Unique History, Unique Opportunity: Evangelicalism in Austria since 1945

The article deals with the history of evangelicalism in Austria, a subject on which there is hardly any scholarly research. In focus is the development of the newly recognized baptist, charismatic, mainline evangelical, mennonite and pentecostal denominations since 1945. The role of immigration in the growth of evangelicalism is examined, especially during two periods: the decade after WWII (1945-55) as well as the massive immigration from Eastern Europe (particularly from Romania) after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. The article also presents examples of indigenous church movements among the Austrian people themselves, especially during the 1970\u27s and 1980\u27s. Although the story of its growth is remarkable, less than 0.3% of the population are members of evangelical churches. Conclusions are made as to how Austria\u27s evangelicals can learn from their past in order to more effectively shape their future

DO HOUSEHOLDS FULLY SHARE RISK? EVIDENCE FROM GHANA

Intrahousehold analyses provide new insights into how households make economic decisions. Much of the work in economics has traditionally treated the household as a single economic actor, but a number of studies are providing evidence that the dynamics among household members affect the outcomes of household economic decisions. This paper contributes to our understanding of such models by incorporating the variability of individual incomes into the analysis of intrahousehold resource allocations, using detailed household survey data from Ghana.Consumer/Household Economics, Risk and Uncertainty,

UNDERSTANDING FARM-LEVEL TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION: LESSONS LEARNED FROM CIMMYT'S MICRO SURVEYS IN EASTERN AFRICA

Drawing on a series of technology adoption studies carried out by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in collaboration with national agricultural research systems in Eastern Africa during 1996-98, this paper suggests alternative approaches for designing technology adoption studies to obtain as much useful information as possible. It describes the Eastern African studies and summarizes specific lessons learned, asks what can be learned from farm-level studies in a few communities, explores generic limitations of micro studies and a range of problems and issues faced in carrying out such studies, addresses challenges that arise in trying to put together a set of compatible micro studies, and lists overall conclusions and specific recommendations.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Dynamic Display of Changing Posterior in Bayesian Survival Analysis: The Software

We consider the problem of estimating an unknown distribution function in the presence of censoring under the conditions that a parametric model is believed to hold approximately. We use a Bayesian approach, in which the prior on is a mixture of Dirichlet distributions. A hyperparameter of the prior determines the extent to which this prior concentrates its mass around the parametric family. A Gibbs sampling algorithm to estimate the posterior distributions of the parameters of interest is reviewed. An importance sampling scheme enables us to use the output of the Gibbs sampler to very quickly recalculate the posterior when we change the hyperparameters of the prior. The calculations can be done sufficiently fast to enable the dynamic display of the changing posterior as the prior hyperparameters are varied. This paper provides a literate program completely documenting the code for performing the dynamic graphics.

End-to-end Phoneme Sequence Recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks

Most phoneme recognition state-of-the-art systems rely on a classical neural network classifiers, fed with highly tuned features, such as MFCC or PLP features. Recent advances in ``deep learning'' approaches questioned such systems, but while some attempts were made with simpler features such as spectrograms, state-of-the-art systems still rely on MFCCs. This might be viewed as a kind of failure from deep learning approaches, which are often claimed to have the ability to train with raw signals, alleviating the need of hand-crafted features. In this paper, we investigate a convolutional neural network approach for raw speech signals. While convolutional architectures got tremendous success in computer vision or text processing, they seem to have been let down in the past recent years in the speech processing field. We show that it is possible to learn an end-to-end phoneme sequence classifier system directly from raw signal, with similar performance on the TIMIT and WSJ datasets than existing systems based on MFCC, questioning the need of complex hand-crafted features on large datasets.Comment: NIPS Deep Learning Workshop, 201

THE RELATIONSHIP OF PROPERTY VALUES AND WETLANDS PROXIMITY IN RAMSEY COUNTY, MINNESOTA

Land Economics/Use,

ARE HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION DECISIONS COOPERATIVE? EVIDENCE ON MIGRATION AND MILK SALES FROM NORTHERN KENYA

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/29/02.Consumer/Household Economics,

Are Household Production Decisions Cooperative? Evidence on Pastoral Migration and Milk Sales from Northern Kenya

Market-based development efforts frequently create opportunities to generate income from goods previously produced and consumed within the household. Production within the household is often characterized by a gender and age division of labor. Market development efforts to improve well being may lead to unanticipated outcomes if household production decisions are non-cooperative. We develop and test models of household decision-making to investigate intra-household decision making in a nomadic pastoral setting from Kenya. Our results suggest that household decisions are contested, with husbands using migration decisions to resist wives' ability to market milk.Intrahousehold decision-making, household production, Kenya