Irrigation and income-poverty alleviation: a comparative analysis of irrigation systems in developing Asia

Poverty / Measurement / Income / Expenditure / Households / Irrigation systems / Asia / Indonesia / Pakistan

A farmers’ company for better price: The case of Chandrika Wewa Farmer Company, Sri Lanka

Farmers associationsCollective actionInstitutionsIrrigation programsMarketingCreditFertilizers

Implications of alternate irrigation water charging policies for the poor farmers in developing Asia: a comparative analysis

Irrigation water / Water rates / User charges / Pricing / Poverty / Water allocation / Water rights / Water delivery / Water distribution / Irrigation canals / Bangladesh / China / India / Indonesia / Pakistan / Vietnam

Development strategy for the irrigation sector of Sri Lanka 2006-2016

Irrigation management / Development plans / Policy / Operations / Maintenance / Rehabilitation / Investment planning / Watersheds / Institutional development / Sri Lanka / Mahaweli Project

Extended Pixel Representation for Image Segmentation

We explore the use of extended pixel representation for color based image segmentation using the K-means clustering algorithm. Various extended pixel representations have been implemented in this paper and their results have been compared. By extending the representation of pixels an image is mapped to a higher dimensional space. Unlike other approaches, where data is mapped into an implicit features space of higher dimension (kernel methods), in the approach considered here, the higher dimensions are defined explicitly. Preliminary experimental results which illustrate the proposed approach are promising

Pro-poor intervention strategies in irrigated agriculture in Asia: poverty in irrigated agriculture: issues and options: Indonesia

Irrigated farming / Poverty / Institutional development / Irrigation management / Colonialism / Policy / Privatization / Hydrology / Climate / Cropping systems / Soils / Participatory rural appraisal / Performance indexes / Crop production / Costs / Households / Income / Expenditure / Irrigation systems / Operations / Maintenance / Water users’ associations / Financing / Constraints / Indonesia

Simulations of the Influence of the West Caribbean Sea Circulation and Eddies on the Meso-American Barrier Reef System

The Meso-American Barrier Reef System (MBRS) along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras is an ecologically and biologically sensitive region. It provides for example, major spawning aggregation sites for various species of fish; these activities may be influenced by variations of the flow near the reef and the transports between the MBRS and the Caribbean Sea circulation. Caribbean eddies, which may play an important role in flow variability, have been studied in the past by observations and models (Carton and Chao, 1999; Murphy et al., 1999; Andrade and Barton, 2000; Oey et al., 2003), but knowledge of their influence on the MBRS is still not complete. With limited availability of long-term observations near the reef and coast, as well as in the open Caribbean Sea, hydrodynamic numerical ocean models may provide important means to study this region

On the Sensitivity of the West Caribbean Sea Circulation to Tides, Wind, and Mesoscale Ocean Eddies: A Three-Dimensional Ocean Model Study

A three-dimensional, primitive equation ocean model is used to study the circulation in the West Caribbean Sea (WCS) region, and to test the sensitivity of the coastal flow to various forcing fields such as tides, climatological wind, and Caribbean eddies. The model domain is bordered by latitudes 15 – 22 degrees N and longitudes 76 – 87 degrees W, with the MesoAmerican Barrier Reef System (MBRS, along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras) and the southern coast of Cuba as land boundaries. The WCS is open to the Caribbean Sea in the southeast and the Yucatan Channel in the northwest, with a prescribed 25 Sv flow-through from southeast to northwest. The results show that the base flow is highly variable even without time dependent forcing and without assimilation of eddies. The interaction of the base flow with the bathymetry gives rise to frequent westward propagating cyclonic eddies with diameters of 50-150 km in the Gulf of Honduras, and an anticyclonic eddy southeast of the Yucatan Channel with diameter of 200 km. When mesoscale eddies are included in the initial condition through assimilation of altimeter data, the WCS model simulates the propagation of those eddies, so that the eddy field is quite realistic even after 45 days from the initialization. Moreover, eddies were found to influence the coastal flow, such that when a cyclonic or an anticyclonic eddy is propagating through the WCS, the velocity field along the MBRS is either attenuated or enhanced, respectively. The area-averaged mean surface kinetic energy is influenced mostly by the 25 Sv flow-through and climatological winds, while the area- averaged eddy surface kinetic energy is influenced mostly by the mesoscale Caribbean eddies

An Investigation of Bank Insolvencies: Can they be predicted before failure?

The banking system has been a backbone for most developed and emerging economies. It provides support to other industry and in turn to the economy as a whole. Over the past couple of years, the banking system has seen significant increase in bank failures these are results of either bad banking or bad management. Bank insolvencies have resulted in mandatory regulations and special attention by governments in order to maintain a stable economy. Early detection of problems in banks is clearly beneficial in order to prevent bank failures. This study attempts to predict bank failures in the U.S. between 2000-2009. It does this by testing two models (consisting of different sets of variables) on a sample of failed banks, bailed banks and a combination of both for up to three years before failure. Binary logistic regression is the statistical analytical tool used to examine the predictive ability of a continuous/categorical variable on a categorical variable (this variable has only two possible numbers: 0 for a non-failed bank and 1 for a failed bank). After testing the predictive power of both models, it was observed that the predictive ability of model 2 was greater than that of model one for the three samples and over the three year period. It was also observed that the predictive power of the model 2 diminished slightly from the first year before failure to the third year before failure. This study has shown that it is possible to observe some symptoms of the possibility of failure as early as three years before possible failure providing a tool for investors, managers and regulators to assess the health of banks early enough for corrective action to be taken. The variables representing the size of the bank in terms of its total assets, total deposits, profits, etc indicating that larger and more profitable banks are less likely to fail or be allowed to fail whatever the case might be. It is suggested that these variables be included in subsequent models attempting to predict the probability of bank failures

Single Sign-on Mechanism for Secure Web Service Access through ISSO

Single sign-on (SSO) is an emerging and more secure authentication mechanism that enables an authorized user with a single username/password to be authenticated by many service providers in a distributed network system. The existing technique used SSO scheme and it has achieved security by applying well-organized security parameters and its improved scheme introduced Verifiable Encryption of Signatures (RSA-VES). But the improvement of both the techniques with respect to security is not fully accomplished. We identified two attacks in existing SSO techniques. The first attack permits a malicious service provider to successfully communicate with a legal user more than one time and to recover the authenticated username/password and then to impersonate the service consumer to grant access to web resources and web services provided by other SP (Service Provider). Another attack is that a third party without any security credential may be able to access network services easily by impersonating some legal user or a fictional user. In our proposed work we introduced Improved Single sign-on (ISSO) scheme, which prevents Credential recovery attack, Impersonation attack and Data injection attack. We used the modified version of JMeter open source tool for generating the test report of the particular web apps. We implemented three web applications which provide financial solutions to customers. These three web applications used SOAP based request and response mapping for efficient handling of communication protocols. The testing result stated that the ISSO scheme fights against the attacks that were present in current SSO scheme