4,713 research outputs found
Participatory varietal selection of potato using the mother & baby trial design: A gender-responsive trainer’s guide.
This guide aims to provide step-by-step guidance on facilitating and documenting the PVS dynamics using the MBT design to select, and eventually release, potato varieties preferred by end-users that suit male and female farmers ’different needs, diverse agro-systems, and management practices, as well as traders ’and consumers’ preferences
Executive performance on the preschool executive task assessment in children with sickle cell anemia and matched controls
Executive deficits are commonly reported in children with sickle cell anemia. Earlier identification of executive deficits would give more scope for intervention, but this cognitive domain has not been routinely investigated due to a lack of age-appropriate tasks normed for preschool children. In particular, information relating to patient performance on an executive task that reflects an everyday activity in the classroom could provide important insight and practical recommendations for the classroom teacher at this key developmental juncture as they enter the academic domain. The performance of 22 children with sickle cell anemia was compared to 24 matched control children on the Preschool Executive Task Assessment. Findings reveal that children with sickle cell anemia are performing poorer than their matched peers on this multi-step assessment. In particular, children with sickle cell anemia required more structured support to shift focus after a completed step, as reflected by poorer scores in the quantitative Sequencing and Completion domains. They also required more support to stay on task, as seen by poorer ratings in the qualitative Distractibility domain. ABBREVIATIONS: PETA: Preschool Executive Task Assessment; SCA: Sickle Cell Anemia; EF: Executive Functioning
Constraints to the sustainability of a ‘systematised’ approach to livestock marketing amongst smallholder cattle producers in South Africa
Commercialization of smallholder agriculture in South Africa is underpinned by reforms to improve livestock off-take in communal areas and engage smallholder farmers with formal markets. To achieve this, Custom Feeding Programmes (CFPs) were established to improve the condition of communal cattle prior to their sale into formal markets and to ‘systematise’ the informal marketing of cattle in communal areas by enabling participants to achieve higher informal market prices. We evaluate the sustainability of eight CFPs located in Eastern Cape Province in terms of their ability to add value to smallholder cattle production and encourage market participation. Communities with CFPs achieved a 16.6% mean cattle off-take rate, substantially higher than in most communal systems. Furthermore, cattle sold through CFPs attained a 17% higher mean selling price than those sold through other marketing channels. However, these benefits were mainly realized by better-off farmers with larger cattle herds and greater ability to transport animals to and from CFPs. More marginalized farmers, particularly women, had low participation. CFPs also face challenges to their sustainability, including inconsistent feed and water supplies, poor infrastructure and high staff turnover. Key to enhancing participation in CFPs, will be improving the way they are supported and embedded within communities
Multiplicative processes and power laws
[Takayasu et al., Phys. Rev.Lett. 79, 966 (1997)] revisited the question of
stochastic processes with multiplicative noise, which have been studied in
several different contexts over the past decades. We focus on the regime, found
for a generic set of control parameters, in which stochastic processes with
multiplicative noise produce intermittency of a special kind, characterized by
a power law probability density distribution. We briefly explain the physical
mechanism leading to a power law pdf and provide a list of references for these
results dating back from a quarter of century. We explain how the formulation
in terms of the characteristic function developed by Takayasu et al. can be
extended to exponents , which explains the ``reason of the lucky
coincidence''. The multidimensional generalization of (\ref{eq1}) and the
available results are briefly summarized. The discovery of stretched
exponential tails in the presence of the cut-off introduced in \cite{Taka} is
explained theoretically. We end by briefly listing applications.Comment: Extended version (7 pages). Phys. Rev. E (to appear April 1998
Modification of maleic anhydride grafted polyethylene with 1,4-diaminobutane in near critical propane
Granules of high density polyethylene grafted with 0.17 wt.% maleic anhydride (PEMA) were modified with an excess of 1,4-diaminobutane (DAB) by impregnation from near critical propane. After formation of amic acid groups, the excess of diaminobutane was extracted with a near critical propane–ethanol mixture (95/5 wt.%). Finally, the obtained PEMA–DAB was imidised quantitatively to the corresponding imide (PEMI) in the melt. The obtained PEMI showed no increased gel content with respect to the PEMA. The presence of primary amine groups was indirectly proven by selective extraction experiments. It appeared that PEMI samples had reacted with the anhydride groups of styrene-MA copolymer (SMA) during melt blending of SMA with PEMI, while the PEMA had not reacted. SMA/PEMI 80/20 blends consisted of a continuous SMA phase and PEMI droplets with a diameter of less than 1 μm. SMA/PEMA 80/20 blends showed a course morphology of PEMA strings in a continuous SMA phase. With this article we have shown that this new technique for the chemical modification of swollen HDPE particles in near critical propane has proven to be much better than the conventional modification in the melt, when it comes to avoiding crosslinking
Parameterized Compilation Lower Bounds for Restricted CNF-formulas
We show unconditional parameterized lower bounds in the area of knowledge
compilation, more specifically on the size of circuits in decomposable negation
normal form (DNNF) that encode CNF-formulas restricted by several graph width
measures. In particular, we show that
- there are CNF formulas of size and modular incidence treewidth
whose smallest DNNF-encoding has size , and
- there are CNF formulas of size and incidence neighborhood diversity
whose smallest DNNF-encoding has size .
These results complement recent upper bounds for compiling CNF into DNNF and
strengthen---quantitatively and qualitatively---known conditional low\-er
bounds for cliquewidth. Moreover, they show that, unlike for many graph
problems, the parameters considered here behave significantly differently from
treewidth
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