Maize and beans marketing in Kenya: the interaction and effectiveness of the informal and formal marketing systems

The study analyses the functioning of the Kenyan domestic maize and Yearns marketing system with special regard to the interaction of the formal (controlled) and informal (uncontrolled) sub-systems. It attempts to reduce the uncertainty as to what effects relaxation of present controls would have. The relaxation of controls has been suggested in the last three Development Plans but no actions have yet been taken. Initially the determinants of the marketing systems' performance — framework for maize and beans marketing operations, structure and conduct of the marketing systems — are described and analysed. This is followed by an evaluation of the performance guided by the stated objectives of the controls: to benefit producers and consumers. To this end, more specifically, the analysis includes an evaluation of the extent to which the marketing systems operate at lowest possible costs (achieve pricing efficiency), prevent exploitation of farmers and consumers (achieve pricing efficiency) and provide secure outlets for producers and sources for consumers. Survey information of the Central Bureau of Statistics and data gathered by a Maize and Beans Trader Survey carried out in markets of Western, Central and Eastern Kenya with the assistance of the FAO/Kenya Government Marketing Development Project provided the empirical base for the analysis. In summary, the analysis suggests that the objectives of controls are not being achieved and in fact that the present system of controls contributes to marketing inefficiencies. The control legislation has created a marketing framework which is conducive to low operational efficiency as reflected in high marketing costs; low pricing efficiency as reflected in poor market and seasonal integration and relativelv high excess profits; and high instability of market conditions. The analysis further indicates that those most affected by the controls are smallholders and rural and urban low-income consumers whereas those that benefit most are large scale farmers. The result is a negative income distribution effect. In conclusion, it is recommended that controls be relaxed in conjunction with other measures to improve the situation. This would further one of the major objectives of the present development strategy to alleviate rural and urban poverty

Decontrolling the maize marketing system in Kenya

In this paper the authors assess the major deficiencies of the present maize marketing system in Kenya, discuss the implications of a completely decontrolled maize market, analyse the effects of different types of stabilisation schemes, and review the Indian and Pakistani experience with private performance and various types of government intervention in food grain marketing systems. An alternative scheme for regulating the Kenyan maize market is suggested and proposals are made for the implementation of such a scheme. The most appropriate form of control of the maize marketing system in Kenya would seem to be a price stabilisation scheme with bufferstock operations to be carried out by the Maize and Produce Board. The Board would act as a buyer and seller of maize to keep price fluctuations within certain limits, and in addition keep a strategic reserve in case of drought. The implementation of this system requires a network of rural collection centres and Maize and Produce Board stores, located in these centres as well as in strategic markets in deficit areas. A market information system has to be established and movement restrictions lifted, and the price structure and rules for the Board's operations have to be clearly defined

The PAX Toolkit and its Applications at Tevatron and LHC

At the CHEP03 conference we launched the Physics Analysis eXpert (PAX), a C++ toolkit released for the use in advanced high energy physics (HEP) analyses. This toolkit allows to define a level of abstraction beyond detector reconstruction by providing a general, persistent container model for HEP events. Physics objects such as particles, vertices and collisions can easily be stored, accessed and manipulated. Bookkeeping of relations between these objects (like decay trees, vertex and collision separation, etc.) including deep copies is fully provided by the relation management. Event container and associated objects represent a uniform interface for algorithms and facilitate the parallel development and evaluation of different physics interpretations of individual events. So-called analysis factories, which actively identify and distinguish different physics processes and study systematic uncertainties, can easily be realized with the PAX toolkit. PAX is officially released to experiments at Tevatron and LHC. Being explored by a growing user community, it is applied in a number of complex physics analyses, two of which are presented here. We report the successful application in studies of t-tbar production at the Tevatron and Higgs searches in the channel t-tbar-Higgs at the LHC and give a short outlook on further developments

Reception of the Herzog Stjepan Vukcic Kosaca in Herzegovina in the Second Half of the 20th Century

