Analysis of agribusiness value chains servicing small-holder dairy farming communities in Punjab, Pakistan: three case studies

The agriculture sector in Pakistan, as in most developing countries, is dominated by smallholder producers. Pakistan has the world’s third largest dairy industry, and milk is efficiently collected and distributed chiefly by informal value chains that market the raw product with minimal cool chain infrastructure. Formal processors have a small market share of 5%. Interview data from farmers, milk collectors and consumers from three rural-urban case study value chains were analysed to study opportunities and challenges faced by the dairy industry. Compositional analysis of milk samples (n=84) collected along these chains identified the fact that in Pakistan informal milk chains provide a cheaper source of calories for the final consumer than industrialised milk chains (USD 0.12 compared USD 0.15 per 100 calories). These three chains created an estimated 4,872 jobs from farm to market and provided access to interest-free credit for the farmers. The existing government price setting mechanism at the retail end and collusion by large processors to set farm gate prices provided significant limitations to the profitability of small-holder farms providing the product. The absence of quality and quantity standards, amid the exchange of huge numbers of small volumes of milk along these chains, are major impediments to industry growth

Dairying and whole-farm economics of crop-livestock farming systems - comparing arid and irrigated districts of Punjab, Pakistan

Dairying is an important component of Pakistan’s mixed crop-livestock farming systems. The national economy engages some 8.8 million small-scale producer households. The country produces more milk than any other except for the United States and India. Yet little is known about small-scale producer microeconomics to inform policy development for improving their welfare. In this paper we aim to identify the whole farm profitability of small agricultural households, with a specific focus on milk production. We compare two contrasting agro-ecological regions within Pakistan’s Punjab (irrigated Okara and rain-fed Bhakkar) using results for a single 2008-09 fiscal year of production for 212 farms. Net farm profits, taking long-run opportunity costs of labour and capital into account, showed only 10 per cent of these farms to be profitable in either district, though short-run profits, accounting for cash costs only, showed positive whole farm gross margins for 90 per cent and 80 per cent of farms in Okara and Bhakkar, respectively. The returns on assets (at 2.78 per cent and 0.53 per cent for the two districts) was lower than the national average return on savings (9 per cent). For dairy enterprises, total costs were higher than incomes; so many farms (70 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively) were assessed as making losses. Given the low opportunity costs of feeds (often crop residues) and of labour (6.2 per cent unemployment) and the high rate of inflation (11.8 per cent), returns on factors of production including labour and capital, may not be lower than international standards. There is a need, however, to raise the dairy industry’s overall productivity to make dairying viable; and to identify an optimal land and livestock combination that is profitable and commercially viable

General boundary conditions for the envelope function in multiband k.p model

We have derived general boundary conditions (BC) for the multiband envelope functions (which do not contain spurious solutions) in semiconductor heterostructures with abrupt heterointerfaces. These BC require the conservation of the probability flux density normal to the interface and guarantee that the multiband Hamiltonian be self--adjoint. The BC are energy independent and are characteristic properties of the interface. Calculations have been performed of the effect of the general BC on the electron energy levels in a potential well with infinite potential barriers using a coupled two band model. The connection with other approaches to determining BC for the envelope function and to the spurious solution problem in the multiband k.p model are discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures; to be published in Phys. Rev. B 65, March 15 issue 200

Two-Photon, Two-gluon and Radiative Decays of Heavy Flavoured Mesons

Here we present the two-photon and two-gluon decay widths of the S-wave ($\eta_{Q\in c,b}$) and P-wave ($\chi_{Q\in c,bJ}$) charmonium and bottonium states and the radiative transition decay widths of $c\bar c$, $b\bar b$ and $c\bar b$ systems based on Coulomb plus power form of the inter-quark potential ($CPP_\nu$) with exponent $\nu$. The Schr$\ddot{o}$dinger equation is solved numerically for different choices of the exponent $\nu$. We employ the masses of different states and their radial wave functions obtained from the study to compute the two-photon and two-gluon decay widths and the E1 and M1 radiative transitions. It is found that the quarkonia mass spectra and the E1 transition can be described by the same interquark model potential of the $CPP_\nu$ with $\nu=1.0$ for $c\bar c$ and $\nu=0.7$ for $b\bar b$ systems, while the M1 transition (at which the spin of the system changes) and the decay rates in the annihilation channel of quarkonia are better estimated by a shallow potential with $\nu<1.0$.Comment: 27 Pages, 8 figure

