Agricultural efficiency of rice farmers in Myanmar : a case study in selected areas

This paper try to analyze unique data set for rice producing agricultural households in some selected areas of Bago and Yangon divisions to examine the households' profit efficiency and the relationship between farm and household attributes and profit inefficiency using a Cobb-Douglas production frontier function. The frequency distribution reveals that the mean technical inefficiency is 0.1627 with a minimum of 3 percent and maximum of 73 percent which indicates that, on average, about 16% of potential maximum output is lost owing to technical inefficiency in both studied areas. While 85% of the sample farms exhibit profit inefficiency of 20% or less, about 40% of the sample farms is found to exhibit technical inefficiency of 20% or less, indicating that among the sample farms technical inefficiency is much lower than profit inefficiency.Myanmar, Rice, Farmers, Agricultural economies, Household, Efficiency, Production frontier function

Predicting Human Cooperation

The Prisoner's Dilemma has been a subject of extensive research due to its importance in understanding the ever-present tension between individual self-interest and social benefit. A strictly dominant strategy in a Prisoner's Dilemma (defection), when played by both players, is mutually harmful. Repetition of the Prisoner's Dilemma can give rise to cooperation as an equilibrium, but defection is as well, and this ambiguity is difficult to resolve. The numerous behavioral experiments investigating the Prisoner's Dilemma highlight that players often cooperate, but the level of cooperation varies significantly with the specifics of the experimental predicament. We present the first computational model of human behavior in repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games that unifies the diversity of experimental observations in a systematic and quantitatively reliable manner. Our model relies on data we integrated from many experiments, comprising 168,386 individual decisions. The computational model is composed of two pieces: the first predicts the first-period action using solely the structural game parameters, while the second predicts dynamic actions using both game parameters and history of play. Our model is extremely successful not merely at fitting the data, but in predicting behavior at multiple scales in experimental designs not used for calibration, using only information about the game structure. We demonstrate the power of our approach through a simulation analysis revealing how to best promote human cooperation.Comment: Added references. New inline citation style. Added small portions of text. Re-compiled Rmarkdown file with updated ggplot2 so small aesthetic changes to plot

Pour une sociologie des pratiques d'assemblée : note sur un champ de recherche quelque peu délaissé

International audienceEn France, les réflexions engagées sur les élus depuis une vingtaine d'années ont négligé de s'intéresser aux arènes parlementaires, alors même que dans d'autres pays, les pratiques d'assemblée sont un objet de recherche particulièrement étudié. Reprenant une partie de la littérature américaine encore méconnue en France, l'article dresse des perspectives de recherche sur le travail parlementaire des élus. Il montre que la sociologie de la profession politique a tout intérêt, désormais, à développer des recherches plus systématiques sur les activités d'assemblée

La politique des bons offices: l'élu, l'action publique et le territoire

International audienceL'exercice du mandat représentatif place les élus dans des jeux de dépendance particulièrement forts. Malgré l'autonomie reconnue aux représentants, ceux-ci sont fortement incités à défendre les dossiers les plus favorables à leurs électeurs et/ou aux groupes organisés dont le soutien peut renforcer leur chance de réélection. C'est au niveau du territoire que s'exprime avec le plus d'intensité le jeu de la dépendance, non seulement parce que c'est là que les élus sont les plus sollicités par les électeurs, mais aussi parce que les associations, groupes de citoyens, lobbies et syndicats n'ont jamais autant d'influence que lorsqu'ils interviennent au niveau de la circonscription, là où les élus tirent les ressources les plus durables pour se maintenir au pouvoir (réseaux de clientèles, fidélités politiques, soutiens financiers, liens avec la presse, etc.). L'article analyse les conditions par lesquelles les élus se transforment en "passeurs" entre leur circonscription et l'assemblée où ils siègent. Le travail des élus se poursuit ainsi hors des enceintes d'assemblée, dans la circonscription, où ils tentent de mettre à profit leur mandat pour intercéder auprès des acteurs du territoire, tenter d'orienter des projets publics dans un sens conforme à leurs intérêts et, in fine, renforcer leur position élective

