Factors influencing net investment decision making for a group of lower North Island sheep and beef farmers : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Agricultural Economics at Massey University

This study investigated the process of net investment decision-making on a group of New Zealand sheep and beef farmers. A review of previous theoretical and empirical research led to the study's objectives, namely to test that investment decision making on New Zealand farms could be incorporated in two dimensions: the determination of a desired level of capital stock and a description of the rate of adjustment of actual capital stock to the desired level. A study of net investment decision-making was chosen because net investment was seen by policy-makers in the 1970's to be an ingredient in planned growth in output. Information on net investment at the individual farmer level was not, however, available to policy-makers at the time. The study was at the individual farmer level to complement previous reserarch at the macro-level on investment in the New Zealand pastoral sector. An investment model was tested using ordinary least squares combining time-series and cross-section data. The initial specification included individual farm dummy variables to account for cross-sectional differences in net investment decision-making. Later, candidate variables hypothesised as explaining cross-section differences were included in the model. The regression results led support to the study's objective. Demand for desired capital stock was viewed as determined by Government policy measures, farm size, farmer age and the initial development state of the farm. Adjustment of actual capital stock to the desired level was viewed as determined by the level of cash at the beginning of each period and windfall gains or losses in net income in the current period. The results provide some basis for the better targeting of future policy measures to the farm sector. The study was limited by lack of a priori knowledge of inter-farm differences in the desire for capital, by the lack of a precise measurement of actual capital stock and the failure to account for interdependencies in the consumption-investment decisions that take place on farms. These limitations could provide avenues for future research

mm-bigness in compatible systems

Taylor-Wiles type lifting theorems allow one to deduce that for $\rho$ a "sufficiently nice" $l$-adic representation of the absolute Galois group of a number field whose semi-simplified reduction modulo $l$, denoted $\overline{\rho}$, comes from an automorphic representation then so does $\rho$. The recent lifting theorems of Barnet-Lamb-Gee-Geraghty-Taylor impose a technical condition, called \emph{$m$-big}, upon the residual representation $\overline{\rho}$. Snowden-Wiles proved that for a sufficiently irreducible compatible system of Galois representations, the residual images are \emph{big} at a set of places of Dirichlet density $1$. We demonstrate the analogous result in the \emph{$m$-big} setting using a mild generalization of their argument

Learning and Games

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning In this chapter, I argue that good video games recruit good learning and that a game's design is inherently connected to designing good learning for players. I start with a perspective on learning now common in the Learning Sciences that argues that people primarily think and learn through experiences they have had, not through abstract calculations and generalizations. People store these experiences in memory -- and human long-term memory is now viewed as nearly limitless -- and use them to run simulations in their minds to prepare for problem solving in new situations. These simulations help them to form hypotheses about how to proceed in the new situation based on past experiences. The chapter also discusses the conditions experience must meet if it is to be optimal for learning and shows how good video games can deliver such optimal learning experiences. Some of the issues covered include: identity and learning; models and model-based thinking; the control of avatars and "empathy for a complex system"; distributed intelligence and cross-functional teams for learning; motivation, and ownership; emotion in learning; and situated meaning, that is, the ways in which games represent verbal meaning through images, actions, and dialogue, not just other words and definitions

pp-adic Langlands functoriality for the definite unitary group

We formalise a notion of $p$-adic Langlands functoriality for the definite unitary group. This extends the classical notion of Langlands functoriality to the setting of eigenvarieties. We apply some results of Chenevier to obtain some cases of $p$-adic Langlands functoriality by interpolating known cases of classical Langlands functoriality