Supply Response of Indian Farmers - Pre and Post Reforms

Supply response to price changes is likely to increase with the increasing liberalization of the agricultural sector. Past studies revealed weak supply response for Indian agriculture. There are no recent reliable estimates to see if the response has improved after the economic reforms introduced in early 90s in India. This study estimates supply response for major crops during pre and post reform periods using Nerlovian adjustment cum adaptive expectation model. Estimation is based on dynamic panel data approach with pooled cross section - time series data across states for India. The standard procedure is to use area as an indicator of supply due to the reason that area decision is totally under the control of farmers. Moreover using supply conceals some variations in area and yield if they move in the opposite directions. In this paper, it is hypothesized that acreage response underestimates supply response and farmers respond to price incentives partly through intensive application of other inputs given the same area, which is reflected in yield. Acreage and yield response functions were estimated and the supply response estimates were derived from these two responses. The significant feature of the specification used in the study is both main and substitutable crops are jointly estimated by a single equation by introducing varying slope coefficients to capture different responses. As expected, foodgrains reveal less response than non-foodgrains. The study found no significant difference in supply elasticities between pre and post reform periods for majority of crops. It raises questions such as whether the constraints are properly identified by the policies or if the impact of reform is yet to be felt in order to make a prominent impact on response parameters. In this study, infrastructural variables other than irrigation could not be introduced due to lack of information for a long time series. Results confirmed that farmers respond to price incentives equally by more intensive application of non-land inputs. Further analysis of the reasons for little impact of reforms on the responses is awaited.dynamic panel model, supply elasticity, acreage and yield response.

Community dependence on non-timber forest products: A Household analysis and its implication for forest conservation

This study explores the factors determining the dependence of local people on protected area of forest based on household analysis of a Protected Area from Kerala. The findings confirm the hypothesis that alternative income source would greatly reduce the dependence and hence ease the conflict between local people interests and forest management in conservation activities. This study raised certain issues in the institutional mechanism of marketing and management of non-wood forest products. The price spread highlighted the large difference between sellers (gatherer's) price and final retail price. Ensuring a fair share to the local people in the final value added and bringing together traditional knowledge of the villager and the commercial ventures making the final product for efficient sharing of benefits would act as incentives for the gatherers to extract the product in a sustainable way and also to cooperate willingly in the conservation activities.forest products, sustainable management, community livelihood

Community Dependence on Non-timber Forest Products - A Household Analysis and its Implication for Forest Conservation

This study explores the factors determining the dependence of local people on protected area of forest based on household analysis of a Protected Area from Kerala. The findings confirm the hypothesis that alternative income source would greatly reduce the dependence and hence ease the conflict between local people interests and forest management in conservation activities. This study raised certain issues in the institutional mechanism of marketing and management of non-wood forest products. The price spread highlighted the large difference between sellers (gatherers) price and final retail price. Ensuring a fair share to the local people in the final value added and bringing together traditional knowledge of the villager and the commercial ventures making the final product for efficient sharing of benefits would act as incentives for the gatherers to extract the product in a sustainable way and also to cooperate willingly in the conservation activities.forest products, sustainable management, community livelihood

Psychology of learning for teachers : preparing for classroom inquiry

This paper is a plea to enable prospective teachers to use the conceptual frameworks, tools and approaches that the discipline of psychology has to offer, so as to understand how children learn. In the course of reviewing Michael Howe's classic book (1999/1984), I will make a distinction between gaining knowledge of theories of learning as mere information, and a deeper “understanding” that allows teachers to research learning in the context of their own classrooms. I will argue that initial teacher education programmes should shift focus from teaching theories of learning as a product to be assimilated, to understanding the processes used to generate these theories

Fear Conditioning and Reconsolidation-Blockade in the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Emergency Responders

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

Reevaluating Standard Analyses of Comparison: The View from Malayalam

In this paper, I will argue for an alternative analysis where both the standard marker than and the comparative marker more encode comparative semantics. The evidence for this comes from Malayalam comparatives. Malayalam lacks an adjectival category and uses complex property concept expressions to encode adjectival meaning (Menon 2013, Menon and Pancheva forthcoming). In the absence of adjectives, nominal and verbal comparatives are formed using two different kinds of comparatives. The comparative marker is an adnomial degree modifier along the lines of ‘in addition to’, ‘in excess of’. The comparative semantics is encoded in the semantically non-vacuous than which functions as a quantifier domain adverbial (similar in spirit to Schwarzschild 2014) whereby it restricts the domain of the degree quantifier more.

