2006 Global hunger index: a basis for cross-country comparisons

"Indices can be powerful tools for international monitoring and advocacy, and if used in international rankings, can help foster a sense of healthy competition among countries. With this in mind, IFPRI's Global Hunger Index (GHI) was designed to help mobilize political will and promote good policies by ranking countries and illustrating trends. It captures three dimensions of hunger: insufficient availability of food, shortfalls in the nutritional status of children, and child mortality, which is to a large extent attributable to undernutrition. Accordingly, the index includes the following three equally weighted indicators: the proportion of people who are food energy deficient as estimated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the prevalence of underweight in children under the age of five as compiled by the World Health Organization, and the under-five mortality rate as reported by UNICEF" from TextHunger, Food availability, Nutritional status, Children, Child mortality, Undernutrition, Indicators, World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, UNICEF,

Matching gluon scattering amplitudes and Wilson loops in off-shell regularization

We construct a regularization for light-like polygonal Wilson loops in ${\cal N}=4$ SYM, which matches them to the off-shell MHV gluon scattering amplitudes. Explicit calculations are performed for the 1-loop four gluon case. The off light cone extrapolation has to be based on the local supersymmetric Wilson loop. The observed matching concerns Feynman gauge. Furthermore, the leading infrared divergent term is shown to be gauge parameter independent on 1-loop level.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, typo correcte

Food Security Analysis and Policies for Transition Countries

This article explores the characteristics of food security in the context of economies in transition. These special characteristics derive from the “legacies†of socialist systems, both economy-wide ones and others specific to the agriculture and the food sector. Food insecurity in transition countries is considered predominantly “transitoryâ€, while social safety nets dating back to the socialist years provide some cushion. Market failures and other institutional constraints are prevalent, inhibiting the process towards improvement of the food security situation. Conflict takes a heavy toll in terms of hunger and malnutrition in economies in transition and macro level factors are at work to determine food security outcomes. At the same time, socialist legacies determine differences in food security outcomes between transition and developing countries beyond what would be explained by income differences.Food security, poverty, malnutrition, transition countries, agriculture, agricultural policy, safety nets, Food Security and Poverty,

Integrated Management of European Cherry Fruit Fly Rhagoletis cerasi (L.): Situation in Switzerland and Europe

Abstract: The European cherry fruit fly, Rhagoletis cerasi (L.) (Diptera: Tephritidae), is a highly destructive pest. The low tolerance for damaged fruit requires preventive insecticide treatments for a marketable crop. The phase-out of old insecticides threatens cherry production throughout the European Union (EU). Consequently, new management techniques and tools are needed. With the increasing number of dwarf tree orchards covered against rain to avoid fruit splitting, crop netting has become a viable, cost-effective method of cherry fruit fly control. Recently, a biocontrol method using the entomopathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana has been developed for organic agriculture. However, for most situations, there is still a lack of efficient and environmentally sound insecticides to control this pest. This review summarizes the literature from over one hundred years of research on R. cerasi with focus on the biology and history of cherry fruit fly control as well as on antagonists and potential biocontrol organisms. We will present the situation of cherry fruit fly regulation in different European countries, give recommendations for cherry fruit fly control, show gaps in knowledge and identify future research opportunities

Is food insecurity more severe in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa?: A comparative analysis using household expenditure survey data

"This paper uses data from national household expenditure surveys to explore whether food insecurity is more severe in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. It employs two indicators of the diet quantity dimension of food insecurity, or the inability to access sufficient food: the prevalence of food energy deficiency and the prevalence of severe food energy deficiency. It also employs two indicators of the diet quality dimension, indicating lack of access to nutritious food: the prevalence of low diet diversity and the percent of energy from staple foods. It finds the regions' food energy deficiency prevalences to be quite close (51 percent in South Asia, 57 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa). However, the prevalence of severe food energy deficiency, which is more life threatening, is higher in Sub-Saharan Africa (51 percent versus 35 percent in South Asia). From a diet quality standpoint, the regions appear to suffer from a comparable and high reliance on staple foods in the diet to the neglect of foods rich in protein and micronutrients, but that Sub-Saharan Africa may be doing worse, as reflected in less diverse diets. The results confirm that both regions suffer from deep food insecurity problems but point to Sub-Saharan Africa as the region with the more severe problem, particularly when it comes to the diet quantity dimension of food insecurity. In deciding which region should be given greater emphasis in the international allocation of scarce development resources, the fact that the numbers of people affected by food insecurity are higher in South Asia should be taken into consideration." from Authors' Abstractfood security, Food energy deficiency, Diet quality,