Biceps, Bitches and Borgs: Reading <i>Jarhead</i>’s Representation of the Construction of the (Masculine) Military Body

This paper explores the relationship between masculinity, the body and the military through a close reading of the film Jarhead. Drawing on a Foucauldian frame of analysis, we consider three performances of the masculine military body that form key aspects of the film’s representational economy: the disciplined body, an outcome of the processes of basic training; the gendered body, realized through deployment of metaphors of the feminine to strengthen the masculine conception of the military body; and the cyborgian body, the result of the man-machine interface which is rapidly developing in many militaries around the world, and which poses significant questions for performances of military masculinity. We conclude by suggesting that the film’s rendering of the material and discursive body reveals an unexpected tension between the expectations of military bodies and the lived experience of their labour. As well as augmenting empirical explorations of male-worker-bodies and analysing the occupation of soldier as requiring a unique kind of body work, our contribution to the body-organization literature turns upon the claim that docile military bodies are made fit for purpose, but may actually no longer have a purpose for which to be fit

Relativistic Calculation of the Meson Spectrum: a Fully Covariant Treatment Versus Standard Treatments

A large number of treatments of the meson spectrum have been tried that consider mesons as quark - anti quark bound states. Recently, we used relativistic quantum "constraint" mechanics to introduce a fully covariant treatment defined by two coupled Dirac equations. For field-theoretic interactions, this procedure functions as a "quantum mechanical transform of Bethe-Salpeter equation". Here, we test its spectral fits against those provided by an assortment of models: Wisconsin model, Iowa State model, Brayshaw model, and the popular semi-relativistic treatment of Godfrey and Isgur. We find that the fit provided by the two-body Dirac model for the entire meson spectrum competes with the best fits to partial spectra provided by the others and does so with the smallest number of interaction functions without additional cutoff parameters necessary to make other approaches numerically tractable. We discuss the distinguishing features of our model that may account for the relative overall success of its fits. Note especially that in our approach for QCD, the resulting pion mass and associated Goldstone behavior depend sensitively on the preservation of relativistic couplings that are crucial for its success when solved nonperturbatively for the analogous two-body bound-states of QED.Comment: 75 pages, 6 figures, revised content

Global mental health: the role of collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic

T32 MH116140 - NIMH NIH HHSPublished versio

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Measurement of the polarisation of W bosons produced with large transverse momentum in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS experiment

This paper describes an analysis of the angular distribution of W->enu and W->munu decays, using data from pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2010, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 35 pb^-1. Using the decay lepton transverse momentum and the missing transverse energy, the W decay angular distribution projected onto the transverse plane is obtained and analysed in terms of helicity fractions f0, fL and fR over two ranges of W transverse momentum (ptw): 35 < ptw < 50 GeV and ptw > 50 GeV. Good agreement is found with theoretical predictions. For ptw > 50 GeV, the values of f0 and fL-fR, averaged over charge and lepton flavour, are measured to be : f0 = 0.127 +/- 0.030 +/- 0.108 and fL-fR = 0.252 +/- 0.017 +/- 0.030, where the first uncertainties are statistical, and the second include all systematic effects.Comment: 19 pages plus author list (34 pages total), 9 figures, 11 tables, revised author list, matches European Journal of Physics C versio

Observation of a new chi_b state in radiative transitions to Upsilon(1S) and Upsilon(2S) at ATLAS

The chi_b(nP) quarkonium states are produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV and recorded by the ATLAS detector. Using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.4 fb^-1, these states are reconstructed through their radiative decays to Upsilon(1S,2S) with Upsilon->mu+mu-. In addition to the mass peaks corresponding to the decay modes chi_b(1P,2P)->Upsilon(1S)gamma, a new structure centered at a mass of 10.530+/-0.005 (stat.)+/-0.009 (syst.) GeV is also observed, in both the Upsilon(1S)gamma and Upsilon(2S)gamma decay modes. This is interpreted as the chi_b(3P) system.Comment: 5 pages plus author list (18 pages total), 2 figures, 1 table, corrected author list, matches final version in Physical Review Letter