Exploring the Bilingual Advantage in Executive Control: Using Goal Maintenance and Expectancies

Previous research has shown that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes such as inhibitory control, task switching and divided attention. The two studies presented in this dissertation investigated possible mechanisms underlying this bilingual advantage in executive control by examining the role of expectancies and goal maintenance in monolingual and bilingual younger (30 to 40 years) and older adults (60 to 80 years). In Chapter 2, the fadeout paradigm (Mayr & Liebscher, 2001) was used to examine differences in the ability to disengage from an irrelevant task cue. Testing began with single task blocks of shape and colour classifications presented separately, followed by a task switching block in which the two tasks alternated randomly. On trial 49, one of the tasks became irrelevant, leaving only a single task to perform. The critical variable was the point at which participants performance reflected this change by examining the number of trials required to return to single task block speed. Results showed that both younger and older bilinguals returned to single task block speeds sooner than monolinguals. The results were interpreted as showing that bilinguals were better able to use task cues to improve task performance and that outsourcing control to task cues may be beneficial. In Chapter 3, a dual modality classification paradigm was used to determine the speed at which two tasks could be executed at the same time as a means of measuring the ability to sustain task goals. The task required participants to simultaneously respond manually to visual stimuli and verbally to auditory stimuli. Results revealed that younger and older bilinguals showed smaller costs in responding to two tasks whereas monolinguals experienced larger delays in making their responses. Proportion analysis of dual task costs and pairs of responses revealed a bilingual advantage and did not show any age-related increases in costs. The results were interpreted as demonstrating the strength in goal maintenance in bilinguals, allowing them to establish a task goal, control interference from stimulus pairings in order to uphold the goal, and to manage multiple streams of information, and these abilities are sustained in aging

Ocular Side Effects of Hydroxychloroquine used in the treatment of Autoimmune Disease

Hydroxychloroquine is a widely used antimalarial drug, used in the treatment of autoimmune disease. Even though toxicity due to this is rare, it is widely studied because of the irreversible vision loss it causes. This study was done to assess the ocular effects of hydroxychloroquine used in the treatment of autoimmune disease and to assess the dosage and duration at which the side effects occur and to find the resolution status of ocular lesion. 200 eyes of 100 patients, who were diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis/systemic lupus erythematosus, on HCQ treatment for a duration of more than 7 years, referred from dermatology and rheumatology department were included in the study. The study was done in Stanley Medical College. Our study found out that 13% of patients out of 100 developed ocular manifestations which increased in incidence after prolonged duration of treatment. The incidence of bull’s eye maculopathy was found to be 2.4% (in 7-10year duration) and 5.5% (more than 10year duration). The incidence of side effects increased when the dose is taken as a higher daily dose, more duration and presence of kidney disease was found to be a significant risk factor. Out of the 13 patients, on cessation of treatment 10 patients showed stable course where 2 patients showed worsening and one needed to be followed up

Multi-resolution dental image registration based on genetic algorithm

The Automated Dental Identification System (ADIS) is a Post Mortem Dental Identification System. This thesis presents dental image registration, required for the preprocessing steps of the image comparison component of ADIS. We proposed a multi resolution dental image registration based on genetic algorithms. The main objective of this research is to develop techniques for registration of extracted subject regions of interest with corresponding reference regions of interest.;We investigated and implemented registration using two multi resolution techniques namely image sub sampling and wavelet decomposition. Multi resolution techniques help in the reduction of search data since initial registration is carried at lower levels and results are updated as the levels of resolutions increase. We adopted edges as image features that needed to be aligned. Affine transformations were selected to transform the subject dental region of interest to achieve better alignment with the reference region of interest. These transformations are known to capture complex image distortions. The similarity between subject and reference image has been computed using Oriented Hausdorff Similarity measure that is robust to severe noise and image degradations. A genetic algorithm was adopted to search for the best transformation parameters that give maximum similarity score.;Testing results show that the developed registration algorithm yielded reasonable results in accuracy for dental test cases that contained slight misalignments. The relative percentage errors between the known and estimated transformation parameters were less than 20% with a termination criterion of a ten minute time limit. Further research is needed for dental cases that contain high degree of misalignment, noise and distortions

Enhanced QoS for real-time multimedia delivery over the wireless link using RFID technology.

This thesis presents a Sensor Guided Wireless Adaptation Scheme (SGWAS) that works in a micromobility domain. SGWAS infers the reason of high packet loss in a realtime multimedia flow received by a mobile node in a wireless cell. Determining the reason of packet loss relies on information obtained from wireless sensors, specifically RFID devices scattered in the cell, to detect the location of the mobile node. If packet loss is due to wireless link congestion, then local rate adaptation is applied in the cell. However, if it is due to handoff or signal propagation effects, e.g. obstruction or attenuation, then rate adaptation is not performed. The source adapts its transmission rate if congestion occurs in the wired network. SGWAS helps improve the quality of service and avoids unnecessary rate adaptation. Simulation results demonstrate that SGWAS identifies the reason of high packet loss and performs rate adaptation only when needed.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .E58. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0352. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006