6,052 research outputs found
Demand-driven and Cost Effective Production: What the Farmers Ought to know. A case of Local Chicken Enterprise in Masindi District-Uganda
Most African communities depend on agriculture for both income generation and food security and yet farming has faced and is still confronted with a lot of production and market related hardships. Despite all these constraints, farmers are stuck on agriculture as itâs the only definite way of earning a living. The mistake farmers and other agricultural practitioners continuously make is to produce first and look for the market later. This is where buyers and the middle men in particular exploit and a conclusion is eventually made by the producer that,â there is no money in agriculture.â Farmers including those who want to reap from agriculture need to first change their attitudes towards it and secondly produce what the markets are demanding at particular point in time. This therefore calls for institutionally guided farmer market research, enterprise selection, experimentation and enterprise development. Farmers can only benefit from agricultural production after carefully understanding what the buyer wants as in the type of the commodity, size, quantity, quality, frequency of supply, conditions of supply and the price the buyer is willing to offer among others. Where the selected enterprise has very high costs of production, the farmer should minimize costs buy substituting some inputs with local materials and also negotiate for a premium price and sign contracts with the buyers. Two farmer research groups in Masindi district in Uganda went through the above processes and have got success stories to tell.Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, International Relations/Trade, Marketing, Productivity Analysis, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,
Coherent Diffraction Imaging of Single 95nm Nanowires
Photonic or electronic confinement effects in nanostructures become
significant when one of their dimension is in the 5-300 nm range. Improving
their development requires the ability to study their structure - shape, strain
field, interdiffusion maps - using novel techniques. We have used coherent
diffraction imaging to record the 3-dimensionnal scattered intensity of single
silicon nanowires with a lateral size smaller than 100 nm. We show that this
intensity can be used to recover the hexagonal shape of the nanowire with a
28nm resolution. The article also discusses limits of the method in terms of
radiation damage.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Violation of action--reaction and self-forces induced by nonequilibrium fluctuations
We show that the extension of Casimir-like forces to fluctuating fluids
driven out of equilibrium can exhibit two interrelated phenomena forbidden at
equilibrium: self-forces can be induced on single asymmetric objects and the
action--reaction principle between two objects can be violated. These effects
originate in asymmetric restrictions imposed by the objects' boundaries on the
fluid's fluctuations. They are not ruled out by the second law of
thermodynamics since the fluid is in a nonequilibrium state. Considering a
simple reaction--diffusion model for the fluid, we explicitly calculate the
self-force induced on a deformed circle. We also show that the action--reaction
principle does not apply for the internal Casimir forces exerting between a
circle and a plate. Their sum, instead of vanishing, provides the self-force on
the circle-plate assembly.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. V2: New title; Abstract partially rewritten;
Largely enhanced introductory and concluding remarks (incl. new Refs.
Epidemic variability in complex networks
We study numerically the variability of the outbreak of diseases on complex
networks. We use a SI model to simulate the disease spreading at short times,
in homogeneous and in scale-free networks. In both cases, we study the effect
of initial conditions on the epidemic's dynamics and its variability. The
results display a time regime during which the prevalence exhibits a large
sensitivity to noise. We also investigate the dependence of the infection time
on nodes' degree and distance to the seed. In particular, we show that the
infection time of hubs have large fluctuations which limit their reliability as
early-detection stations. Finally, we discuss the effect of the multiplicity of
shortest paths between two nodes on the infection time. Furthermore, we
demonstrate that the existence of even longer paths reduces the average
infection time. These different results could be of use for the design of
time-dependent containment strategies
Nurturing the young shoots of talent: Using action research for exploration and theory building
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 19(4), 433-450, 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1350293X.2011.623515.This paper reports the outcomes of a set of action research projects carried out by teacher researchers in 14 local education authorities in England, working collaboratively with university tutors, over a period of three years. The common aim of all the projects was to explore practical ways of nurturing the gifts and talents of children aged fourâseven years. The project was funded by the Department of Education and Skills in England as part of the government's gifted and talented programme. The project teachers felt that their understanding of issues relating to nurturing the gifts and talents of younger children was enhanced through their engagement in the project. It was possible to map the findings of the projects to the English government's National Quality Standards for gifted and talented education which include: (1) identification; (2) effective provision in the classroom; (3) enabling curriculum entitlement and choice; (4) assessment for learning; (5) engaging with community, families and beyond. The findings are also analysed within the framework of good practice in educating children in the first years of schooling. Participating practitioners felt that action research offered them a suitable methodology to explore the complexity of the topic of giftedness through cycles of planning, action and reflection and personal theory building
Thermal quantum electrodynamics of nonrelativistic charged fluids
The theory relevant to the study of matter in equilibrium with the radiation
field is thermal quantum electrodynamics (TQED). We present a formulation of
the theory, suitable for non relativistic fluids, based on a joint functional
integral representation of matter and field variables. In this formalism
cluster expansion techniques of classical statistical mechanics become
operative. They provide an alternative to the usual Feynman diagrammatics in
many-body problems which is not perturbative with respect to the coupling
constant. As an application we show that the effective Coulomb interaction
between quantum charges is partially screened by thermalized photons at large
distances. More precisely one observes an exact cancellation of the dipolar
electric part of the interaction, so that the asymptotic particle density
correlation is now determined by relativistic effects. It has still the
decay typical for quantum charges, but with an amplitude strongly
reduced by a relativistic factor.Comment: 32 pages, 0 figures. 2nd versio
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