Cotton-textile-apparel sectors of India:

"Cotton, textiles, and apparel are critical agricultural and industrial sectors in India. This study provides descriptions of these sectors and examines the key developments emerging domestically and internationally that affect the challenges and opportunities the sectors face. More than four million farm households produce cotton in India, and about one-quarter of output is produced by marginal and small farms. Although production has expanded—most recently with the introduction of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton—domestic prices dropped sharply in the late 1990s, in parallel to world cotton prices. Using partial equilibrium simulations, we estimate that a price movement of the magnitude that occurred has a significant effect on levels of poverty among cotton-producing households. The fiber-to-fabric production chain, from cotton processing through apparel, employs more than 12 million workers in India and provides 16 percent of export earnings. Except for the spinning industry, these sectors are dominated by small, fragmented, and nonintegrated units, which adversely affect their competitiveness. Recent policy reforms have induced some technological improvements. In terms of future prospects for the Indian processing, textile, and apparel industries, our analysis emphasizes three dimensions of reform—the need for further investments in human resource development to improve industry productivity and reduce poverty among workers in these sectors, the emergence of modern domestic retail marketing chains, and the potentially vibrant prospects for the industry that arise from a growing domestic fabric demand and new opportunities in world markets if appropriate policies and investments are undertaken." from authors' abstractCotton, textiles, Apparel, Rural poverty, subsidies, Industry policy, World markets,

Geographies of corporate practice in development: Contested capitalism and encounters

In this introduction to the themed issue, Geographies of Corporate Practice in Development: Contested Capitalism and Encounters, we reflect on how development is shaped by a range of actors in relation to corporate practices and market-based interventions. The research collectively fills a gap in scholarly work critically interrogating the meaning, practices and outcomes of corporate activities that couple growth and profit-led commercial goals with claims to improving lives of vulnerable communities. The geographical perspective adds an understanding of places and narratives of corporate practice, both in the micro-politics of everyday engagements and in associated macro level changes across different scales of engagement. Although the capitalist enterprise itself has long been debated in economic and development geography, its associated social, development and environmental costs and consequences have become the subject of renewed contestation, debate and critique in the last decade, and particularly following the 2008 financial crisis. Here we introduce a set of articles focused on particular development experiences that reflect the grey space between seemingly irreconcilable opposites—sustained commercial growth and profit versus human well-being—recognizing that the corporate interests at stake are multifarious and situated across both corporate and non-corporate domains of influence and actions. For this reason, we speak in this themed issue not merely of corporations and the effects of their development projects, but rather emphasize the encounters between the assemblage of actors involved in implementing, contesting and morphing these projects across scales of intervention, from boardroom ideas to grassroots iterations with social, environmental and economic implications.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.11.02

Evaluation of problem-solving skills: what we really do

Abstract no. 1394published_or_final_versio

Do Multinational enterprises push up wages of domestic firms in the Italian Manufacturing sector?

This paper analyzes the effects of foreign direct investment on wages paid by domestic firms in the Italian manufacturing sector over the period 2002–2007. In particular, the authors investigate the im-pact of multinational enterprises on wages paid by local firms which operate in the same industry, known and horizontal wage spillovers, or have linkages with multinational enterprises in both downstream and upstream industries, known as vertical wage spillovers. By using a large panel dataset, consisting of 551,000 observations, the authors find evidence of wage spillovers only at inter-industry level and, more specifically, for those firms who supply their goods to multinational enterprises, described as backward wage spillovers. Moreover, findings suggest that the wage spillover effect is strongly affected by the technological gap between local and foreign firms: only workers employed in domestic firms with a low-medium technological absorptive capacity seem to benefit from the presence of multinational enterprises in terms of higher wages

Novel “nano-phage” interfaces for wireless biosensors

The prevention of food-borne illness has become a very important factor in public health. Meantime, the conventional microbiological detection techniques are time consuming, require proficiency and appropriate laboratory conditions. Recently, there has been an extensive work undertaken towards the development of diagnostic biosensor devices for on-site detection of biological threats that explore a diversity of transduction mechanisms and bio-recognition elements. In particular, the environmentally robust filamentous phages have been successfully used as an alternative to fragile antibodies in wireless biosensor system for real-time pathogen detection. However, when phages are used as interface, they can aggregate forming bundles of fibers that cannot cover completely the sensor’s interface leading to the decrease in sensor’s performance. In this work we developed novel wireless magnetoelastic biosensors with interface formed by biorecognition nanoparticles called “nano-phage”. “Nano-phage” comprises nanoparticles with diameter ~11 nm composed of self-assembled fusion major coat protein of landscape phages selected against the target analyte. For proof-of-concept, we investigated interfaces formed by three model phages selected from landscape libraries: streptavidin binders 7b1 and SAE10 and clone E2 highly specific and selective for S. typhimurium. Beside food borne pathogens, this new approach can be used to develop biosensors with increased performance for early detection of cancer diseases and other pathologies

Antidepressant drugs and generic counselling for treatment of major depression in primary care:randomised trial with patient preference arms

