A Hedonic Analysis of Cattle Prices in the Central Corridor of West Africa: Implications for Production and Marketing Decisions

Detailed weekly sales transactions data for the period January 2000-June 2001 from three frontier markets in the central corridor of West Africa were analyzed to identify the factors influencing short-run, intra-year cattle prices. The empirical results indicate that in addition to market location and seasonality of supply and sales, market participants show systemic preferences for specific cattle attributes (sex, weight, condition and finish) and are willing to pay premium prices consistent with their preferences. Communicating this information to producers can assist them to tailor their production and marketing decisions to meet market expectations and thereby improve their competitiveness, profitability and intra-regional livestock trade. Innovative policy and institutional approaches to improve market information dissemination and ease other constraints that tend to dampen supply response, even in the face of favorable prices, are discussed in the paper.livestock markets, hedonic price model, market information, West Africa, Livestock Production/Industries, C21, D4, Q13, Q17,

Coercion-Resistant Hybrid Voting Systems

Abstract: This paper proposes hybrid voting systems as a solution for the vote buying and voter coercion problem of electronic voting systems. The key idea is to allow voters to revoke and overrule their electronic votes at the polling station. We analyze the potential and pitfalls of such revocation procedures and give concrete recommendations on how to build a hybrid system offering coercion-resistance based on this feature. Our solution may be of interest to governments, which aim at integrating paper-based and electronic voting systems rather than replacing the former by the latter.

Long-term HIV infection and antiretroviral therapy are associated with bone microstructure alterations in premenopausal women

Summary: We evaluated the influence of long-term HIV infection and its treatment on distal tibia and radius microstructure. Premenopausal eumenorrheic HIV-positive women displayed trabecular and cortical microstructure alterations, which could contribute to increased bone fragility in those patients. Introduction: Bone fragility is an emerging issue in HIV-infected patients. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) quantified areal bone mineral density (BMD) predicts fracture risk, but a significant proportion of fracture risk results from microstructural alterations. Methods: We studied the influence of long-term HIV infection on bone microstructure as evaluated by high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) in 22 HIV-positive (+ve) premenopausal eumenorrheic women and 44 age- and body mass index (BMI)-matched HIV-negative (−ve) controls. All subjects completed questionnaires regarding calcium/protein intakes and physical activity, and underwent DXA and HR-pQCT examinations for BMD and peripheral skeleton microstructure, respectively. A risk factor analysis of tibia trabecular density using linear mixed models was conducted. Results: In HIV+ve women on successful antiretroviral therapy (undetectable HIV-RNA, median CD4 cell count, 626), infection duration was 16.5 ± 3.5 (mean ± SD) years; median BMI was 22 (IQR, 21-26) kg/m2. More HIV+ve women were smokers (82 versus 50%, p = 0.013). Compared to controls, HIV+ve women had lower lumbar spine (spine T-score −0.70 vs −0.03, p = 0.014), but similar proximal femur BMD. At distal tibia, HIV+ve women had a 14.1% lower trabecular density and a 13.2% reduction in trabecular number compared to HIV−ve women (p = 0.013 and 0.029, respectively). HR-pQCT differences in distal radius were significant for cortical density (−3.0%; p = 0.029). Conclusions: Compared with HIV−ve subjects, premenopausal HIV+ve treated women had trabecular and cortical bone alterations. Adjusted analysis revealed that HIV status was the only determinant of between group tibia trabecular density differences. The latter could contribute to increased bone fragility in HIV+ve patient

Coercion-resistant Proxy Voting

In general, most elections follow the principle of equality, or as it came to be known, the principle of “one man – one vote”. However, this principle might pose difficulties for voters, who are not well informed regarding the particular matter that is voted on. In order to address this issue, a new form of voting has been proposed, namely proxy voting. In proxy voting, each voter has the possibility to delegate her voting right to another voter, so called proxy, that she considers a trusted expert on the matter. In this paper we propose an end-to-end verifiable Internet voting scheme, which to the best of our knowledge is the first scheme to address voter coercion in the proxy voting setting