The modernization process in Greek Agriculture: The case of investment aid

The present study focuses on certain critical aspects of the agricultural modernization, in the course of implementation of the investment aid scheme in Greece. Although the investments made under the scheme, contributed to the significant reorganization of the farms as well as to employment creation, serious deficiencies were detected in the way the scheme has been designed and implemented: lack of programming logic serving specific targets and of suitable mechanisms for information and back-up of farmers on technico-organizational matters, as well as non-incorporation of the principles of programming, monitoring and assessment. The way the scheme was implemented, exemplifies the subventionist logic of income assistance, and underlines some standing characteristics in Greek agricultural policy. Finally, alternative priorities of investment policy application are examined.Investment aid, agricultural policy, farm modernization,

Support and protection of Greek Agriculture: inter-temporal developments and sectoral diversification

This paper aims at determining the level of support of Greek agriculture. The calculations are performed on commodity basis over the period 1989-2006. By using an adapted OECD methodology, research findings indicate that the overall support level of Greek agriculture is similar to that of EU though after 2002 diverging trends are observed. A redistribution of the various parts of support is ascertained, whereas livestock production is more supported than crop production. The ratio of market price support to the total value of production seems to explain variations in support levels between Greece and the EU. The need for a critical reappraisal of OECD methodology is stressed.support, protection, agricultural policy, Greek Agriculture, OECD

ΠΑΙΧΝΙΔΟΚΕΝΤΡΙΚΗ ΜΑΘΗΣΗ ΜΕ ΤΗ ΧΡΗΣΗ Τ.Π.Ε. ΣΤΟ ΔΗΜΟΤΙΚΟ

Σε αυτή την εργασία το θέμα είναι η παιχνιδοκεντρική προσέγγιση της διδασκαλίας και της μάθησης (Game-Based Learning, GBL) και συγκεκριμένα πώς ο/η εκπαιδευτικός μπορεί να εισάγει αυτή τη μέθοδο στη διδακτική πράξη. Γίνεται προσπάθεια να αναλυθεί η παιχνιδοκεντρική προσέγγιση και να διερευνηθεί τόσο η αποδοχή της από την εκπαιδευτική κοινότητα όσο και τα αποτελέσματά της σε συγκεκριμένους άξονες της μάθησης των μαθητών. Για τους σκοπούς αυτούς πραγματοποιήθηκε έρευνα με δύο σκέλη: (α) Συντάχθηκε και διακινήθηκε ηλεκτρονικά ανώνυμο ερωτηματολόγιο σε εκπαιδευτικούς τόσο του ιδιωτικού όσο και του δημοσίου τομέα, με ερωτήσεις σχετικά με την εμπειρία τους στη χρήση παιχνιδοκεντρικής μάθησης και παιχνιδιών στην τάξη τους. Οι απαντήσεις (60) αναλύθηκαν και τα συμπεράσματα χρησιμοποιήθηκαν για τη σχεδίαση του επόμενου σκέλους. (β) Πραγματοποιήθηκε παρέμβαση σε μαθητές της Ε’ δημοτικού, σε ιδιωτικό σχολείο της Αθήνας, με τους μαθητές είτε σε ρόλο παίκτη είτε σε ρόλο δημιουργού (κατασκευαστή) ψηφιακών εκπαιδευτικών παιχνιδιών. Για την παρέμβαση δημιουργήθηκαν αρχικά από το δάσκαλο της τάξης (γράφοντα) και στη συνέχεια από τους ίδιους τους μαθητές σε ομάδες, μία σειρά από ψηφιακά παιχνίδια τα οποία είχαν σχέση με τη διδακτέα ύλη της Ε δημοτικού στα μαθήματα της Γλώσσας και των Μαθηματικών. Για τη δημιουργία τους χρησιμοποιήθηκαν η πλατφόρμα Word Wall και το Power Point. Ακολούθησε αξιολόγηση της παρέμβασης με θετικά αποτελέσματα.This Master Thesis is dealing with Game-Based Learning in Primary School with the use of ICT