Master of Arts

thesisKorean women's minds, bodies, and histories have been used by both the South Korean and Japanese governments to further national political agendas since the promulgation of women's education. Women's education was portrayed as necessary for the good of the nation in Chosŏn Korea, and they were to use their education to become better mothers and wives. Women were to give birth to more children in order to literally create and mold the next generation of good citizens for the nation. After colonization by Japan, Korean women were expected to learn the values and ethics of a good imperial subject, and to pass them on to their children. Although many women took advantage of their new opportunities for education, ultimately their bid for independence through education was redirected toward nationalist endeavors. Women's bodies were used as cheap sources of labor, and they often suffered abuse due to their inferior social status and inability to fight back against their oppressors. Finally, women's bodies were used for Japanese soldiers' sexual needs as Korean women were forced into sexual slavery under the comfort women system. These women suffered horribly in comfort stations, and were subjected to further pain and humiliation upon their return home, when many were rejected by their families for their supposed "defilement." The comfort women's stories have remained largely untold until the early 1990s when a more conducive social environment allowed many to step forward and finally tell their stories. Once again, however, they have been denied legitimacy, as the Japanese government initially refused to admit to participation in the comfort system and to this day contests its involvement. Furthermore, the humanitarians that are helping the comfort women pursue acknowledgment and compensation are only interested in telling the worst stories in order to construct a black and white paradigm of Japanese cruelty and aggression. This is not bringing justice to the history and lives of all comfort women, but once again using women for a political agenda. Women, past and present, have suffered long enough, and their lives should not be rewritten to serve a political agenda

Temperature preferences of tropical fishes and the influence of local abiotic and biotic factors

Tiffany Nay examined temperature preferences of tropical fish and factors that influence these preferences. She found that tropical fish do prefer specific temperatures and these are influenced by habitat quality and interactions with other species. This information is critical to predict the future distributions of tropical fishes under ocean warming

Modeling of quad-station module cluster tools using petri nets

The semiconductor industry is highly competitive, and with the recent chip shortage, the throughput of wafers has become more important than ever. One of the tools that the industry has deployed is to use of quad-station modules instead of the traditional single-station modules that allow for higher throughput and better wafer consistency by processing multiple wafers at the same time and distributing work. The industry trend is to use multiple transfer chamber robots to stack the quad-station modules in a series, particularly for etch products. In this work, the quad-station cluster tool wafer movement is modeled by using Petri net as a process-bounded system. The system analysis and simulations are performed by using timed and colored Petri nets. The results are useful to deepen our understanding of the discrete-event dynamics of quad-station module cluster tools and offer the highly needed insight into their efficient and deadlock-free operation

Betting and Belief: Prediction Markets and Attribution of Climate Change

Despite much scientific evidence, a large fraction of the American public doubts that greenhouse gases are causing global warming. We present a simulation model as a computational test-bed for climate prediction markets. Traders adapt their beliefs about future temperatures based on the profits of other traders in their social network. We simulate two alternative climate futures, in which global temperatures are primarily driven either by carbon dioxide or by solar irradiance. These represent, respectively, the scientific consensus and a hypothesis advanced by prominent skeptics. We conduct sensitivity analyses to determine how a variety of factors describing both the market and the physical climate may affect traders' beliefs about the cause of global climate change. Market participation causes most traders to converge quickly toward believing the "true" climate model, suggesting that a climate market could be useful for building public consensus.Comment: All code and data for the model is available at http://johnjnay.com/predMarket/. Forthcoming in Proceedings of the 2016 Winter Simulation Conference. IEEE Pres

Make Your (Punctuation) Mark!

Punctuation marks are a part of our daily lives, and yet, we rarely take time to think about them. This presentation serves to counter that, diving deep into the histories and origins of various punctuation marks. Each student in Honors 1320 chose a punctuation mark to individually research, learning more about why we use the marks that we do. We hope that through this research, people can gain a deeper appreciation for punctuation marks and their histories. Students and additional presenters from Honors 1320: Annie Bramson, Audrey Douglas, Micaela Garcia, Erin Hamilton, Lucy Hankins, Gillian Jarrard, Eli Moss, Cynthia Narkin, Michelle Norman, Olivia Ownby, Kieran Paskins, Cambria Roberts, Gracie Shippen, Kutter Wrigh

Effect of leading-edge geometry on boundary-layer receptivity to freestream sound

The receptivity to freestream sound of the laminar boundary layer over a semi-infinite flat plate with an elliptic leading edge is simulated numerically. The incompressible flow past the flat plate is computed by solving the full Navier-Stokes equations in general curvilinear coordinates. A finite-difference method which is second-order accurate in space and time is used. Spatial and temporal developments of the Tollmien-Schlichting wave in the boundary layer, due to small-amplitude time-harmonic oscillations of the freestream velocity that closely simulate a sound wave travelling parallel to the plate, are observed. The effect of leading-edge curvature is studied by varying the aspect ratio of the ellipse. The boundary layer over the flat plate with a sharper leading edge is found to be less receptive. The relative contribution of the discontinuity in curvature at the ellipse-flat-plate juncture to receptivity is investigated by smoothing the juncture with a polynomial. Continuous curvature leads to less receptivity. A new geometry of the leading edge, a modified super ellipse, which provides continuous curvature at the juncture with the flat plate, is used to study the effect of continuous curvature and inherent pressure gradient on receptivity