Poultry-based poverty alleviation projects in Ehlanzeni District Municipality: do they contribute to the South African government’s ‘developmental state’ ambition?

The aim of this study was to identify both institutional and production constraints to the success of poultry-based poverty alleviation projects (PAPs) in Bushbuckridge Municipality of the Ehlanzeni District of Mpumalanga Province. A mixed methods research design was used. Purposive sampling was used to select 10 Chairpersons, 20 ordinary members, and five extension officers of PAPs who served as respondents in the study. Face-to-face interviews were conducted using a semi-structured guide to collect qualitative data. The qualitative data was analysed using the Atlas ti 7.0.81 software. The results were used to develop a questionnaire employed to collect quantitative data from 116 respondents. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23.0 was used to analyze the latter data. The major institutional constraints identified, in descending order of severity, were: lack of regulation of prices of poultry feed, lack of government start-up capital/subsidy, inadequate extension shows the poor support the PAPs receive. High price of poultry feeds force PAPs to stock fewer chickens was the major production constraint followed by diseases, in particular New Castle and Bronchitis are killing chickens and water supply is so erratic and unreliable that it affects effective running of poultry-based PAPs. It was concluded that despite the wide range of constraints facing them, PAPs were improving people’s livelihoods. The need for revamping the local extension service in order to deal with the numerous challenges that the PAPs faced was highlighted. Central to this reengineering of the extension support system is the need for creating platforms and opportunities for the PAPs to co-learn and learn from each other, both of which are fundamental ingredients of sustainability.Keywords: Constraints; developmental state; extension; povert

Shrinking Bouma's window: How to model crowding in dense displays

Contains fulltext : 236043.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)In crowding, perception of a target deteriorates in the presence of nearby flankers. Traditionally, it is thought that visual crowding obeys Bouma's law, i.e., all elements within a certain distance interfere with the target, and that adding more elements always leads to stronger crowding. Crowding is predominantly studied using sparse displays (a target surrounded by a few flankers). However, many studies have shown that this approach leads to wrong conclusions about human vision. Van der Burg and colleagues proposed a paradigm to measure crowding in dense displays using genetic algorithms. Displays were selected and combined over several generations to maximize human performance. In contrast to Bouma's law, only the target's nearest neighbours affected performance. Here, we tested various models to explain these results. We used the same genetic algorithm, but instead of selecting displays based on human performance we selected displays based on the model’s outputs. We found that all models based on the traditional feedforward pooling framework of vision were unable to reproduce human behaviour. In contrast, all models involving a dedicated grouping stage explained the results successfully. We show how traditional models can be improved by adding a grouping stage.14 p

The Somali chilled meat value chain: Structure, operation, profitability and opportunities to improve the competitiveness of Somalia’s chilled meat export trade

Export-oriented pastoral livestock production is an important source of livelihood of the Somali people. The country is largely food deficient, with imports forming a significant proportion of basic food requirements and which are largely financed through earnings from exports of live animals and meat. The export of meat products offers more avenues for increased earnings and tax revenue by exploiting the available opportunities for domestic value addition, than does live animal trade. This study characterizes the Somali chilled export meat value chain in terms of actors, institutions and practices, and provides an initial analysis of their profitability in handling four species of livestock. It also canvasses actors’ views on opportunities and constraints faced. Its main objective is to provide information that will enable development of strategies to improve the efficiency of the Somali chilled meat export value chain as a way of increasing incomes to market actors. Primary data used was obtained from a rapid appraisal of chilled meat export marketing value chains in Somalia and a formal survey of market actors (brokers, small-scale traders, agents of exporters, exporters and airfreight operators). Secondary data obtained from a review of relevant literature and interviews with expert informants was also generated. The study identified a widely-recognized and consistently-applied grading system for slaughter stock. Quality requirements in importing countries were revealed to be well known throughout the chain, in that actors’ rankings of attributes were consistent within and between actor stages. Conversely, knowledge of health and safety requirements in the importing countries was known only to exporters. Other inconsistencies throughout the chain included the nature and strength of trading relationships: long-lived at exporter and agent level but short term and cash-based at producer level. Although exporters made payments mostly on the basis of carcass weight, agents of exporters paid based on per head of live animals. There is evidence of economies of scale, and of financial advantage in species specialization (specifically, goats) by traders. Most actors’ aspirations feature expansion, but they report investment funding as their main constraint. The report presents preliminary recommendations for public and private sectors, many predicated on further study. These focus on value addition and information sharing on what constitutes value, building of product identity and legally protecting its unique status, and coordination to address costs

