Small-Scale Irrigation and Household Income: Evidences in Southern Tigray, Ethiopia

Agricultural production in Ethiopia is mainly rainfed, which is characterized by its erratic and often inadequate nature. To solve the challenge, it is crucial to shift and expand irrigation agriculture. the aim of this study is to analyze the role of small-scale irrigation on household income improvement in ayba and atsela kebelles of southern Tigray. To achieve its objective, this study used descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, frequency of appearance and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) econometric model. The ATT show that the farm income is highly affected when the smallholder farmers are participated in small-scale irrigated farming. In conclusion, this empirical finding suggests that access to irrigation was improved income of treated households in a significant way. Therefore, to make considerable improvement on household income actions should be taken by household heads, government of Ethiopia, national and international organizations to increase households’ participation in irrigation activities. Keywords: Income, small-scale irrigation, Household DOI: 10.7176/JESD/13-15-03 Publication date:August 31st 202

Exploring the diversity in the impact of colors of rating scales on user's rating behavior

User-generated ratings have become an integral part of data-driven systems, yet they are known to be susceptible to rating bias that can distort the true ratings of users and can subsequently contaminate the effectiveness of the system. Earlier studies have discovered that different characteristics of a rating scale such as granularity, color, neutral point, etc. play a significant role in instigating bias in users' rating behavior. Amongst all, the research works done so far to explore the impact of colors used in rating scales have uncovered significant contradictory patterns of bias in user ratings. This research argues that because of their individuality, users' responses to the influence exerted by the color of the scale are diverse. Personality and culture are known as two consistent representatives of a person's individuality. Yet no attempt has been made to explore the diversity in individuals' responses to the influence of color of rating scales from the perspective of their personality and culture. In addition to it, while investigating the impact of color, the existing research works employed rating scales varying in multiple characteristics other than colors and consequently failed to capture the sole impact of color on users' rating behavior. This research addresses the problem by providing new empirical information about the impact of color-coded rating scales on users' rating behavior. A within-subject study was conducted to collect participants' responses on a demographic and a personality assessment questionnaire and their ratings on different products. The result shows that, extroverts tend to provide biased ratings in star-based scales with contrasting color combinations. On the other hand, collectivists exhibit a tendency to provide biased ratings under the influence of star-based and emoji-based scales with contrasting color combinations. The analysis also revealed some significant directions on how extroverts and collectivists adjust their ratings due to bias. Precisely, taking a personality and culture based approach can help to gain a thorough understanding of the impact of color-coded rating scales on users' rating behavior

Planning in Self-Planned Informal Cities

Post-colonial urban informality is subject to binary interpretations, entrenching or inverting existing practices. There is a renewed attention in urban studies literature to view cities as self-organising systems rather than as an outcome of a top-down hierarchical planning process. With case studies from Khulna city, Bangladesh, the argument presented in this paper reiterates the self-organising system theory where the built-environment is a juxtaposition and spatial negotiation of numerous (micro)informal planning organisations. Land-owner association, housing societies, private land developers, mosque committees, local ward counsellors, young environmental activists, or even individual actors are the true (micro)planners anddecision-makers who negotiate everyday spatial arrangement and service provision of post-colonial cities. Such negotiations and arrangements are not necessarily responses to planning failure, but are democratic, aligned to stakeholders’ aspirations, and testify the need to incorporate such inputs into the planning code. I then argue, that, qualitative negotiations and arrangements, as such informality,need to be incorporated as planning rule in cities of urban informality

