Impediments to Employment and Enterprise Diversification: Evidence from Small-Scale Farms in Poland

In an environment of low returns to agricultural activities and slow structural change, both employment and enterprise diversification have been presented as possible strategies for raising the incomes of farm households. This paper focuses on the barriers to taking up off-farm employment and establishing new non-agricultural enterprises. Factor and cluster analysis are applied to a data-set of individual farms in Poland in order to identify groups of households facing similar constraints and profile policy measures that are most likely to assist diversification. The majority of non-diversifiers are unlikely to become pluriactive in the near future due to a combination of age, a desire to concentrate on farming and remoteness. Farm households that are willing to diversify are characterised by the lowest agricultural incomes. For these households, a poor endowment of human and physical capital is a major constraint.Poland, diversification, off-farm employment, non-agricultural enterprises, cluster analysis, Industrial Organization, Labor and Human Capital, R0, Q12,

Non-Agricultural Diversification of Farm Households and Corporate Farms in Central Europe

Consumer/Household Economics, Farm Management,

AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT AND THE DIVERSIFICATION OF FARM HOUSEHOLDS IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Survey evidence from three Central European Countries (Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) is analysed to identify the degree of non-agricultural farm diversification and the factors facilitating or impeding it in individual farms. The effect of diversification on rural job creation is investigated. The results indicate that the level of diversification is relatively small and enterprise diversification by farmers is unlikely to generate sufficient new jobs and solve the problem of high rural unemployment. The attempt to transpose the Western European model of agricultural diversification to the acceding countries via the SAPARD programme is questionable, as non-farm centric rural policies appear to be more appropriate.Farm households, non-agricultural diversification, job creation, Central Europe, Consumer/Household Economics,

Designing stem cell niches for differentiation and self-renewal

Mesenchymal stem cells, characterized by their ability to differentiate into skeletal tissues and self-renew, hold great promise for both regenerative medicine and novel therapeutic discovery. However, their regenerative capacity is retained only when in contact with their specialized microenvironment, termed the stem cell niche. Niches provide structural and functional cues that are both biochemical and biophysical, stem cells integrate this complex array of signals with intrinsic regulatory networks to meet physiological demands. Although, some of these regulatory mechanisms remain poorly understood or difficult to harness with traditional culture systems. Biomaterial strategies are being developed that aim to recapitulate stem cell niches, by engineering microenvironments with physiological-like niche properties that aim to elucidate stem cell-regulatory mechanisms, and to harness their regenerative capacity in vitro. In the future, engineered niches will prove important tools for both regenerative medicine and therapeutic discoveries

The Landscape of Modern Theses

Central to current debates about the future of graduate education are calls for models of scholarship attendant to new labor markets. These debates will be contextualized with the argument that we must innovate traditional modes of scholarly engagement in an effort to supply graduate students with important skills for the 21st-century workplace. The topography of current developments in alternative theses and dissertations will be mapped, providing an overview of contemporary models for graduate education with an eye toward future possibilities for higher education

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Oglala People, 1841-1879: A Political History\u3c/i\u3e By Catherine Price

This book is a thorough history of official relations between the Oglala Lakota and the US Government during the mid-nineteenth century, with a special eye to the impact of these relations on the political structures that had been characteristic of Oglala society before significant white contact. The book\u27s structure is straightforward: an introductory chapter draws on early ethnographic data and related scholarship to layout the political anatomy of Oglala society in the early nineteenth century, while the following six chapters cover Oglala-white relations from 1841 to 1879. Each of the six historical chapters not only recounts important events but also interprets the actions of Oglala groups and individuals through the political lens provided by the first chapter. The book quite simply makes new sense of Oglala actions usually left under-interpreted or dismissed as capricious in standard accounts. My own research on US Government strategies for bringing the Oglalas under control during the 1870s would have benefited substantially had Price\u27s book been available a few years earlier. Previous scholarship on this period has established that the US Government\u27s insistence on singling out Red Cloud and other head chiefs as representatives and rulers of their peoples resulted from fundamental misunderstandings of Oglala political life. However, many scholars (myself included) have contented themselves with the assertion that Plains Indian societies were simply more decentralized and democratic than Government officials assumed, perhaps going so as far as to mention that akicitas and warrior societies were a significant locus of power. We have thus perpetuated the misleading impression that· the failure of head chiefs to control their societies was basically equivalent to a lack of political order. Price shows that a quite complicated but nevertheless stable and resilient political structure accounted for what appeared to non-Oglalas as unpredictability and disorder. Unlike Western political structures, Oglala political authority was situational, shifting from one individual or group to another depending on whether the band was engaged in hunting, war, ceremonial activities, or facing a crisis. While the patterns of frequency with which different groups or individuals held temporary power changed as contact with whites became more common, the flexible structure within which the exercise of power was assigned did not (at least during the period with which Price is concerned). This book is interesting in its own right and constitutes a valuable enrichment of our understanding of the period

Current approaches for modulation of the nanoscale interface in the regulation of cell behavior

Regulation of cell behavior in response to nanoscale features has been the focus of much research in recent years and the successful generation of nanoscale features capable of mimicking the natural nanoscale interface has been of great interest in the field of biomaterials research. In this review, we discuss relevant nanofabrication techniques and how they are combined with bioengineering applications to mimic the natural extracellular matrix (ECM) and create valuable nanoscale interfaces