U radu se nastoji prikazati recepcija hercega Stjepana Vukčića Kosače u Hercegovini u drugoj polovici 20. stoljeća s posebnim naglaskom na razdoblje u kojemu je Bosna i Hercegovina bila jedna od republika bivše Jugoslavije. S obzirom na činjenicu da bi se barem početno znanje o hercegu Stjepanu trebalo steći tijekom osnovnoga i srednjoškolskoga obrazovanja, najprije je dat osvrt na nastavne planove i programe u kojima su, između ostaloga, naznačeni ciljevi (zadatci) nastave povijesti, a zatim se analiziraju tekstovi u udžbenicima povijesti koji su bili u uporabi u bh. školama (osnovnim i gimnazijama), u kojima se u određenim nastavnim jedinicama obrađuje djelovanje hercega Stjepana. Sudeći prema nastavnim planovima i programima, kao i sadržaju udžbenika iz druge polovice 20. stoljeća (barem nama dostupnima), mladež u Hercegovini u razmatranom razdoblju nije mogla mnogo saznati i naučiti o ovoj povijesnoj osobi, s čijom je titulom povezano ime prostora u kojemu žive. Na kraju istražuje se hercegova prisutnost u nazivima ulica, trgova i institucija u hercegovačkim gradovima i općinama. Istraživanje pokazuje da je tek u novije vrijeme evidentan interes nekih pojedinaca i institucija koje žele ovoj povijesnoj osobi dati značenje koje joj pripada. Naime, sve ulice u Hercegovini koje nose njegovo ime, kao i jedna institucija, imenovane su nakon 1990. godine.With the aim of presenting the reception of the Herzog Stjepan Vukcic Kosaca in Hercegovina in the second half of the 20th century, the paper analyzes the contents of history textbooks that write about the life and work of the Herzog Stjepan and his presence in the names of streets, squares and institutions in Herzegovinian towns and municipalities. Considering the second half of the 20th century, most attention is paid to the period in which Bosnia and Herzegovina was one of the republics of the former Yugoslavia. To illustrate the contents from medieval history, or the ones related to Stjepan, most important are school curricula, in which, apart from the teaching units and lessons, the teaching of history was particularly indicative, when during this period the constant task was "spreading fraternity and unity" or "developing patriotic awareness among students", the emphasis being on teaching history of the "newer period". Judging by the curricula and the content of textbooks from the second half of the 20th century (at least those available to us), the youth of Herzegovina in the mentioned period could not learn much about this historical person whose name is associated with the name of the area in which they live. Namely, by looking at the texts of the textbooks up to the 90s, it is evident that the texts in the textbooks differ, both in scope and emphasis on certain facts. What all the authors mention is taking of the \u27Herzog\u27 title in 1448 and the fall of Herzegovina under the Ottoman rule, whereas all the other facts about the Herzog Stjepan vary from one text to another. As there were no official textbooks in the region of Herzegovina in the 90s of the 20th century, the paper, as an example, presents the texts only from two textbooks (one for elementary school and the other for grammar school) used in some schools in Herzegovina which worked according to the Croatian curriculum, where we can find hardly any information about the Herzog Stjepan. Finally, the results of the research of the Herzog\u27s presence in the names of streets, squares and institutions of the Herzegovinian cities and municipalities show that the interest of some individuals and institutions, who want to give this historical person the significance he deserves, has only recently become evident. Namely, all the streets in Herzegovina named after the Herzog, as well as one institution, got this name after 1990

Tissue Phenomics for prognostic biomarker discovery in low- and intermediate-risk prostate cancer

Tissue Phenomics is the discipline of mining tissue images to identify patterns that are related to clinical outcome providing potential prognostic and predictive value. This involves the discovery process from assay development, image analysis, and data mining to the final interpretation and validation of the findings. Importantly, this process is not linear but allows backward steps and optimization loops over multiple sub-processes. We provide a detailed description of the Tissue Phenomics methodology while exemplifying each step on the application of prostate cancer recurrence prediction. In particular, we automatically identified tissue-based biomarkers having significant prognostic value for low-and intermediate-risk prostate cancer patients (Gleason scores 6-7b) after radical prostatectomy. We found that promising phenes were related to CD8(+) and CD68(+) cells in the microenvironment of cancerous glands in combination with the local micro-vascularization. Recurrence prediction based on the selected phenes yielded accuracies up to 83% thereby clearly outperforming prediction based on the Gleason score. Moreover, we compared different machine learning algorithms to combine the most relevant phenes resulting in increased accuracies of 88% for tumor progression prediction. These findings will be of potential use for future prognostic tests for prostate cancer patients and provide a proof-of-principle of the Tissue Phenomics approach

