GENDER IMPACTS OF SMALL FARMERS’ COMMERCIALIZATION OF GINGER (Zingiber officinale Rosc.) ENTERPRISE IN NIGERIA

This study addressed the issue of gender and agricultural commercialization among smallholders in Nigeria with ginger as a case study. It focused on the relative or absolute roles, gains and losses by men and women farmers as a result of commercializing small ginger farm. Ginger is a crop grown mainly for cash in Nigeria. Nigerian ginger is known to produce very high quality essential oils mainly oleoresin and gingerol used in confectionery and pharmaceutical industries. Men take decision mostly on ginger production while ginger marketing is more of the women’s job. Women income is devoted to food and children care while men take care of education of the children. There is increased income and improved health facilities to members of the household. There are, however, increases in workload and responsibility for men for major decisions while women play major role in decision during maintenance of ginger field.Nigerian Ginger, Commercialization, Gender impacts, Agribusiness, Consumer/Household Economics,

The AMC Linear Disability Score in patients with newly diagnosed Parkinson disease

Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the clinimetric properties of the AMC Linear Disability Score (ALDS), a new generic disability measure based on Item Response Theory, in patients with newly diagnosed Parkinson disease (PD).\ud \ud Methods: A sample of 132 patients with PD was evaluated using the Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y), the Unified PD Rating Scale motor examination, the Schwab and England scale (S&E), the Short Form–36, the PD Quality of Life Questionnaire, and the ALDS.\ud \ud Results: The internal consistency reliability of the ALDS was good ([alpha] = 0.95) with 55 items extending the sufficient item-total correlation criterion (r > 0.20). The ALDS was correlated with other disability measures (r = 0.50 to 0.63) and decreasingly associated with measures reflecting impairments (r = 0.36 to 0.37) and mental health (r = 0.23 to -0.01). With regard to know-group validity, the ALDS indicated that patients with more severe PD (H&Y stage 3) were more disabled than patients with mild (H&Y stage 1) or moderate PD (H&Y stage 2) (p < 0.0001). The ALDS discriminated between more or less severe extrapyramidal symptoms (p = 0.001) and patients with postural instability showed lower ALDS scores compared to patients without postural instability (p = < 0.0001). Compared to the S&E (score 100% = 19%), the ALDS showed less of a ceiling effect (5%).\ud \ud Conclusion: The AMC Linear Disability Score is a flexible, feasible, and clinimetrically promising instrument to assess the level of disability in patients with newly diagnosed Parkinson disease

Images and realities of rural life : Wageningen perspectives on rural transformations

Publicatie ter gelegenheid van 50 jaar sociologie in Wageninge

Visual features drive the category-specific impairments on categorization tasks in a patient with object agnosia

Object and scene recognition both require mapping of incoming sensory information to existing conceptual knowledge about the world. A notable finding in brain-damaged patients is that they may show differentially impaired performance for specific categories, such as for “living exemplars”. While numerous patients with category-specific impairments have been reported, the explanations for these deficits remain controversial. In the current study, we investigate the ability of a brain injured patient with a well-established category-specific impairment of semantic memory to perform two categorization experiments: ‘natural’ vs. ‘manmade’ scenes (experiment 1) and objects (experiment 2). Our findings show that the pattern of categorical impairment does not respect the natural versus manmade distinction. This suggests that the impairments may be better explained by differences in visual features, rather than by category membership. Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) as ‘artificial animal models’ we further explored this idea. Results indicated that DCNNs with ‘lesions’ in higher order layers showed similar response patterns, with decreased relative performance for manmade scenes (experiment 1) and natural objects (experiment 2), even though they have no semantic category knowledge, apart from a mapping between pictures and labels. Collectively, these results suggest that the direction of category-effects to a large extent depends, at least in MS′ case, on the degree of perceptual differentiation called for, and not semantic knowledge