intake within rural Kenya and motivating higher rates of foreign direct investment in a sustainable, beneficial sector. We used a publicly available (www.ifpri.org) dataset called "Land Tenure, Agricultural Productivity and the Environment, 2001." A logistical regression analysis is employed to answer our research questions. The results showed that: family members education, having an extra job in addition to farming, and exposure to external market forces (was the farmer a local, or immigrant) all greatly contributed to the likelihood of adoption. This research aims to gnaw away at the ambiguity and lack of research associated with the Kenyan dairy sub-sector and aims to facilitate greater understanding and investment in the sector. Keywords: Adoption, Logistic regression, Kenya, Crossbreed cattl

Experimental and theoretical studies of electrostatic confinement

Potential profiles have been measured on INS-e with an emissive probe and compared with theoretical stability predictions. So far there is good agreement between theory and experiment, but the stability limits have not yet been accessed experimentally

The Size Distributions of Asteroid Families in the SDSS Moving Object Catalog 4

Asteroid families, traditionally defined as clusters of objects in orbital parameter space, often have distinctive optical colors. We show that the separation of family members from background interlopers can be improved with the aid of SDSS colors as a qualifier for family membership. Based on an ~88,000 object subset of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object Catalog 4 with available proper orbital elements, we define 37 statistically robust asteroid families with at least 100 members using a simple Gaussian distribution model in both orbital and color space. The interloper rejection rate based on colors is typically ~10% for a given orbital family definition, with four families that can be reliably isolated only with the aid of colors. About 50% of all objects in this data set belong to families, and this fraction varies from about 35% for objects brighter than an H magnitude of 13 and rises to 60% for objects fainter than this. The fraction of C-type objects in families decreases with increasing H magnitude for H > 13, while the fraction of S-type objects above this limit remains effectively constant. This suggests that S-type objects require a shorter timescale for equilibrating the background and family size distributions via collisional processing. The size distributions for 15 families display a well-defined change of slope and can be modeled as a "broken" double power-law. Such "broken" size distributions are twice as likely for S-type familes than for C-type families, and are dominated by dynamically old families. The remaining families with size distributions that can be modeled as a single power law are dominated by young families. When size distribution requires a double power-law model, the two slopes are correlated and are steeper for S-type families.Comment: 50 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in Icaru