Weaknesses in Institutional Organization: Explaining the Dismal Performance of Kenya's Coffee Cooperatives

In this paper, we use the experience of Kenya's failing Coffee Cooperatives to show that, under certain circumstances, membership based organizations can give rise to perverse incentives that undermine the benefits of organizing and lead to a reduction in member productivity and welfare. We identify certain features of the institutional environment underlying Kenya's coffee cooperatives that facilitate rent-seeking behavior. The lack of a formal regulatory structure with credible enforcement mechanisms, the presence of informal electoral practices conducive to vote-buying, and the legal support for local monopsonies that facilitates exploitive pricing all contribute to the dismal performance of Kenya's coffee cooperatives. Using a data set of more than 200 coffee farmers representing nine cooperatives, we find a statistically significant relationship between cooperatives empirically determined to be corrupt and high levels of technical inefficiency in coffee production among their members.Agricultural Cooperatives, Decentralization, Rent-Seeking, Technical Inefficiency, Agribusiness, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, D7, Q13, Q18, Z13,

Political Micro-Targeting in Kenya: An Analysis of the Legality of Data-Driven Campaign Strategies under the Data Protection Act

oai:ojs2.strathmore.edu:article/61The 2013 general election marked the entry of data-driven campaigning into Kenyan politics as political parties begun collecting and storing voter data. More sophisticated techniques were deployed in 2017 as politicians retained the services of data analytics firms such as Cambridge Analytica, accused of digital colonialism and undermining democracies. It is alleged that political parties engaged in regular targeting and more intrusive micro-targeting, facilitated by the absence of a data protection legal framework.The promulgation of the Data Protection Act, 2019, ostensibly remedied this gap. This paper analyses whether, and to what extent, political parties can rely on the same–or similar– regular targeting and micro-targeting techniques in subsequent elections. While regular targeting differs from micro-targeting as the latter operates at a more granular level, both comprise of three steps- collecting a voter’s personal data, profiling them, and sending out targeted messages. This paper considers the legality of each of these steps in turn. It finds that going forward, such practices will likely require the consent of the data subject. However, the Act provides for several exceptions which political parties could abuse to circumvent this requirement. There are also considerable loopholes that allow open access to voter data in the electoral list as well as the personal data of the members of a rival political party. The efficacy of the Data Protection Act will largely rest on whether the Data Protection Commissioner will interpret it progressively and hold political parties to account

Digital Technologies and Election Management in Zimbabwe: Pseudo-democratic Transition and Contorted Delirium?

This article examines the extent to which the adoption of biometric voter registration in election management in Zimbabwe has appeared a phantom on the horizon regarding democratisation. While the emergence of digitalised election management brought with it expectations of credible electoral processes and outcomes in a country with a history of rampant electoral malpractices in manually managed processes, the phenomenon is yet to yield positive results regarding democratisation in Zimbabwe. Despite the shift from manually managed electoral process to a digitalised approach, the quagmire of irregularities has persisted in Zimbabwean elections. This is largely attributable to the trajectory of governance in Zimbabwe which appears to militate against the exploitation of the opportunities presented by digital technologies in democratising elections in the county. This said, the conclusion drawn from this article is that the configuration of political power, particularly issues of the breach of the democratic principles of separation of power and separation of personnel, are disingenuous to technology-induced democratic transition to credible elections. Secondary research was used to obtain data for this article as data were gathered from books, journal articles, newspaper articles and institutional reports.&nbsp

Recurrent 3D Pose Sequence Machines

3D human articulated pose recovery from monocular image sequences is very challenging due to the diverse appearances, viewpoints, occlusions, and also the human 3D pose is inherently ambiguous from the monocular imagery. It is thus critical to exploit rich spatial and temporal long-range dependencies among body joints for accurate 3D pose sequence prediction. Existing approaches usually manually design some elaborate prior terms and human body kinematic constraints for capturing structures, which are often insufficient to exploit all intrinsic structures and not scalable for all scenarios. In contrast, this paper presents a Recurrent 3D Pose Sequence Machine(RPSM) to automatically learn the image-dependent structural constraint and sequence-dependent temporal context by using a multi-stage sequential refinement. At each stage, our RPSM is composed of three modules to predict the 3D pose sequences based on the previously learned 2D pose representations and 3D poses: (i) a 2D pose module extracting the image-dependent pose representations, (ii) a 3D pose recurrent module regressing 3D poses and (iii) a feature adaption module serving as a bridge between module (i) and (ii) to enable the representation transformation from 2D to 3D domain. These three modules are then assembled into a sequential prediction framework to refine the predicted poses with multiple recurrent stages. Extensive evaluations on the Human3.6M dataset and HumanEva-I dataset show that our RPSM outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches for 3D pose estimation.Comment: Published in CVPR 201