New Evolving Fuzzy System Algorithms Using Dynamic Constraint

An information granule has to be translated into significant frameworks of granular computing to realize interpretability-accuracy tradeoff. These two objectives are in conflict and constitute an open problem. Evolving information granules is a significant concept of granular computing which consider coarser partition (or lower granule i.e. higher error) to fine partition (or higher granule i.e. lower error). While this error reducing granular framework is considered, interpretability constraint is the factor to improve the tradeoff between interpretability and accuracy. Furthermore, overfitting and underfitting criteria are noteworthy to be considered while evolving process continues. In addition, the stability-plasticity tradeoff is another significant consideration to design a granular framework in order to find a consistent and up-to-date fuzzy information granule method. A new operational framework namely evolving fuzzy system (EFS) is developed in this research work, which ensures a compromise between interpretability and reasonable accuracy. Three models are designed based on EFS namely, evolving structural fuzzy system (ESFS), evolving output-context fuzzy system (EOCFS) and evolving information granule (EIG). The evolving information granule is initiated with the first information granule by translating the knowledge of the entire output domain. The initial information granule is considered as an underfitting state with a high approximation error. Then, the EFS starts evolving in the information granule by partitioning the output (or input) domain and uses a dynamic constraint to maintain semantic interpretability in the output (or input) contexts. The outcome on the synthetic and real-world data using the EFS shows the effectiveness of the proposed system, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The EFS needs less number of rules (i.e. high interpretable) and low error (i.e. high accuracy) with respect to the existing methods. For example, if the proposed EIG method is applied to the Nakanishi‘s nonlinear system then four fuzzy rules and 0.142 mean square error (MSE) are found. Furthermore, the EIG outperforms if compared with the existing methods. The important criterion in the EFS is to determine the prominent distinction (output or input context) and realize the distinct information granule that depicts the semantics at the fuzzy partition level. The EFS tends to evolve toward the lower error region and realizes the effective rule base by avoiding overfitting. Furthermore, the evolving overfitting index and uncertainty controller of the self-adaptive process are dynamically attained from past and current knowledge. Therefore, effective rule base is the balanced fuzzy model of the approximated system. Within the proposed three models (ESFS, EOCFS and EIG), EIG has the significant ability to tradeoff between interpretability and accuracy, while the proposed ESFS method shows the highly interpretable granular framework which also realizes the interpretability-accuracy tradeoff

Socio-Economic, Cultural and Family Factors Causing Juvenile Delinquency and Its Consequences in Bangladesh: A Look for Way Out

One of the most severe problems irritating current societies in different countries of the world is juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquency is a social disease for any country and the problem is more horrendous in Bangladesh. It is very much alarming for any country as it ruin the life of the youth generation of a country. As a poor and densely populated country of the third world it is very disastrous for Bangladesh as it has direct effects not only on the victim of the crime but also on their family, society and country. Like many other countries of the world the trend of juvenile delinquency is rapidly increasing in Bangladesh. Due to various socio-economic, cultural and family factors both boys and girls of teenagers in Bangladesh are getting involved in different types of anti-social activities like drug addiction, drug trafficking, eve-teasing, sexual offences, extortion, swipe, smuggling, criminalized politics and sometimes even involved in murder and several others felonious actions. The main object of this study is to explore the different socio-economic, cultural and family factors that cause juvenile delinquency in Bangladesh and its impacts on the family, society and country and also to provide an avenue to eliminate juvenile delinquency in Bangladesh. This study is basically qualitative in nature where data have been collected from secondary source only. For collecting data various national and international journals, books, news paper writing etc. are analyzed

Ongoing WTO Negotiations and Bangladesh’s Interests: Insights from CPD’s October 2002 Tracking Mission to Geneva

The paper is based on the participation of CPD delegation in Geneva and gives an insight into the particular issue of priority interest to Bangladesh in the context of the ongoing negotiations including GATS, AoA, TRIPS and Market Access.The paper provides an understanding about the important implications of the ongoing Doha Development Round negotiations for Bangladesh and other least developed countries (LDCs) both in terms of accessing the opportunities emanating from the evolving global trading system, and also from the perspective of addressing the attendant challenges.WTO-General Council, Tracking Mission, Geneva, Bangladesh

QoS Design Consideration for Enterprise and Provider’s Network at Ingress and Egress Router for VoIP protocols

Compliance with the Service Level Agreement (SLA) metric is a major challenge in a Multiprotocol Label Switching Virtual Private Network (MPLS VPN) because mandatory models must be maintained on both sides of the MPLS VPN in order to achieve end-to-end service levels. The end-to-end service of an MPLS VPN can be degraded owing to various issues such as distributed denial of service (DDoS), and Random Early Detection (RED) that prevents congestion and differentiates between legitimate and illegitimate user traffic. In this study, we propose a centralized solution that uses a SLA Violation Detector (SLAVD) and intrusion detection to prevent SLA violation

Redescription of Lepismatophila cruszi Kundu and Haldar, 1984 (Apicomplexa : Sporozoea) from Chondracis rosea (Order: Orthoptera)

This study describes external characteristics and life history of a species of cephaline gregarine (Apicomplexa: Sporozoea) of the genus Lepismatophila [1], from Chondracis rosea (Order: Orthoptera)of Manipur, India. Diagnosis characteristic of the species the epimerite a simple symmetrical knob, Protomerite present throughout trophozoite stage, Solitary nature of Sporadins, Cyst without ducts dehiscence by simple rupture and Spores in uncoiling chains, ellipsoidal, boat shaped, without any filamentous process are discussed. And the morphological details of the different stages supported with photomicrographs are also provided