On the Approximability of Dodgson and Young Elections

The voting rules proposed by Dodgson and Young are both designed to nd the alternative closest to being a Condorcet winner, according to two di erent notions of proximity; the score of a given alternative is known to be hard to compute under either rule. In this paper, we put forward two algorithms for ap- proximating the Dodgson score: an LP-based randomized rounding algorithm and a deterministic greedy algorithm, both of which yield an O(logm) approximation ratio, where m is the number of alternatives; we observe that this result is asymptotically optimal, and further prove that our greedy algorithm is optimal up to a factor of 2, unless problems in NP have quasi-polynomial time algorithms. Although the greedy algorithm is computationally superior, we argue that the randomized rounding algorithm has an advantage from a social choice point of view. Further, we demonstrate that computing any reasonable approximation of the ranking produced by Dodgson\u27s rule is NP-hard. This result provides a complexity-theoretic explanation of sharp discrepancies that have been observed in the Social Choice Theory literature when comparing Dodgson elections with simpler voting rules. Finally, we show that the problem of calculating the Young score is NP-hard to approximate by any factor. This leads to an inapproximability result for the Young ranking

The modernization process in Greek Agriculture: The case of investment aid

The present study focuses on certain critical aspects of the agricultural modernization, in the course of implementation of the investment aid scheme in Greece. Although the investments made under the scheme, contributed to the significant reorganization of the farms as well as to employment creation, serious deficiencies were detected in the way the scheme has been designed and implemented: lack of programming logic serving specific targets and of suitable mechanisms for information and back-up of farmers on technico-organizational matters, as well as non-incorporation of the principles of programming, monitoring and assessment. The way the scheme was implemented, exemplifies the subventionist logic of income assistance, and underlines some standing characteristics in Greek agricultural policy. Finally, alternative priorities of investment policy application are examined

Edge-Compressed Majority Graph: Where Social Choice Meets Information Visualization

International audienceCollective decisions are everywhere: choosing central or local governments, selecting a candidate to hire for an open position, choosing a restaurant to share a dinner with some friends are examples of collective decision making situations. Social Choice provides a lot of methods which can help people making a decision in such situations. However, the diversity of these voting procedures and the mathematical background necessary to understand them can be seen as obstacles to the use of these methods in everyday situations by laypersons. We claim that information visualization techniques can help a lot the democratization of social choice, by providing people with some easily interpretable information and, in the end, helping them making informed collective decisions. In this paper, we present the Edge-Compressed Majority Graph, a technique dedicated to the visualization of the majority graph of a preference profile. Using an insight-based evaluation method, we show that this technique gives better results in conveying information about the preferences than other classical visualization techniques

A Voting Argumentation Framework: Considering the Reasoning behind Preferences

International audienceOne of the most prominent ways to reach an acceptable collective decision in normal group settings is the employment of routines and methods of social choice theory. The classical social choice setting is the following: each agent involved in the decision expresses her preferences about a given set of alternatives in the form of a linear order on them. Then, the group's aggregated decision is the outcome of the application of a voting rule to the input's preferences. However, there are instances where social choice on its own cannot provide proper solutions. For example, there are decision problems where the outcome has to be based on the reasoning behind agents' preferences, rather than the unjustified preferences itself. Hence, our research motivation is the practical case where agents' rationale is needed for the decision outcome. In this paper, we explore how the agents' rationale can be formulated inside the classical voting setting. Therefore, we propose a decision-making procedure based on argumenta-tion and preference aggregation which permits us to explore the effect of reasoning and deliberation along with voting for the decision process. We quantify the deliberation phase by defining a new voting argumentation framework, that uses vote and generic arguments, and its acceptability semantics based on the notion of pairwise comparisons between alternatives. We prove for these semantics some theoretical results regarding well-known properties from Argumentation and Social Choice Theory