84 research outputs found
Exploring the complexities of gender roles and psychological wellbeing in farm-families: implications for agricultural extension, management and research
Premised on the recognition that psychological wellbeing is a vital component of optimal productivity, and the need for agricultural extension to enhance farmers' welfare, the study was motivated by a dearth of research on the construction and determinants of psychological wellbeing and gender roles in farm-families. The intention was to gain insight and understanding of the farmers' life experiences, peculiar needs, problems and aspirations, in their unique socio-historical and cultural contexts. The study explored the complexities of the socio-cultural construction of gender roles and psychological wellbeing in farm-families of Ogun state Nigeria. The study is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing from and contributing to the bodies of knowledge in gender-based research, social psychology, family studies, and agricultural extension. Findings reveal a need for the development of gender-sensitive and culture-specific strategies in the agricultural extension system, aimed at improving psychological wellbeing and livelihood security of farm-families and ultimately enhancing sustainable agricultural and national development. Keywords: gender, farm-families, implications for extension, Nigeria South African Journal of Agricultural Extension Vol. 34(1) 2005: 122-13
Behavioral Modernity and the Cultural Transmission of Structured Information: The Semantic Axelrod Model
Cultural transmission models are coming to the fore in explaining increases
in the Paleolithic toolkit richness and diversity. During the later
Paleolithic, technologies increase not only in terms of diversity but also in
their complexity and interdependence. As Mesoudi and O'Brien (2008) have shown,
selection broadly favors social learning of information that is hierarchical
and structured, and multiple studies have demonstrated that teaching within a
social learning environment can increase fitness. We believe that teaching also
provides the scaffolding for transmission of more complex cultural traits.
Here, we introduce an extension of the Axelrod (1997} model of cultural
differentiation in which traits have prerequisite relationships, and where
social learning is dependent upon the ordering of those prerequisites. We
examine the resulting structure of cultural repertoires as learning
environments range from largely unstructured imitation, to structured teaching
of necessary prerequisites, and we find that in combination with individual
learning and innovation, high probabilities of teaching prerequisites leads to
richer cultural repertoires. Our results point to ways in which we can build
more comprehensive explanations of the archaeological record of the Paleolithic
as well as other cases of technological change.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures. Submitted to "Learning Strategies and Cultural
Evolution during the Paleolithic", edited by Kenichi Aoki and Alex Mesoudi,
and presented at the 79th Annual Meeting of the Society for American
Archaeology, Austin TX. Revised 5/14/1
Results of the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC)
Next-generation surveys like the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Rubin) will generate orders of magnitude more discoveries of transients and variable stars than previous surveys. To prepare for this data deluge, we developed the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC), a competition that aimed to catalyze the development of robust classifiers under LSST-like conditions of a nonrepresentative training set for a large photometric test set of imbalanced classes. Over 1000 teams participated in PLAsTiCC, which was hosted in the Kaggle data science competition platform between 2018 September 28 and 2018 December 17, ultimately identifying three winners in 2019 February. Participants produced classifiers employing a diverse set of machine-learning techniques including hybrid combinations and ensemble averages of a range of approaches, among them boosted decision trees, neural networks, and multilayer perceptrons. The strong performance of the top three classifiers on Type Ia supernovae and kilonovae represent a major improvement over the current state of the art within astronomy. This paper summarizes the most promising methods and evaluates their results in detail, highlighting future directions both for classifier development and simulation needs for a next-generation PLAsTiCC data set
Factors associated with persons with disability employment in India: a cross-sectional study
The Young Supernova Experiment: Survey Goals, Overview, and Operations
Time domain science has undergone a revolution over the past decade, with
tens of thousands of new supernovae (SNe) discovered each year. However,
several observational domains, including SNe within days or hours of explosion
and faint, red transients, are just beginning to be explored. Here, we present
the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE), a novel optical time-domain survey on the
Pan-STARRS telescopes. Our survey is designed to obtain well-sampled
light curves for thousands of transient events up to . This
large sample of transients with 4-band light curves will lay the foundation for
the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,
providing a critical training set in similar filters and a well-calibrated
low-redshift anchor of cosmologically useful SNe Ia to benefit dark energy
science. As the name suggests, YSE complements and extends other ongoing
time-domain surveys by discovering fast-rising SNe within a few hours to days
of explosion. YSE is the only current four-band time-domain survey and is able
to discover transients as faint 21.5 mag in and 20.5 mag in
, depths that allow us to probe the earliest epochs of stellar explosions.
YSE is currently observing approximately 750 square degrees of sky every three
days and we plan to increase the area to 1500 square degrees in the near
future. When operating at full capacity, survey simulations show that YSE will
find 5000 new SNe per year and at least two SNe within three days of
explosion per month. To date, YSE has discovered or observed 8.3% of the
transient candidates reported to the International Astronomical Union in 2020.
We present an overview of YSE, including science goals, survey characteristics
and a summary of our transient discoveries to date.Comment: ApJ, in press; more information at https://yse.ucsc.edu
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