THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF BGH ON THE NEW YORK STATE DAIRY SECTOR: COMPARATIVE STATIC RESULTS

The price and quantity effects of a forthcoming biotechnology product, bovine growth hormone (bGH), are explored in a simple partial equilibrium model. The model is based on previous theoretical work on technological change but is developed in terms of a sector output. A particular output curve is estimated using data from a random sample of New York State dairy farms. Information on the farm level production effects of bGH is used to shift the output curve and to solve for equilibrium levels of price and output. The model projects the bGH may lead to the exit of 5,400 New York dairy farms and a 20 percent reduction in herd size. Consumers will benefit from an approximately 30 percent drop in milk price. The effect on gradual diffusion of bGH on farm numbers if considered. To accommodate this technology policies encouraging an orderly transfer of resources out of the dairy sector should be examined.Livestock Production/Industries,

Does foraging efficiency vary with colony size in the fairy martin Petrochelidon ariel?

Colonial breeding occurs in a wide range of taxa, however the advantages promoting its evolution and maintenance remain poorly understood. In many avian species, breeding colonies vary by several orders of magnitude and one approach to investigating the evolution of coloniality has been to examine how potential costs and benefits vary with colony size. Several hypotheses predict that foraging efficiency may improve with colony size, through benefits associated with social foraging and information exchange. However, it is argued that competition for limited food resources will also increase with colony size, potentially reducing foraging success. Here we use a number of measures (brood feeding rates, chick condition and survival, and adult condition) to estimate foraging efficiency in the fairy martin Petrochelidon ariel, across a range of colony sizes in a single season (17 colonies, size range 28-139 pairs). Brood provisioning rates were collected from multiple colonies simultaneously using an electronic monitoring system, controlling for temporal variation in environmental conditions. Provisioning rate was correlated with nestling condition, though we found no clear relationship between provisioning rate and colony size for either male or female parents. However, chicks were generally in worse condition and broods more likely to fail or experience partial loss in larger colonies. Moreover, the average condition of adults declined with colony size. Overall, these findings suggest that foraging efficiency declines with colony size in fairy martins, supporting the increased competition hypothesis. However, other factors, such as an increased ectoparasitise load in large colonies or change in the composition of phenotypes with colony size may have also contributed to these patterns.

Information politics, transnational advocacy and education for all

Introduction: Successful advocacy requires research. Advocacy organizations need to gather evidence to show the extent of a particular social problem, the lack of official response to the problem, and solutions that could be fostered from the ground up. The process of gathering information and using it for political advocacy has been termed “information politics” (Keck & Sikkink 1998). In the past two decades, civil society organizations have played an increasingly prominent role in global educational advocacy and governance (Mundy & Murphy 2001; Mundy 2007). Civil society organizations carry out a significant amount of research into the (lack of) progress made on Education for All goals, monitoring and evaluating education policy and practice at local, national and regional levels, and offering alternative approaches to meet EFA targets. Yet little has been done to examine the evidence-gathering process to see what it can tell us about the role of advocacy research in education policy and the wider role of civil society in global educational change. This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of evidence-based advocacy and educational governance. In order to do so, I examine information politics as carried out by two civil society organizations in the Education for All (EFA) movement. One is ActionAid International, a large international development NGO originally based in the UK but now headquartered in Johannesburg. The other is the Asian South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education (ASPBAE), a regional network of education practitioners and activists currently headquartered in Mumbai. I explore one example of information politics carried out by each of my case study organizations: ActionAid’s International Benchmarks on Adult Literacy, and ASPBAE’s Asia South-Pacific Education Watch. My intention here is to shed light on how information is collected and disseminated by advocacy NGOs, and what this tells us about the internal dynamics and strategies of these organizations as well as the wider development education field of which they are a part

Methodologies for studying agricultural markets in developing countries

This report provides some guidelines on the selection of an appropriate methodology for studying the performance of agricultural markets in developing countries, from a public interest perspective. The paper draws on the experience of the Indonesian Rice Marketing Study (RMS), which was undertaken by NRI from 1989-91

Rice marketing in Indonesia: Methodology, results and implications of a research study

There is a continuing trend in developing countries, as elsewhere, to devolve activities which have hitherto been performed by the public sector to the private sector, and to less regulated markets. The marketing of staple foods is no exception to this trend, but it raises important issues about national food security, price stability, and the protection of poor people from price rises which could mean malnutrition or starvation. Rice Marketing in Indonesia describes a research project which explores these issues in depth for a staple food commodity in a large developing country. The research focuses on seasonal rice price formation, on storage and sales decisions by farmers and traders, and on competition and efficiency in marketing channels. The research approach, which involves tracing marketing chains from sample farmers, is likely to be of interest to all those concerned with studying the liberalization of food markets in developing countries

Autonomic service configuration for telecommunication MASs with extended role-based GAIA and JADEx

Autonomie Communications have attracted huge attention recently for the management of telecommunication networks in the European Network Research Community. The purpose of this research is to offer the abilities such as autonomy, scalability, adaptation as well as simplicity for management application in complex networks. The accomplished networks inspired by biological mechanisms or market-based concepts could enable agents to be of intelligence, scalablility, and interoperabliliry in the management functional domains with regards to the large volume requirements from services' fulfillment perspective in decentralized Multi-Agent Systems. In accordance with TMF and FIPA specifications and requirements, the autonomy attributes self-configuring, self-adapting, self-limiting, self-preserving, and self-optimizing are involved into our simulation. Resource allocation requests are bidded for a long session in the multi-unit Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction. This design adopts the software development methodology-GAIA and the framework-JADEx. We have shown multiple service configuration in dynamic network can be nearly optimized by autonomie behaviors via bidding according to business objectives for getting maximum revenues. We conclude this end-to-end approach maintains self-managing capability, easy-to-implement scalability, and more incentively compatible and efficient over other common implementation so that it could achieve the optimal solution to the flexible requirements for the Service Fulfillment for advanced IP networks. © 2005 IEEE

Rapid assessment methods for small farm storage surveys

Farm surveys are often the first step taken in identifying storage problems. As time and money for such work are generally scarce, it is important to be able to make the best use of them to get the information needed. This paper describes some of the specific techniques and experience developed by the Ghana MoFA/UK ODA Larger Grain Borer Project for rapid storage surveys on small-scale farms. It is argued that the following factors can critically contribute to producing more timely and relevant results: • formulation of specific survey objectives which focus on gathering data needed for decision-making. • use of a range of techniques to meet these objectives, including secondary data and key informants, informal surveys, case studies and participatory meetings. • avoidance of unwitting sampling bias, using rapid techniques such as transect village walks to select farmers, along with careful timing of field visits. • methods of sample analysis which can be used in the field, rather than the lab. Field analysis has many benefits including cost, speed, potential for increased sampling, and most importantly the greater participation of farmers and field staff in the analysis and interpretation of results. • use of rapid and flexible techniques of analysis and presentation, in particular mapping. Practical examples of each of these are given