Recent Trends in Employment and Unemployment: Assessing the impact of the economic downturn on part-time farmers

working paperThis paper provides an overview of contemporary trends in national employment and unemployment before providing a synopsis of the regional distribution of unemployment and how it has changed in recent years. Using Quarterly National Household Survey data (QNHS) the analysis then focuses on a sub-group within the QNHS data who report employment in Agriculture, Forestry or Fishing as a secondary occupation. This latter group derive the majority of their income off-farm and fall firmly within the 'part-time' farming category. Exploring changes in employment patterns amongst this group not only highlights the impact of the recession on farm-based families but also reveals some of the ongoing consequences of the restructuring of Ireland’s rural economy. The paper concludes by considering the implications of these findings with regard to demand for state supports to farmers

Supply Chains Linking Food SMEs in Lagging Rural Regions in Ireland

End of project reportThis report reflects the Irish contribution to a 3-year EU-funded research project, SUPPLIERS, which was concerned with the development, innovation, competitiveness and sustainability of food SMEs in lagging rural regions(LRRs) of the EU and Poland. It summarises the results of the research conducted in Ireland, evaluates these findings and makes recommendations to benefit food SMEs located in Ireland’s LRRs. Two regions were selected for study in Ireland. These were the West, comprising counties Galway, Mayo and Roscommon, and the Northwest, comprising counties Donegal, Sligo and Leitrim. Both are classified as Objective 1 regions reflecting their predominantly rural character, economic disadvantage and relative remoteness from urban centres. Three food products were selected for detailed study in each region. Products selected in the West were mushrooms, farmed salmon and speciality foods and, in the Northwest, organic produce, farmed shellfish and prepared consumer foods. This product range encompassed a range of chains from local to international, integrated to fragmented, direct to indirect, providing a basis for comparison and evaluation of different chain structures. This summary report concentrates on the results of four surveys carried out over the course of the study. Producers, intermediaries, commercial customers and support institutions were surveyed.This publication derives from the EU funded project on ‘Supply chains linking food SMEs in Europe’s lagging rural regions’ (SUPPLIERS, QLK5-CT-2000- 00841

Occupational fatalities amongst farm workers in Ireland, 1992 – 2008

working paperBackground: Whilst occupational fatalities amongst farm workers have been studied internationally little research has been published concerning farm fatalities or the demography farm fatalities in Ireland. Aims 1) To establish the incidence of farm fatalities during the 1992 – 2009 period in Ireland, 2) to explore the changing age profile of those experiencing fatal injuries on farms in Ireland. Methods: An official dataset containing the details of every fatal farm accident during the 1992 – 2009 period is used to evaluate changes in the number and age profile of farm fatalities in Ireland. Results: There were 304 deaths on farms during the 1992 – 2009 period in Ireland. The average number of annual fatalities is declining having fallen by 16% from 18 to 16 per year during this time. The fatality rate has however increased from 15 to 22 per 100,000 workers. This has been driven by a reduction in the number of workers employed on farms and, it is hypothesised, rapid ageing of the farm workforce. The demographic profile of those killed on farms changed significantly over the period. There are fewer deaths amongst younger cohorts. Older farmers, those over 55 years of age, now account for the vast majority of all fatal accidents. Conclusion: These findings highlight the changing nature of fatal farm incidents over the 1993 – 2009 period in Ireland. The increasing number of fatalities amongst older farmers suggests that Ireland’s Farm Safety Partnership needs to place greater emphasis of raising awareness amongst older farmers of fatality risks

A spatial analysis of agriculture in the Republic of Ireland, 1991 to 2000

End of year projectBy linking farm census and administrative data from the CSO and DAF to a geographic information system and analysing the mapping output, this project shows the continued broad division of farming in the state into marginal farming areas in the north and west and more commercial farming areas in the south and east. While this division was compounded by the 1992 CAP reforms, and commercial farming became more spatially concentrated over the 1990s, the influence of the development in the non-farm economy, particularly in peri-urban rural areas across the state, provided local drivers of change that encouraged enterprise substitution to beef production, the farming system most readily combined by farm holders with another job. A full report on the mapping output will be produced in a forthcoming publication (see publications list)

