The Effects of the Food Reserve Agency on Maize Market Prices in Zambia

This policy synthesis estimates the effects of the Zambia Food Reserve Agency’s (FRA) activities on maize market prices in the country. The FRA, a government parastatal strategic food reserve/maize marketing board, buys maize at a pan-territorial price that typically exceeds wholesale market prices in major maize producing areas. It then exports the maize or sells it domestically at prices determined by tender, at auction, or administratively. In deficit production years, the Agency often imports maize and sells it to select large-scale millers at below-market prices.Zambia, Maize, Food Security, Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Security and Poverty,

Code of Silence: Police Shootings and the Right to Remain Silent

Two events in September 1995 gave the public a brief glimpse of law enforcement officers asserting the Fifth Amendment privilege. In the trial of the century, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Mark Fuhrman asserted the privilege during the O.J. Simpson murder trial in response to questions concerning whether he planted evidence or provided truthful testimony. A week later, an FBI agent asserted the privilege in response to a Senate committee\u27s inquiry concerning the shootout at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. These highly publicized exercises of the privilege are rare. For the most part, invocations of the privilege by the police are a regular occurrence outside the scope of public scrutiny. At this real-world crossing, two basic tenets of constitutional democracy intersect - control of government and preservation of liberty. On the one hand, the people need to regulate the state, especially when it is empowered to take human life. On the other hand, civil liberties must be safeguarded, even when those who claim them stand in the shoes of the state. At this juncture, however, we seem to return to the Twilight Zone. For, it may be asked, how can we both control the state and, at the same time, grant its agents constitutional protection? Before we get to this question, it is necessary to first understand just how much and what kind of official latitude we allow the state when it comes to the sanctioned use of deadly force by police officials. Having done that, we can then consider the character and scope of certain constitutional claims sometimes invoked by police officers in this context. This latter consideration - the central focus of this article - points to a peculiar phenomenon, namely, the specter of government acting as a powerful deputy authorized to use lethal force and as a powerless individual in need of constitutional safeguards. Typically, we do not think of the government wearing both hats. Yet, when it does, the result is often perplexing. Having thus introduced this perplexity, it is now appropriate to return to a preliminary but nevertheless significant matter - official use of deadly force in America

Code of Silence: Police Shootings and the Right to Remain Silent

Two events in September 1995 gave the public a brief glimpse of law enforcement officers asserting the Fifth Amendment privilege. In the trial of the century, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Mark Fuhrman asserted the privilege during the O.J. Simpson murder trial in response to questions concerning whether he planted evidence or provided truthful testimony. A week later, an FBI agent asserted the privilege in response to a Senate committee\u27s inquiry concerning the shootout at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. These highly publicized exercises of the privilege are rare. For the most part, invocations of the privilege by the police are a regular occurrence outside the scope of public scrutiny. At this real-world crossing, two basic tenets of constitutional democracy intersect - control of government and preservation of liberty. On the one hand, the people need to regulate the state, especially when it is empowered to take human life. On the other hand, civil liberties must be safeguarded, even when those who claim them stand in the shoes of the state. At this juncture, however, we seem to return to the Twilight Zone. For, it may be asked, how can we both control the state and, at the same time, grant its agents constitutional protection? Before we get to this question, it is necessary to first understand just how much and what kind of official latitude we allow the state when it comes to the sanctioned use of deadly force by police officials. Having done that, we can then consider the character and scope of certain constitutional claims sometimes invoked by police officers in this context. This latter consideration - the central focus of this article - points to a peculiar phenomenon, namely, the specter of government acting as a powerful deputy authorized to use lethal force and as a powerless individual in need of constitutional safeguards. Typically, we do not think of the government wearing both hats. Yet, when it does, the result is often perplexing. Having thus introduced this perplexity, it is now appropriate to return to a preliminary but nevertheless significant matter - official use of deadly force in America

