Issue 07: The Need for Local Reintegration Policy/Programs in Rural Mexico

Since 2007, a growing number of Mexican immigrants in the United States have been returning to Mexico. For the first time since the 1960s, net migration in Mexico is zero, implying that just as many Mexicans are returning to Mexico as are going to the United States. There are a number of factors contributing to this return migration by Mexican nationals. This current situation presents the Mexican government with new priorities and responsibilities. Upon return, many of these unskilled workers face barriers preventing proper reintegration back into Mexican society, including a lack of support networks, potential language and cultural barriers dependent on the length of time they spent in the United States, and a lack of skills needed for available employment. The Mexican government is not prepared to assist and support the number of returning migrants. This lack of reintegration support causes many returning migrants to again leave Mexico and fosters a circular form of migration

Commissioning the SoLid Detector Using Cosmic Ray Muons

The SoLid detector was constructed during 2017 and started to take data in December 2017. Commissioning a new detector implies defining and understanding a whole set of new variables. On the one hand the environmental conditions are followed, and on the other hand quantities related to the stability of the detector are monitored. Cosmic muons are ideal for studying the stability of SoLid, because of their abundance due to the small overburden. Muons can be used to study the timing synchronisation and energy calibration of the detector on a daily timescale. They can be used to monitor the detector stability and to correlate it with the environmental conditions. Muons also create secondary particles along their trajectory that can be detected and used for commissioning. For instance, spallation neutrons that are thermalized and captured in the detector can be used to verify the thermalisation properties of the detector. Stopping muon decays allow for a check of the muon decay time.Comment: Talk presented at NuPhys2018 (London, 19-21 December 2018

Challenges for smallholder market access: a review of literature on institutional arrangements in collective marketing

Purpose of the review: This review presents recent research on collective action in agricultural markets, focusing on the institutional settings that increase market access for smallholder farmers. It focuses attention on challenging research areas that try to understand and resolve the inherent contradictions that exist between members in the group and between the group and others. Findings: Collective action in agricultural markets is facilitated by institutional arrangements that effectively resolve the inherent tensions within groups as well as between farmers and other economic agents. Research explores the logic of collective marketing and the impact of trust and reputation on the mediation of opportunistic action in groups. Special attention is given to institutional arrangements on the interface between vertical and horizontal coordination in food chains, especially related to strategies of producer organisations to by-pass middlemen, to meet quality requirements in modern markets and to effectively use postharvest technologies. Research points to the importance of formal and informal rules and regulations in enabling farmers’ organisations to bulk and process agricultural products. Directions for future research: Informed decision making by value chain actors on replicating or upscaling institutional arrangements to improve the performance of their value chain needs information on its social embeddedness and its relation with the legal environment. More comparative research is needed on “workable models” and “best practices” for facilitating collaborative marketing in developing countries.farmers’ organisations; markets; cooperatives, bulking; opportunistic behaviour; enabling policies

Effectively Engaging Diasporas Under the New Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development

With the amalgamation of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) into a new Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD), new opportunities will emerge for a coherent approach to diaspora engagement initiatives that combine the existing policy directions under a single umbrella. DFATD should work with diasporas in Canada to facilitate and improve engagement with the sending regions. This engagement can occur through current programs, as well as the creation of a new pilot project requiring cooperation between the different policy approaches. Engagement should vary according to the different levels of formal government diasporic engagement of the sending countries, as countries with weak government engagement will require policy approaches distinct from countries with strong government engagement

Illocutionary Acts in Stand-up Comedy

This research was conducted to discover the types of illocutionary acts, the most dominant type of illocutionary acts, the implication of the dominant type of illocutionary acts, and which utterances show the function of stand-up comedy in stand-up comedy performances in Indonesia. It was based on descriptive design by applying both quantitative and qualitative method. This study took ten performances of stand-up comedy which is taken randomly from the internet and there were 1378 illocutionary acts in ten stand-up comedy selected. The findings show that all types of illocutionary acts were used in stand-up comedy and the percentages were: 55.9% of representatives, 22.9% of directives, 16.2% of expressives, 3% of declaratives and 2% of commissives. There was another function of stand-up comedy in addition to entertaining, informing, and criticizing, which is insinuating. The most dominant illocutionary acts type found was representatives. It means, in delivering their material, the comics dominantly convey their belief that some proposition is true and they also indirectly provoke the audience to believe their words

Runtime Analysis of a Simple Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm

Practical knowledge on the design and application of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) is available but well-founded theoretical analyses of the runtime are rare. Laumanns, Thiele, Zitzler, Welzel and Deb (2002) have started such an analysis for two simple mutation-based algorithms including SEMO. These algorithms search locally in the neighborhood of their current population by selecting an individual and flipping one randomly chosen bit. Due to its local search operator, SEMO cannot escape from local optima, and, therefore, has no finite expected runtime in general. In this talk, we investigate the runtime of a variant of SEMO whose mutation operator flips each bit independently. It is proven that its expected runtime is O(n^n) for all objective functions f: {0,1}^n -> R^m, and that there are bicriteria problems among the hardest problem for this algorithm. Moreover, for each d between 2 and n, a bicriteria problem with expected runtime Theta(n^d) is presented. This shows that bicriteria problems cover the full range of potential runtimes of this variant of SEMO. For the problem LOTZ (Leading-Ones-Trailing Zeroes), the runtime does not increase substantially if we use the global search operator. Finally, we consider the problem MOCO (Multi-Objective-Counting-Ones). We show that the conjectured bound O((n^2)log n) on the expected runtime is wrong for both variants of SEMO. In fact, MOCO is almost a worst case example for SEMO if we consider the expected runtime; however, the runtime is O((n^2)log n) with high probability. Some ideas from the proof will be presented

Commissioning the SoLid detector using cosmic ray muons

The SoLid detector was constructed during 2017 and started to take data in December 2017. Commissioning a new detector implies defining and understanding a whole set of new variables. On the one hand the environmental conditions are followed, and on the other hand quantities related to the stability of the detector are monitored. Cosmic muons are ideal for studying the stability of SoLid, because of their abundance due to the small overburden. Muons can be used to study the timing synchronisation and energy calibration of the detector on a daily timescale. They can be used to monitor the detector stability and to correlate it with the environmental conditions. Muons also create secondary particles along their trajectory that can be detected and used for commissioning. For instance, spallation neutrons that are thermalized and captured in the detector can be used to verify the thermalisation properties of the detector. Stopping muon decays allow for a check of the muon decay time