What was the impact of dairy goats distributed by the Crop-Goat project in Tanzania?

In Tanzania most goat production is extensive and aimed at selling live animals with limited direct impact on food security and nutrition. The Crop and Goat Project (CGP), implemented in Kongwa and Mvomero districts, aimed at improving income, food security and nutrition of poor households by promoting dairy goat production integrated with cassava and sweet potatoes. Within the project area, village leaders generated a list of 70 potential goat recipients in each of the 4 intervention villages, based on resources and capacity. Out of these, 108 households received a total of 229 dairy goats over the project period. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impacts of introducing dairy goats on income, assets and food consumption. A baseline survey at project initiation was conducted among 552 households in 2012, including all households which later received goats. Out of these, 373 households were interviewed a second time in 2014. This sample includes 98 of the beneficiary households, 102 potential beneficiary households, not having received a project goat, and 120 non-potential households in project villages. Analysis of the baseline data revealed that beneficiary households were different to potential and non-potential households in terms of non-livestock assets and food consumption. Therefore, the study applies a difference-in-differences (DD) approach in combination with propensity score matching to overcome the observed bias for estimating the impact of the project intervention. Results from the econometric analysis show the interventions had no significant effect on livestock or total income. Unsurprisingly, the project does appear to have significantly increased household ownership of small ruminants and total livestock. We also find a significant increase in the food consumption score of the survey respondent in project households, but no significant effect on the consumption score of the index child. Finally, we see a significant increase in the respondent's frequency of consuming dairy products, though none for the index child. Results suggest that dairy goats in this context have a stronger impact on household nutrition than on income although a better understanding of intra-household food allocation is required to support child nutrition

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

Continuous adaption through real data analysis turn simulation models into digital twins

Digital twins of production systems enable new forms of production control, flexibility and continuous improvement. While off-the-shelf software for discrete-event simulation permits the fast implementation of rough simulation models with sufficient accuracy for project-based analysis, they lack the precision and generality of a digital twin. This paper presents an approach to close the gap between model and reality by continuous and iterative updates enabled by connecting the simulation model to IT systems and smart data analysis. However, handling different databases requires a generative and flexible modelling approach as well as suitable algorithms for probability distribution estimation and control logic identification. The presented approach was validated at a real world example from the automotive industry where an average deviation of output to reality per week of 0.1% was achieved, proving the effectiveness of the approach

Quantum Dot Potentials: Symanzik Scaling, Resurgent Expansions and Quantum Dynamics

This article is concerned with a special class of the ``double-well-like'' potentials that occur naturally in the analysis of finite quantum systems. Special attention is paid, in particular, to the so-called Fokker-Planck potential, which has a particular property: the perturbation series for the ground-state energy vanishes to all orders in the coupling parameter, but the actual ground-state energy is positive and dominated by instanton configurations of the form exp(-a/g), where a is the instanton action. The instanton effects are most naturally taken into account within the modified Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization conditions whose expansion leads to the generalized perturbative expansions (so-called resurgent expansions) for the energy values of the Fokker-Planck potential. Until now, these resurgent expansions have been mainly applied for small values of coupling parameter g, while much less attention has been paid to the strong-coupling regime. In this contribution, we compare the energy values, obtained by directly resumming generalized Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization conditions, to the strong-coupling expansion, for which we determine the first few expansion coefficients in powers of g^(-2/3). Detailed calculations are performed for a wide range of coupling parameters g and indicate a considerable overlap between the regions of validity of the weak-coupling resurgent series and of the strong-coupling expansion. Apart from the analysis of the energy spectrum of the Fokker-Planck Hamiltonian, we also briefly discuss the computation of its eigenfunctions. These eigenfunctions may be utilized for the numerical integration of the (single-particle) time-dependent Schroedinger equation and, hence, for studying the dynamical evolution of the wavepackets in the double-well-like potentials.Comment: 13 pages; RevTe

Measurement crosstalk between two phase qubits coupled by a coplanar waveguide

We analyze the measurement crosstalk between two flux-biased phase qubits coupled by a resonant coplanar waveguide cavity. After the first qubit is measured, the superconducting phase can undergo damped oscillations resulting in an a.c. voltage that produces a frequency chirped noise signal whose frequency crosses that of the cavity. We show experimentally that the coplanar waveguide cavity acts as a bandpass filter that can significantly reduce the crosstalk signal seen by the second qubit when its frequency is far from the cavity's resonant frequency. We present a simple classical description of the qubit behavior that agrees well with the experimental data. These results suggest that measurement crosstalk between superconducting phase qubits can be reduced by use of linear or possibly nonlinear resonant cavities as coupling elements.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Review of System Dynamics models for electricity market simulations

This paper provides a review on modeling electricity markets with System Dynamics (SD) focusing on deregulated electricity market models. First the SD method is classified within the wide field of electricity market modeling. Then all distinctive properties of the SD method in this context are elaborated. After an overview of first SD models in energy economics, a comprehensive review of models of deregulated electricity markets is presented. The review captures more than 80 publications in the field of SD energy market modeling. Some tendencies could be identified: Firstly SD models are more and more combined with other methods like generic algorithms, experimental economics or analytical hierarchy processes. Secondly, stochastic variables are considered increasingly. Thirdly, models show a higher level of detail and increasingly evaluate aspects such as new markets designs or new market components and their interdependencies

Semiclassical approximations for Hamiltonians with operator-valued symbols

We consider the semiclassical limit of quantum systems with a Hamiltonian given by the Weyl quantization of an operator valued symbol. Systems composed of slow and fast degrees of freedom are of this form. Typically a small dimensionless parameter $\varepsilon\ll 1$ controls the separation of time scales and the limit $\varepsilon\to 0$ corresponds to an adiabatic limit, in which the slow and fast degrees of freedom decouple. At the same time $\varepsilon\to 0$ is the semiclassical limit for the slow degrees of freedom. In this paper we show that the $\varepsilon$-dependent classical flow for the slow degrees of freedom first discovered by Littlejohn and Flynn, coming from an \epsi-dependent classical Hamilton function and an $\varepsilon$-dependent symplectic form, has a concrete mathematical and physical meaning: Based on this flow we prove a formula for equilibrium expectations, an Egorov theorem and transport of Wigner functions, thereby approximating properties of the quantum system up to errors of order $\varepsilon^2$. In the context of Bloch electrons formal use of this classical system has triggered considerable progress in solid state physics. Hence we discuss in some detail the application of the general results to the Hofstadter model, which describes a two-dimensional gas of non-interacting electrons in a constant magnetic field in the tight-binding approximation.Comment: Final version to appear in Commun. Math. Phys. Results have been strengthened with only minor changes to the proofs. A section on the Hofstadter model as an application of the general theory was added and the previous section on other applications was remove