About individual differences in vision

In cognition, audition, and somatosensation, performance strongly correlates between different paradigms, which suggests the existence of common factors. In contrast, visual performance in seemingly very similar tasks, such as visual and bisection acuity, are hardly related, i.e., pairwise correlations between performance levels are low even though test-retest reliability is high. Here we show similar results for visual illusions. Consistent with previous findings, we found significant correlations between the illusion magnitude of the Ebbinghaus and Ponzo illusions, but this relationship was the only significant correlation out of 15 further comparisons. Similarly, we found a significant link for the Ponzo illusion with both mental imagery and cognitive disorganization. However, most other correlations between illusions and personality were not significant. The findings suggest that vision is highly specific, i.e., there is no common factor. While this proposal does not exclude strong and stable associations between certain illusions and between certain illusions and personality traits, these associations seem to be the exception rather than the rule. © 2016 Elsevier Lt

Full counting statistics of information content

We review connections between the cumulant generating function of full counting statistics of particle number and the R\'enyi entanglement entropy. We calculate these quantities based on the fermionic and bosonic path-integral defined on multiple Keldysh contours. We relate the R\'enyi entropy with the information generating function, from which the probability distribution function of self-information is obtained in the nonequilibrium steady state. By exploiting the distribution, we analyze the information content carried by a single bosonic particle through a narrow-band quantum communication channel. The ratio of the self-information content to the number of bosons fluctuates. For a small boson occupation number, the average and the fluctuation of the ratio are enhanced.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

The Metaethics of Nursing Codes of Ethics and Conduct

Nursing codes of ethics and conduct are features of professional practice across the world, and in the UK, the regulator has recently consulted on and published a new code. Initially part of a professionalising agenda, nursing codes have recently come to represent a managerialist and disciplinary agenda and nursing can no longer be regarded as a self-regulating profession.This paper argues that codes of ethics and codes of conduct are significantly different in form and function similar to the difference between ethics and law in everyday life. Some codes successfully integrate these two functions within the same document, while others, principally the UK Code, conflate them resulting in an ambiguous document unable to fulfil its functions effectively. The paper analyses the differences between ethical- codes and conduct-codes by discussing titles, authorship, level, scope for disagreement, consequences of transgression, language and finally and possibly most importantly agent-centeredness. It is argued that conduct codes cannot require nurses to be compassionate because compassion involves an emotional response. The concept of kindness provides a plausible alternative for conduct-codes as it is possible to understand it solely in terms of acts. But if kindness is required in conduct-codes, investigation and possible censure follows from its absence. Using examples it is argued that there are at last five possible accounts of the absence of kindness. As well as being potentially problematic for disciplinary panels, difficulty in understanding the features of blameworthy absence of kindness may challenge UK nurses who, following a recently introduced revalidation procedure, are required to reflect on their practice in relation to The Code. It is concluded that closer attention to metaethical concerns by code writers will better support the functions of their issuing organisations

Extreme Ultra-Violet Spectroscopy of the Lower Solar Atmosphere During Solar Flares

The extreme ultraviolet portion of the solar spectrum contains a wealth of diagnostic tools for probing the lower solar atmosphere in response to an injection of energy, particularly during the impulsive phase of solar flares. These include temperature and density sensitive line ratios, Doppler shifted emission lines and nonthermal broadening, abundance measurements, differential emission measure profiles, and continuum temperatures and energetics, among others. In this paper I shall review some of the advances made in recent years using these techniques, focusing primarily on studies that have utilized data from Hinode/EIS and SDO/EVE, while also providing some historical background and a summary of future spectroscopic instrumentation.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to Solar Physics as part of the Topical Issue on Solar and Stellar Flare

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

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02