Assisting Vietnamese Mango Farmers to Capture Greater Benefi ts through Improved Supply Chain Management

In the developing countries, traditional supply chains for fresh produce are giving way to new supermarket-led supply chains. The rapid transformation in the fruit and vegetable sector is due to the meteoric rise of supermarkets, hypermarkets, superstores, neighbourhood stores, convenience stores, and discount stores, which are impacting on smallholder farmers. This change is also impacting on both upstream and downstream market intermediaries through the demand for safe, high-quality produce that has been produced in a sustainable manner. Problems with procurement in traditional supply chains include few product standards, inconsistent supply, highly variable transaction costs, and limited market information. Supermarkets are now setting new procurement practices and supply systems which focus on reducing costs and improving quality to enable them to sell at lower prices. This will allow them to win over consumers and to obtain a larger market share. However, the ability of smallholder farmers, collector agents, and wholesalers in the Mekong Delta to meet safe food levels and the quality demands of domestic and overseas supermarkets can only be obtained through improving their production and supply chain practices. The implementation of new production and postharvest practices and the modernization of these supply chains may preclude many smallholder farmers from participating. Smallholder farmers must develop risk minimization strategies, such as forming collaborative marketing groups, implementing new crop management and production systems, improving the packaging, and creating more efficient transport methods and handling practices to provide a safe, competitively priced, high-quality product. Understanding the supply chain and where to intervene are essential if farmers and all supply chain participants are to benefit. In this paper, we describe mango supply chains in the Mekong Delta, provide empirical data collected from surveys, and highlight improvements smallholder farmers have been making to achieve greater benefits

Novel genetic loci associated with hippocampal volume

The hippocampal formation is a brain structure integrally involved in episodic memory, spatial navigation, cognition and stress responsiveness. Structural abnormalities in hippocampal volume and shape are found in several common neuropsychiatric disorders. To identify the genetic underpinnings of hippocampal structure here we perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 33,536 individuals and discover six independent loci significantly associated with hippocampal volume, four of them novel. Of the novel loci, three lie within genes (ASTN2, DPP4 and MAST4) and one is found 200 kb upstream of SHH. A hippocampal subfield analysis shows that a locus within the MSRB3 gene shows evidence of a localized effect along the dentate gyrus, subiculum, CA1 and fissure. Further, we show that genetic variants associated with decreased hippocampal volume are also associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease (rg =-0.155). Our findings suggest novel biological pathways through which human genetic variation influences hippocampal volume and risk for neuropsychiatric illness

Assisting Vietnamese Mango Farmers to Capture Greater Benefits through Improved Supply Chain Management

In the developing countries, traditional supply chains for fresh produce are giving way to new supermarket-led supply chains. The rapid transformation in the fruit and vegetable sector is due to the meteoric rise of supermarkets, hypermarkets, superstores, neighborhood stores, convenience stores, and discount stores, which are impacting on smallholder farmers. Th is change is also impacting on both upstream and downstream market intermediaries through the demand for safe, high-quality produce that has been produced in a sustainable manner. Problems with procurement in traditional supply chains include few product standards, inconsistent supply, highly variable transaction costs, and limited market information. Supermarkets are now setting new procurement practices and supply systems which focus on reducing costs and improving quality to enable them to sell at lower prices. Th is will allow them to win over consumers and to obtain a larger market share. However, the ability of smallholder farmers, collector agents, and wholesalers in the Mekong Delta to meet safe food levels and the quality demands of domestic and overseas supermarkets can only be obtained through improving their production and supply chain practices. The implementation of new production and postharvest practices and the modernization of these supply chains may preclude many smallholder farmers from participating. Smallholder farmers must develop risk minimization strategies, such as forming collaborative marketing groups, implementing new crop management and production systems, improving the packaging, and creating more efficient transport methods and handling practices to provide a safe, competitively priced, high-quality product. Understanding the supply chain and where to intervene are essential if farmers and all supply chain participants are to benefi t. In this paper, we describe mango supply chains in the Mekong Delta, provide empirical data collected from surveys, and highlight improvements smallholder farmers have been making to achieve greater benefits

On efficient approaches for solving a cake filtration model under parameter variation

In this work, we are considering a mathematical model for an industrial cake filtration process. The model is of moving boundary type and involves a set of parameters, which vary in a given range. We are interested in the case when the model has to be solved for thousands of different parameter values, and therefore model order reduction (MOR) is desirable, so that from full order solutions with one or several sets of parameters we derive a reduced model, which is used further to perform the simulations with new parameters. We study and compare the performance of several MOR techniques known from the literature. We start with standard MOR based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and consider also several more advanced techniques based on combination of MOR and reduced basis techniques, including approaches relying on computation of sensitivities. The transformation from a moving to a fixed domain introduces time varying coefficients into the equations, which makes it reasonable to use an offline/online decomposition. Several test cases involving different simulation time horizons and short time training are considered. Numerical tests show that the discussed methods can approximate the full model solution accurately and work efficiently for new parameters belonging to a given parameter range

Uncovering Fractional Monodromy

<p>The uncovering of the role of monodromy in integrable Hamiltonian fibrations has been one of the major advances in the study of integrable Hamiltonian systems in the past few decades: on one hand monodromy turned out to be the most fundamental obstruction to the existence of global action-angle coordinates while, on the other hand, it provided the correct classical analogue for the interpretation of the structure of quantum joint spectra. Fractional monodromy is a generalization of the concept of monodromy: instead of restricting our attention to the toric part of the fibration we extend our scope to also consider singular fibres. In this paper we analyze fractional monodromy for n (1):(-n (2)) resonant Hamiltonian systems with n (1), n (2) coprime natural numbers. We consider, in particular, systems that for n (1), n (2) > 1 contain one-parameter families of singular fibres which are 'curled tori'. We simplify the geometry of the fibration by passing to an appropriate branched covering. In the branched covering the curled tori and their neighborhood become untwisted thus simplifying the geometry of the fibration: we essentially obtain the same type of generalized monodromy independently of n (1), n (2). Fractional monodromy is then recovered by pushing the results obtained in the branched covering back to the original system.</p>