Process and information integration via hypermedia

Success stories for advanced automation prototypes abound in the literature but the deployments of practical large systems are few in number. There are several factors that militate against the maturation of such prototypes into products. Here, the integration of advanced automation software into large systems is discussed. Advanced automation systems tend to be specific applications that need to be integrated and aggregated into larger systems. Systems integration can be achieved by providing expert user-developers with verified tools to efficiently create small systems that interface to large systems through standard interfaces. The use of hypermedia as such a tool in the context of the ground control centers that support Shuttle and space station operations is explored. Hypermedia can be an integrating platform for data, conventional software, and advanced automation software, enabling data integration through the display of diverse types of information and through the creation of associative links between chunks of information. Further, hypermedia enables process integration through graphical invoking of system functions. Through analysis and examples, researchers illustrate how diverse information and processing paradigms can be integrated into a single software platform

Entanglement, Holography and Causal Diamonds

We argue that the degrees of freedom in a d-dimensional CFT can be re-organized in an insightful way by studying observables on the moduli space of causal diamonds (or equivalently, the space of pairs of timelike separated points). This 2d-dimensional space naturally captures some of the fundamental nonlocality and causal structure inherent in the entanglement of CFT states. For any primary CFT operator, we construct an observable on this space, which is defined by smearing the associated one-point function over causal diamonds. Known examples of such quantities are the entanglement entropy of vacuum excitations and its higher spin generalizations. We show that in holographic CFTs, these observables are given by suitably defined integrals of dual bulk fields over the corresponding Ryu-Takayanagi minimal surfaces. Furthermore, we explain connections to the operator product expansion and the first law of entanglement entropy from this unifying point of view. We demonstrate that for small perturbations of the vacuum, our observables obey linear two-derivative equations of motion on the space of causal diamonds. In two dimensions, the latter is given by a product of two copies of a two-dimensional de Sitter space. For a class of universal states, we show that the entanglement entropy and its spin-three generalization obey nonlinear equations of motion with local interactions on this moduli space, which can be identified with Liouville and Toda equations, respectively. This suggests the possibility of extending the definition of our new observables beyond the linear level more generally and in such a way that they give rise to new dynamically interacting theories on the moduli space of causal diamonds. Various challenges one has to face in order to implement this idea are discussed.Comment: 84 pages, 12 figures; v2: expanded discussion on constraints in section 7, matches published versio

Theater Facility Impact Study, Volume 1: Theater Facilities: Guidelines and Strategies

This report formulates guidelines and strategies for the creation of regional theater facilities. This study creates a typology for a new building type based on the programmatic desires of regional theater as it has evolved through several generations. Received a research citation from Progressive Architecture and a research excellence award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Funded by the NEA and published jointly with Beckley/Myers Architects. Reprinted in 1985.https://dc.uwm.edu/caupr_mono/1019/thumbnail.jp

HIV/AIDS and Agrarian Livelihoods in Zambia: a Test of the New Variant Famine Hypothesis.

1. Consistent with the New Variant Famine (NVF) hypothesis, the negative impact of drought on crop output and output per hectare is further exacerbated where HIV prevalence rates are relatively high, particularly in the low- and medium rainfall zones of the country (agro-ecological regions I and II). 2. HIV prevalence rates and AIDS-related mortality rates in Zambia are highest in the lowest rainfall and most drought-prone zone of the country (agro-ecological region I). 3. Only for districts in agro-ecological region I do we find evidence of a robust negative effect of HIV/AIDS on agrarian livelihood indicators. Relatively stable food production zones and/or areas with relatively low HIV prevalence rates appear to be less vulnerable to the adverse effects predicted by the NVF hypothesis, which suggests that HIV/AIDS exacerbates the effects of drought and other shocks on agrarian communities. 4. HIV/AIDS reduces the crop production gains associated with fertilizer subsidy increases in the highest rainfall areas. 5. Increases in the percentage of female-headed households in a district are related to declines in agricultural production indicators, but these effects do not appear to worsen when the HIV/AIDS epidemic is severe. 6. Only in districts whose borders encompass both agro-ecological regions II and III do we consistently find weak evidence that HIV/AIDS reduces the contribution of productive assets to crop output and output per unit of land as would be expected under the NVF hypothesis.food security, food policy, Zambia, HIV/AIDS, Food Security and Poverty, Health Economics and Policy, Q20,