Organic agriculture and rural livelihoods in Karnataka, India

The research explored the effects a change from conventional to organic farming had on the livelihoods of a group of farmers in Karnataka, South India. It involved semi-structured interviews with organic farmers, NGOs, consumers, marketing organisations, and the State Agricultural Department. The farmers in the case study perceived that they had improved their livelihoods over the long term by the conversion from conventional to organic farming. Reduced costs for external inputs and reduced labour requirements together with similar or higher yields and premium prices resulted in higher net-farm incomes. The conversion to organic farming reduced the reliance on credits and the risk of crop failure due to pests, diseases and droughts, thereby reducing vulnerability. In addition, the farmers mentioned enhanced natural assets, reduced risk of pesticide poisonings, improved food safety, higher levels of self-sufficiency, and the access to networks supporting knowledge exchange and political participation as important benefits of the conversion. However, almost all the case study farmers noted that the conversion period was difficult due to temporarily declining yields and a lack of information and experiences. This is likely to be a major constraint preventing asset-poor farmers from adopting organic agriculture

Is the Inflation-Output Nexus Asymmetric in the Euro Area?

This paper challenges the assumption that the inflation process within the euro area is well-described by a linear Phillips curve and investigates in a nonparametric framework how inflation is sensitive to output growth. An asymmetric output-inflation trade-off is pointed out in the euro area at both aggregated and individual country levels.Nonlinear Phillips curve ; Price stability ; Kernel smoothing.

Extreme(ly) mean(ingful): Sequential formation of a quality group

The present paper studies the limiting behavior of the average score of a sequentially selected group of items or individuals, the underlying distribution of which, $F$, belongs to the Gumbel domain of attraction of extreme value distributions. This class contains the Normal, Lognormal, Gamma, Weibull and many other distributions. The selection rules are the "better than average" ($\beta=1$) and the "$\beta$-better than average" rule, defined as follows. After the first item is selected, another item is admitted into the group if and only if its score is greater than $\beta$ times the average score of those already selected. Denote by $\bar{Y}_k$ the average of the $k$ first selected items, and by $T_k$ the time it takes to amass them. Some of the key results obtained are: under mild conditions, for the better than average rule, $\bar{Y}_k$ less a suitable chosen function of $\log k$ converges almost surely to a finite random variable. When $1-F(x)=e^{-[x^{\alpha}+h(x)]}$, $\alpha>0$ and $h(x)/x^{\alpha}\stackrel{x\rightarrow \infty}{\longrightarrow}0$, then $T_k$ is of approximate order $k^2$. When $\beta>1$, the asymptotic results for $\bar{Y}_k$ are of a completely different order of magnitude. Interestingly, for a class of distributions, $T_k$, suitably normalized, asymptotically approaches 1, almost surely for relatively small $\beta\ge1$, in probability for moderate sized $\beta$ and in distribution when $\beta$ is large.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AAP684 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Rotational apparent mass by electrical analogy

Electrical analogy technique for determining rotational apparent masses of body in two- dimensional fluid flo

Studying High Energy Final State Interactions by N/D Method

We discuss the final state interaction effects at high energies via a multi-channel N/D method. We find that the 2 by 2 charge--exchange final state interactions typically contribute an enhancement factor of a few times $10^{-2}$ in the $B$ meson decay amplitudes, both for the real and the imaginary part. We also make some discussions on the elastic rescattering effects.Comment: 10 pages, revte

A theoretical study of the aerodynamic characteristics of lifting-body entry vehicles Summary report, Mar. 1965 - Mar. 1966

Aerodynamic characteristics of lifting-body entry vehicle