Postponing Maternity in Ireland

As in many other developed countries, Ireland in recent decades has experienced a postponement of maternity. In this paper we consider the main trends in this phenomenon, considering changes in first and later births separately. We adapt the theoretical model due to Walker (1995) to incorporate a declining marginal return to experience to provide a human capital/career planning explanation for this postponement. We estimate a hazard model based upon the 1994 Living in Ireland Survey to empirically test this model. The career-planning hypothesis was found to hold. However an assumption about perfect capital markets failed indicating the impact of an income effect on the timing of maternity. The model also identified the importance of cohort differences in the timing of marriage in explaining much of the inter-cohort specific differences in the timing of maternity.labour markets, fertility

Point-set algorithms for pattern discovery and pattern matching in music

An algorithm that discovers the themes, motives and other perceptually significant repeated patterns in a musical work can be used, for example, in a music information retrieval system for indexing a collection of music documents so that it can be searched more rapidly. It can also be used in software tools for music analysis and composition and in a music transcription system or model of music cognition for discovering grouping structure, metrical structure and voice-leading structure. In most approaches to pattern discovery in music, the data is assumed to be in the form of strings. However, string-based methods become inefficient when one is interested in finding highly embellished occurrences of a query pattern or searching for polyphonic patterns in polyphonic music. These limitations can be avoided by representing the music as a set of points in a multidimensional Euclidean space. This point-set pattern matching approach allows the maximal repeated patterns in a passage of polyphonic music to be discovered in quadratic time and all occurrences of these patterns to be found in cubic time. More recently, Clifford et al. (2006) have shown that the best match for a query point set within a text point set of size n can be found in O(n log n) time by incorporating randomised projection, uniform hashing and FFT into the point-set pattern matching approach. Also, by using appropriate heuristics for selecting compact maximal repeated patterns with many non-overlapping occurrences, the point-set pattern discovery algorithms described here can be adapted for data compression. Moreover, the efficient encodings generated when this compression algorithm is run on music data seem to resemble the motivic-thematic analyses produced by human experts

Teaching with a Humanist

This paper is a report about a team-taught course at San Francisco State University, and what the author learned having taught it over 11 years with faculty in the humanities. As part of an interdisciplinary curriculum called NEXA, which explored the boundaries between science and the humanities, the course revealed to the author several ways mathematics and humanities pedagogies can reciprocally learn from each other and emphasize similar goals

Using point-set compression to classify folk songs

Thirteen different compression algorithms were used to calculate the normalized compression distances (NCDs) between pairs of tunes in the Annotated Corpus of 360 Dutch folk songs from the collection Onder de groene linde. These NCDs were then used in conjunction with the 1-nearest-neighbour algorithm and leave-one-out cross-validation to classify the 360 melodies into tune families. The classifications produced by the algorithms were compared with a ground-truth classification prepared by expert musicologists. Twelve of the thirteen compressors used in the ex-periment were based on the discovery of translational equivalence classes (TECs) of maximal translatable patterns (MTPs) in point-set representations of the melodies. The twelve algorithms con-sisted of four variants of each of three basic algorithms, COSI-ATEC, SIATECCOMPRESS and Forth’s algorithm. The main difference between these algorithms is that COSIATEC strictly partitions the input point set into TEC covered sets, whereas the TEC covered sets in the output of SIATECCOMPRESS and Forth’s algorithm may share points. The general-purpose compressor, bzip2, was used as a baseline against which the point-set com-pression algorithms were compared. The highest classification success rate of 77–84 % was achieved by COSIATEC, followed by 60–64 % for Forth’s algorithm and then 52–58 % for SIATE-CCOMPRESS. When the NCDs were calculated using bzip2, the success rate was only 12.5%. The results demonstrate that the effectiveness of NCD for measuring similarity between folk-songs for classification purposes is highly dependent upon the actual compressor chosen. Furthermore, it seems that compres-sors based on finding maximal repeated patterns in point-set rep-resentations of music show more promise for NCD-based mu-sic classification than general-purpose compressors designed for compressing text strings. 1