1,720,959 research outputs found
Sustainable small-scale animal agriculture and food security in Africa
Full text linkFor Africa, smallholder livestock farming is crucial for rural livelihood and food security. Understanding the connections between food security, gender inequality, and climate change can help us find solutions to Africa’s persistent food crisis. Women’s participation in small-scale animal agriculture helps ensure the food security of households; however, climate change has a detrimental effect on animal productivity, so prioritizing climate-smart animal husbandry techniques is critical. The shift in animal agriculture toward sustainability must be fueled by gender-sensitive strategies. Production and food security will improve through a transdisciplinary strategy that recognizes the connections among small-scale animal agriculture, climate change, and gender issues. Policies that are adapted to local conditions and encourage equitable growth in small-scale animal agriculture will be necessary to address the challenges this sector faces and improve food security. The majority of developing nations have institutional and technical obstacles that could prohibit the small-scale farming sector from participating in new food security efforts aimed at enhancing rural livelihoods. Therefore, it is highly doubtful that any strategy created to improve food security while downplaying the importance of smallholder agriculture will be long-term viable. The discussion makes clear the importance of small-scale animal agriculture and offers potential solutions that could be adopted to transform the small-scale animal agriculture sector to increase its value and enhance food security across the continent.
Relevance and feasibility of women's involvement in promoting sustainable food production and security in Southern Africa
Full text linkHarnessing women’s potential for food production and security has been a challenge in Southern Africa. The face of food production in Southern Africa is often female, but more often than not, their roles are generally undervalued and constrained by gender inequalities and limitations on their access to resources, services, and market opportunities. This chapter explores how women involvement in food production can have a positive impact on food security in Southern Africa. The gender aspect of food security assume significance, as it is widely recognized that women are the custodian of food production in many communities in Southern Africa. There is a tendency of men and women participating unevenly in food production, have unequal access to productive resources and exhibit different levels of engagement in rural, urban and home-based food production. Despite this anomaly, there is still a common understanding that food production needs to be increased in order to cope with the increased human population and achieving food security in the region. With this in mind, food production and security have emerged as key development targets in Southern Africa. This has propelled the urgent need for promoting food production, reducing food insecurity and poverty reduction in its totality. One of the factors contributing to perpetual low food production and insecurity has been gender discrimination and/or lack of participation of women in agricultural programs and projects. In this chapter there is an attempt to describe the impact of gender-based discrimination on food production and its implication on food security. The indispensable role and challenges faced by women in food production are highlighted. The need to invest in education and training of women to support food production systems in order to accrue maximum benefit is acknowledged. In this regard, it is imperative that planning and implementation of any food production programs focusing on improving food security should be based on gender sensitive policies. Policies which give women due recognition as far as food production decision making processes are concerned are sought. The chapter concludes with the understanding that involvement of women in food production becomes a key component of addressing food insecurity in Southern Africa. The vulnerability of people in Southern Africa to food insecurity depends both on measures that can be implemented in a given context and the capacity of families, and women in particular, to respond to food shortages. It is important, therefore that food security remains high on the regional development agenda. The region should prioritize appropriate interventions which help women fully participate in food production and develop sustainable livelihoods
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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