Smallholder Farmer Development: International Donor Funding Trends

In order to enable more coordination between these various initiatives, FSG and the Smallholder Coalition have catalogued and analyzed $12 billion in funding from 29 donors representing more than 1,700 smallholder-focused projects active from 2009 onwards. Our intention with this analysis is to provide the community of donors, corporations, networks, NGOs, and governments involved with smallholder development with a first-of-its-kind snapshot of the state of smallholder funding flow trends

Complexity of and Algorithms for Borda Manipulation

We prove that it is NP-hard for a coalition of two manipulators to compute how to manipulate the Borda voting rule. This resolves one of the last open problems in the computational complexity of manipulating common voting rules. Because of this NP-hardness, we treat computing a manipulation as an approximation problem where we try to minimize the number of manipulators. Based on ideas from bin packing and multiprocessor scheduling, we propose two new approximation methods to compute manipulations of the Borda rule. Experiments show that these methods significantly outperform the previous best known %existing approximation method. We are able to find optimal manipulations in almost all the randomly generated elections tested. Our results suggest that, whilst computing a manipulation of the Borda rule by a coalition is NP-hard, computational complexity may provide only a weak barrier against manipulation in practice

A literature review of paid sick leave and disparate populations in the United States during the COVID pandemic

The COVID pandemic is providing many public health and health policy learning opportunities to identify disparities among women, minorities, and underserved/distressed populations and inform subsequent policy-level strategies. It is recommended people stay home when they are sick; yet, not all people have access to paid sick leave. Individuals are left with the unfortunate decision to lose pay or go to work when they are ill. This is disconcerting in any given year with the annual flu illness and other communicable diseases; however, especially concerning during the COVID pandemic given the high virus transmissibility. Paid sick leave is not universally accessible at a federal level yet was a temporary solution to bridge this gap during COVID. This literature review aims to provide additional context for state and federal legislation of a paid sick leave policy with findings thematically organized. Furthermore, the review proposes a cross-sectional study to identify specific disparities in working-age adults in the rural Nebraska Panhandle to accessing paid sick leave, increasing the evidence-base of public health, and informing a long-term state and/or federal paid sick leave strategy

A Family Approach to Family Literacy with Latino Parents

The research question addressed in this project is, How can Latino parent involvement and direct teaching of literacy skills help to improve their child’s reading skills? Over the years, research has demonstrated the importance of parent involvement in the success of students’ achievement. Furthermore, Latino parent involvement has demonstrated benefits that far exceed expectations. When families and schools work together utilizing different Family Literacy programs, students and families succeed. This Capstone reviewed different literature to help understand Latino family involvement, in addition to reviewing different family literacy programs to help answer the research question. The Capstone also included a project that is an eight week training session for parents on different second grade literacy skills that are introduced through shared reading. The skills they gained over the eight weeks helped provide them with tools that could help improve their child’s reading skills

Physiological and psychological health effects of Nordic walking on sedentary adults

To investigate the effects of an eight week Nordic Walking programme on health outcomes in sedentary yet healthy adults. Thirty-nine participants (mean age = 54.6 ± 9.3 years) were randomised to a Nordic (N=20) or standard walking group (N=19) and completed three 55-minute supervised walking sessions per week. Blood pressure, aerobic capacity, lipid profile and anthropometry were assessed and participants completed measures of health-related quality of life, self-esteem, depression and mood pre- and post intervention. There was a significant group interaction for diastolic blood pressure with a trend for lower values in the Nordic Walking group post intervention. There was a significant decrease in waist, hip and upper arm circumference and a significant increase in total distance and averaging exercising heart rate in both walking groups post intervention. There were no significant differences within or between groups for total cholesterol, high and low density lipoprotein however a significant intervention effect was observed for triglycerides. The findings point towards a non-significant improvement in health-related quality of life, selfesteem, depression and mood in both walking groups over time. In line with previous research, an eight-week walking intervention significantly improved aspects of physical and mental health in a sedentary population, although Nordic Walking did not enhance these health benefits compared to standard walking. Further research needs to focus on increasing intervention duration, ensuring mastery of correct technique and monitoring intensity during the intervention period

IST Austria Technical Report

POMDPs are standard models for probabilistic planning problems, where an agent interacts with an uncertain environment. We study the problem of almost-sure reachability, where given a set of target states, the question is to decide whether there is a policy to ensure that the target set is reached with probability 1 (almost-surely). While in general the problem is EXPTIME-complete, in many practical cases policies with a small amount of memory suffice. Moreover, the existing solution to the problem is explicit, which first requires to construct explicitly an exponential reduction to a belief-support MDP. In this work, we first study the existence of observation-stationary strategies, which is NP-complete, and then small-memory strategies. We present a symbolic algorithm by an efficient encoding to SAT and using a SAT solver for the problem. We report experimental results demonstrating the scalability of our symbolic (SAT-based) approach

An Investigation into the Impact of Parkinson's Disease upon Decision Making Ability and Driving Performance

Diagnostics and Rehabilitation of Parkinson's Disease presents the most current information pertaining to news-making topics relating to this disease, including etiology, early biomarkers for the diagnostics, novel methods to evaluate symptoms, research, multidisciplinary rehabilitation, new applications of brain imaging and invasive methods to the study of Parkinson's disease. Researchers have only recently begun to focus on the non-motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease, which are poorly recognized and inadequately treated by clinicians. The non-motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease have a significant impact on patient quality of life and mortality and include cognitive impairments, autonomic, gastrointestinal, and sensory symptoms. In-depth discussion of the use of imaging tools to study disease mechanisms is also provided, with emphasis on the abnormal network organization in parkinsonism. Deep brain stimulation management is a paradigm-shifting therapy for Parkinson's disease, essential tremor, and dystonia. In the recent years, new approaches of early diagnostics, training programmes and treatments have vastly improved the lives of people with Parkinson's disease, substantially reducing symptoms and significantly delaying disability. Written by leading scientists on movement and neurological disorders, this comprehensive book should appeal to a multidisciplinary audience and help people cope with medical, emotional, and practical challenges

Eliminating the Weakest Link: Making Manipulation Intractable?

Successive elimination of candidates is often a route to making manipulation intractable to compute. We prove that eliminating candidates does not necessarily increase the computational complexity of manipulation. However, for many voting rules used in practice, the computational complexity increases. For example, it is already known that it is NP-hard to compute how a single voter can manipulate the result of single transferable voting (the elimination version of plurality voting). We show here that it is NP-hard to compute how a single voter can manipulate the result of the elimination version of veto voting, of the closely related Coombs' rule, and of the elimination versions of a general class of scoring rules.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of Twenty-Sixth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12