The full-ORF clone resource of the German cDNA Consortium

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>With the completion of the human genome sequence the functional analysis and characterization of the encoded proteins has become the next urging challenge in the post-genome era. The lack of comprehensive ORFeome resources has thus far hampered systematic applications by protein gain-of-function analysis. Gene and ORF coverage with full-length ORF clones thus needs to be extended. In combination with a unique and versatile cloning system, these will provide the tools for genome-wide systematic functional analyses, to achieve a deeper insight into complex biological processes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we describe the generation of a full-ORF clone resource of human genes applying the Gateway cloning technology (Invitrogen). A pipeline for efficient cloning and sequencing was developed and a sample tracking database was implemented to streamline the clone production process targeting more than 2,200 different ORFs. In addition, a robust cloning strategy was established, permitting the simultaneous generation of two clone variants that contain a particular ORF with as well as without a stop codon by the implementation of only one additional working step into the cloning procedure. Up to 92 % of the targeted ORFs were successfully amplified by PCR and more than 93 % of the amplicons successfully cloned.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The German cDNA Consortium ORFeome resource currently consists of more than 3,800 sequence-verified entry clones representing ORFs, cloned with and without stop codon, for about 1,700 different gene loci. 177 splice variants were cloned representing 121 of these genes. The entry clones have been used to generate over 5,000 different expression constructs, providing the basis for functional profiling applications. As a member of the recently formed international ORFeome collaboration we substantially contribute to generating and providing a whole genome human ORFeome collection in a unique cloning system that is made freely available in the community.</p

Forward pi^0 Production and Associated Transverse Energy Flow in Deep-Inelastic Scattering at HERA

Deep-inelastic positron-proton interactions at low values of Bjorken-x down to x \approx 4.10^-5 which give rise to high transverse momentum pi^0 mesons are studied with the H1 experiment at HERA. The inclusive cross section for pi^0 mesons produced at small angles with respect to the proton remnant (the forward region) is presented as a function of the transverse momentum and energy of the pi^0 and of the four-momentum transfer Q^2 and Bjorken-x. Measurements are also presented of the transverse energy flow in events containing a forward pi^0 meson. Hadronic final state calculations based on QCD models implementing different parton evolution schemes are confronted with the data.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures and 3 table

Multi-Jet Event Rates in Deep Inelastic Scattering and Determination of the Strong Coupling Constant

Jet event rates in deep inelastic ep scattering at HERA are investigated applying the modified JADE jet algorithm. The analysis uses data taken with the H1 detector in 1994 and 1995. The data are corrected for detector and hadronization effects and then compared with perturbative QCD predictions using next-to-leading order calculations. The strong coupling constant alpha_S(M_Z^2) is determined evaluating the jet event rates. Values of alpha_S(Q^2) are extracted in four different bins of the negative squared momentum transfer~\qq in the range from 40 GeV2 to 4000 GeV2. A combined fit of the renormalization group equation to these several alpha_S(Q^2) values results in alpha_S(M_Z^2) = 0.117+-0.003(stat)+0.009-0.013(syst)+0.006(jet algorithm).Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, this version to appear in Eur. Phys. J.; it replaces first posted hep-ex/9807019 which had incorrect figure 4

Measurement of Leading Proton and Neutron Production in Deep Inelastic Scattering at HERA

Deep--inelastic scattering events with a leading baryon have been detected by the H1 experiment at HERA using a forward proton spectrometer and a forward neutron calorimeter. Semi--inclusive cross sections have been measured in the kinematic region 2 <= Q^2 <= 50 GeV^2, 6.10^-5 <= x <= 6.10^-3 and baryon p_T <= MeV, for events with a final state proton with energy 580 <= E' <= 740 GeV, or a neutron with energy E' >= 160 GeV. The measurements are used to test production models and factorization hypotheses. A Regge model of leading baryon production which consists of pion, pomeron and secondary reggeon exchanges gives an acceptable description of both semi-inclusive cross sections in the region 0.7 <= E'/E_p <= 0.9, where E_p is the proton beam energy. The leading neutron data are used to estimate for the first time the structure function of the pion at small Bjorken--x.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Eur. Phys.