Penilaian Sistem Informasi Akademik Menggunakan Model Cobit 4.1

Lembaga XYZ telah membuat sistem informasi akademik agar proses akademik berjalan lancar, namun selama ini belum ada penilaian pada sistem yang telah dibuat, apakah sistem itu sudah sesuai dengan standar pengelolaan IT atau belum. Karena itu penelitian ini menggunakan salah satu standar tata kelola TI yakni Cobit. Cobit Apabila tata kelola TI sesuai dengan standar yang diakui, maka pengelolaan dianggap layak dipercaya, Sehingga akan meningkatkan kepercayaan pengguna.. Adapun pendekatan yang digunakan adalah kualitatif dan kuantitatif. Pendekatan kualitatif dalam penelitian ini adalah data yang diperoleh melalui pengamatan (observasi) dan didasarkan pada penafsiran pemahaman peneliti secara subjektif. Hasil penilaian pada sistem yang diperoleh berada pada level 3 (defined). Artinya pemahaman pemakai (user) dalam menggunakan sistem belum merata dan terdapat masih ada kebijakan tata kelola IT yang belum lengkap

Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: Testing to Protect Future Generations

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are a class of chemicals that interferes with human hormone processes. EDCs are omnipresent: pesticides, plastics, and drugs, among other common chemicals, all demonstrate endocrine-disrupting properties. Scientific studies have demonstrated the frightening effect EDCs have on human health, for adults but also particularly for fetuses while they develop in utero. Given these health concerns, Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, which requires the EPA to test pesticides for their endocrine-disrupting properties. Unfortunately this testing, fifteen years later, has still not begun. Additionally, pesticides are only one subcategory of EDCs. Therefore this Note argues that citizens should bring suit under the Administrative Procedure Act to compel EPA to complete testing of pesticides for endocrinedisrupting properties and extend testing to non-pesticide EDCs, all with the goal of furthering effective regulation of EDCs

Sistem Penilaian Kinerja Pengabdian Kepada Masyarakat

Perguruan tinggi diharapkan mampu memanfaatkan IPTEK yang dimiliki oleh sumber daya manusianya dalam hal memajukan kesejahteraan masyarakat dan mencerdaskan kehidupan bangsa melalui kegiatan pengabdian kepada masyarakat. Setiap perguruan tinggi harus dapat memenuhui Standar Nasional Pengabdian kepada Masyarakat, yaitu kriteria minimal tentang sistem pengabdian kepada masyarakat. Upaya pemerintah untuk memudahkan proses pelaporan kinerja pengabdian adalah dengan membuat sistem informasi penelitian dan pengabdian kepada masyarakat (SIMLITABMAS). Pada sistem SIMLITABMAS RISTEKDIKTI memberikan fasilitas untuk pelaporan kinerja pengabdian secara daring (online). Universitas Muslim Indoensia (UMI) juga telah membuat sistem yang serupa yaitu Sistem Informasi Penelitian dan Pengabdian (SIMLITABDIMAS), namun sistem yang dikembangkan UMI belum memberikan fasilitas laporan kinerja pengabdian. Oleh sebab itu diperlukan pengembangan sistem untuk fasilitas pelaporan kinerja pengabdian internal Universitas Muslim Indonesia. Pembuatan sistem informasi menggunakan bahasa pemrograman PHP, JavaScript dan CSS. Software editor yang akan digunakan adalah Notepad++. Perancang sistem disesuaikan dengan manual operasioal pelaporan kinerja pengabdian dosen yang disusun oleh kemenristekdikti. Hasil pengabdian adalah telah membuat sistem pelaporan luaran pengabdian dosen internal Universitas Muslim Indonesia

Perbandingan Metode SAW dan TOPSIS pada Kasus UMKM

Dalam pengambilan keputusan terhadap masalah berdasarkan sebuah analisa pribadi yang subjektif tanpa menggunakan metode tertentu, biasanya memiliki tingkat kesalahan yang tinggi sehingga hal ini akan membahayakan pengambilan keputusan yang berujung pada penyesalan. Ada banyak metode Decision Support System (DSS) yang dapat digunakan untuk proses pengambilan keputusan, namun 2 metode yang sering digunakan untuk melakukan proses pengambilan keputusan yakni metode Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) dan Technique For Others Referencean by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Karena itu untuk mengetahui yang terbaik dari 2 metode tersebut, maka dilakukan Perubahan pembobotan dan hasil pengujian diperoleh kesamaan dalam proses pengembilan keputusan (pemecahan masalah). Sehingga dalam pengambilan keputusan dapat menggunakan salah satu metode SAW atau TOPSIS. Perangkingan 2 metode tersebut akan menentukan lokasi yang strategis untuk meningkatkan omzet USAha percetakan (UMKM)