1,720,955 research outputs found

    Does it pay to switch from free grazing to stall feeding? Impact of stall feeding practice on household welfare in Tigrai Ethiopia

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    In this paper, efforts were made to the impact of full and seasonal stall feeding technology on households’ economic, ecological, and social welfare outcome indicators in rural Northern Ethiopia using data obtained from the survey of 518 rural farmers. In order to address our primary objective, an endogenous switching regression model was applied. The overall result indicated that SF adoption ensures significant gains in terms of the specified outcome indicators. Using endogenous switching regression models, we estimated different outcome indicators for both adopters from adoption (ATT), and non-adopters had they adopted (ATU). It is identified that there would be a decline of 21% in milk production and productivity if adopters would not have adopted this technology while non-adopters are estimated to increase their milk production and productivity by 100 and 48% if they would adopt this technology. The results further show that SF adoption had a significant increment in the lactation period. An increase of consumption expenditure by 17% from FSF and 44% in the case of SSF could be considered significant on livelihoods for smallholder farmers. On average, adoption of SF increased manure use in the range of 258–294 kg for adopters. The results showed that SF has decreased the propensity of hiring labor by about 29% and purchase of animal feed by 31%. We have found that participation in SF, on average, decreased total cattle stock by 1 TLU but increased the probability of keeping milking cow by 23%. The adoption of SF increased the likelihood of participating in an animal sale market by 29% for adopters and by 47% for non-adopters had they decided to adopt. The adoption of SF leads to a gain in a number of plants of 11 trees and 29 m of physical construction for the typical adopter and 36 trees and 133 m if the typical non-adopter were to adopt the SF technology on their plots. The adoption process also increased the propensity of growing trees by 19% and decreased household animal shock experience by a probability of 19% for adopters and about 15%

    Welfare and food security response of animal feed and water resource scarcity in Northern Ethiopia

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    Abstract The scarcity of grazing and water for an animal has a negative effect on household welfare and food security either by affecting livestock production directly, affecting crop or off-farm income due to labor reallocation or through its direct impact on time leisure consumption. The economic impacts of resource (grazing and water) scarcity on welfare are undermined. Thus, a better understanding that is derived from the factual evidence is required. The first objective of this paper is to explore the link between natural resource scarcity and per capita food consumption expenditure (PCFE) as proxy for welfare and food security followed by the second objective of analyzing whether this effect is uniform across all quantile groups and there is gender differential effect using distance and shadow price as resource scarcity indicators. The paper used a relatively unique data set from a randomly drawn 518 sample farmers in Northern Ethiopia. To address our first objective, we employ the IV two-stage least square estimation for welfare and probit model for food security drawing on non-separable farm household model. Our estimates show that about 48% of the households were food secure while 52% were food insecure. Our results confirmed the theoretical prediction that resource scarcity affects household PCFE and food security adversely as predicted by the downward spiral hypothesis. The results indicate that animal feed and water scarcity have an important impact on welfare and food security. As expected, in aggregate, reducing time spent searching for water per day leads to an increase in PCFE and food security. Similarly, a decrease in time wastage for searching grazing increase PCFE and food security respectively, and an increment of PCFE and food security is achieved by a reduction in crop residue transporting time per day. The gender differential analysis signals that increasing resource scarcity results in low PCFE and food security, with the male are considerably likely to have less food consumption expenditure and being food insecure more as compared to female households. The total impact of time spent searching for water, grazing, and transporting straw on per PCFE is − 0.142%, − 0.102%, and − 0.092%, respectively, and decreasing reaching time to a water, grazing, and straw source by 0.6 min will increase PCFE by 354 ETB, 254 ETB, and 229 ETB for the median household. Depending on results from the quantile regression, the effect of water and feed scarcity is not uniform across the food consumption distribution

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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

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    We 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

    Author Index

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    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

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    We 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
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