The poorest and hungry: Looking below the line

Poverty reduction, Poverty dynamics, Hunger, Trends in global hunger, MDGs, Development assistance,

Mutation Operators for the Evolution of Finite Automata

Evolutionary programming has originally been proposed for the breeding of finite state automata. The mutation operator is working directly on the graph structure of the automata. In this paper we introduce variation operators based on the automatons input/output behavior rather than its structure. The operators are designed to make use of additional information based on a ranking of states as well as a problem-specific metric which enhances the search process

Validation of the world food programme's food consumption score and alternative indicators of household food security:

"The objective of this study is to validate the World Food Programme's (WFP) method of establishing the prevalence of food insecurity. WFP's method has two parts: (1) the construction of a Food Consumption Score (FCS) and (2) the classification of food security status based on the FCS. Our validation work has the following components: (1) collecting and analyzing survey data from three countries—Burundi, Haiti, and Sri Lanka—that contain information about calorie consumption at the household level and information needed to construct the FCS; (2) establishing the extent to which an assessment of food security status based on the FCS mimics food security status based on household calorie consumption; and (3) assessing whether changes to the construction of the FCS would improve its predictive power and whether such changes are feasible, given the environment in which these assessments are typically conducted. To achieve the third objective, alternative dietary diversity and food frequency indicators are constructed by either modifying WFP's calculation method for the FCS or following a different approach, such as that for the Household Dietary Diversity Score developed by the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance Project. By comparing indicator performance, we can answer the questions of whether the FCS could be simplified by using food group diversity instead of food frequency by food group, if further disaggregation of food groups would improve its validity, and what the merits and demerits of other aspects of WFP's standard method are. Based on our findings about the validity of the FCS and the results for alternative proxy indicators, we then suggest changes to the construction of the FCS. Our findings on the usefulness of the FCS are encouraging. The same holds true for the alternative indicators of dietary diversity and food frequency we considered. There are positive and statistically significant associations with calorie consumption per capita, particularly when small quantities are excluded from food frequencies. In two out of three study sites, food frequency scores are clearly superior to simpler measures of diet diversity (food or food group count). Higher levels of disaggregation are advantageous, but with diminishing marginal returns. We note, however, that the provision of food aid seems to weaken the association of the FCS with calorie consumption. All of these observations support the use of WFP's FCS for food security assessments. However, the cutoff points used by WFP to define poor, borderline, and adequate Food Consumption Groups are too low when the FCS classification is compared to estimates of calorie deficiency from our survey data and other sources. As a food security classification device, the FCS could be improved by excluding foods consumed in small quantities from the FCS and, even more important, adjusting the cutoffs used to classify households as having poor, borderline, or acceptable food security. Minor gains in the validity of the FCS could be achieved by making several technical adjustments to the calculation of the FCS, for example, using a 12-group food classification instead of an 8-food group classification. This study has several limitations. We did not validate the proxy indicators against diet quality, because this would have required the collection of individual 24-hour recall data for all household members, which was beyond the scope of our study. The use of seven-day household recall data is a limitation for our analysis; information on dietary intakes from individual 24-hour recalls is generally considered more accurate. The lack of precise information on the effects of excluding small quantities from food frequencies is another constraint." from authors' abstractfood security, Dietary diversity, Food frequency, Proxy indicators, Food consumption score, Validation study,

Zum Wissen des Rechtsübersetzers und zur Wissensaufbereitung in übersetzerischen Hilfsmitteln

This article deals with the diffi culties encountered by the translator with no legal back-ground in consulting resources conveying legal knowledge, ranging from the text of the law to the legal encyclopaedia, designed for lawyers, lawyers and non-lawyers, lawyers and legal translators respectively. Starting from the translation from Italian into German of a text of company law, there is first of all a description of the legal knowledge required by the legal translator to translate the legal text in question and the legal knowledge conveyed by the text for translation itself. After an overview of the resources that the legal translator may draw on to integrate any gaps in his legal knowledge, there is an illustration of the problems linked to the different types of resources, concluding with a demonstration of the advantages of a resource such as JUSLEX, designed and created exclusively for the legal translator