Objectives: To compare the efficacy of antidepressant drugs and generic counselling for treating mild to moderate depression in general practice. To determine whether the outcomes were similar for patients with randomly allocated treatment and those expressing a treatment preference.Design: Randomised controlled trial, with patient preference arms. Follow up at 8 weeks and 12 months and abstraction of GP case notes.Setting: 31 general practices in Trent region.Participants: Patients aged 18–70 who met research diagnostic criteria for major depression; 103 patients were randomised and 220 patients were recruited to the preference arms.Main outcome measures: Difference in mean Beck depression inventory score; time to remission; global outcome assessed by a psychiatrist using all data sources; and research diagnostic criteria.Results: At 12 months there was no difference between the mean Beck scores in the randomised arms. Combining the randomised and patient preference groups, the difference in Beck scores was 0.4 (95% confidence interval −2.7 to 3.5). Patients choosing counselling did better than those randomised to it (mean difference in Beck score 4.6, 0.0 to 9.2). There was no difference in the psychiatrist's overall assessment of outcome between any of the groups. 221/265 (83%) of participants with a known outcome had a remission. Median time to remission was shorter in the group randomised to antidepressants than the other three groups (2 months v 3 months). 33/221 (15%) patients had a relapse.Conclusions: Generic counselling seems to be as effective as antidepressant treatment for mild to moderate depressive illness, although patients receiving antidepressants may recover more quickly. General practitioners should allow patients to have their preferred treatment

Using digital storytelling as an assessment instrument: preliminary findings at an online university

‘Digital Storytelling’ is a term often used to refer to a number of different types of digital narrative including web-based stories, hypertexts, videoblogs and computer games. While the definition of digital storytelling is still evolving, this emergent form of creative work has found an outlet in a wide variety of different domains ranging from community social history, to cookbooks, to the classroom. It is the latter domain that provides the focus for this paper, specifically the online classroom in the graduate business school environment. The authors hypothesise that as – in the majority of societies – people are ‘hard wired’ both to tell and to listen to stories from a very young age and, significantly, to remember stories, the scope for deep learning using this particular pedagogical tool is considerable. The more conservative forces within business schools may not be persuaded by this idea but – whether they are or not – the fact remains that, in the knowledge economy, digital technologies have become the modus operandi for business communication. In this sense, a business school curriculum with a heavy bias towards textbased, essay-style assignments might be adjudged out-of-step with the times. A supplementary hypothesis, therefore, is that digital storytelling also represents a highly authentic form of assessment (Herrington et al. 2003), in that the digital storytelling format improves presentation skills which are highly sought in the business world today. Much of the work on digital storytelling in the education sphere has concentrated on the primary and secondary sectors. With some notable exceptions (e.g. Paull 2002), the literature on digital storytelling in the tertiary/adult education sector is quite sparse. Research on the use of digital storytelling in business schools, meanwhile, appears non-existent, hence the motivation for this study

Command Agent Belief Architecture to Support Commander Decision Making in Military Simulation

In the war, military conflicts have many aspects that are consistent with complexity theory e.g., the higher commander’s decision is directed at animate entity that react under hierarchical and self-organised structure in decentralised command and control for the collectivist dynamism of decomposed elements due to nonlinear complexity of warfare on the battlefield. Agent technology have been found to be suitable for modelling tactical behaviour of entities at multiple level of resolution under hierarchical command and control (C2) structure and provide a powerful abstraction mechanism required for designing simulations of complex and dynamic battlefield situations. Intelligent agents can potentially reduce the overhead on such experiments and studies. Command agents, plan how to carry out the operation and assign tasks to subordinate agents. They receive information from battlefield environment and use such information to build situation awareness and also to respond to unforeseen situations. In the paper, we have proposed a mechanism for modelling tactical behaviour of an intelligent agent by which higher command level entities should be able to synthesize their beliefs derived from the lower level sub ordinates entities. This paper presents a role-based belief, desire and intention mechanism to facilitate in the representation of military hierarchy, modelling of tactical behaviour based on agent current belief, teammate’s belief propagation, and coordination issues. Higher commander can view the battlefield information at different levels of abstraction based on concept of aggregation and disaggregation and take appropriate reactive response to any unforeseen circumstances happening in battlefield

Dark Web Data Classification Using Neural Network

There are several issues associated with Dark Web Structural Patterns mining (including many redundant and irrelevant information), which increases the numerous types of cybercrime like illegal trade, forums, terrorist activity, and illegal online shopping. Understanding online criminal behavior is challenging because the data is available in a vast amount. To require an approach for learning the criminal behavior to check the recent request for improving the labeled data as a user profiling, Dark Web Structural Patterns mining in the case of multidimensional data sets gives uncertain results. Uncertain classification results cause a problem of not being able to predict user behavior. Since data of multidimensional nature has feature mixes, it has an adverse influence on classification. The data associated with Dark Web inundation has restricted us from giving the appropriate solution according to the need. In the research design, a Fusion NN (Neural network)-S3VM for Criminal Network activity prediction model is proposed based on the neural network; NN- S3VM can improve the prediction