1,720,957 research outputs found
Community Participation in Developing and Assessing Household Food Security in the Highlands of Northern Thailand
No full textAbstractThe communities in the highland environments are food insecure, depriving of land ownership, and less accessible to infrastructures and services. The present study aimed to understand how the highland communities perceived and defined their food security, and to develop community food security assessment. Two upland villages and three highland villagers in the Chiang Mai province, northern Thailand were selected. Quality research methods and tools were employed. The meaning of food security as given by farmers could be grouped into seven attributes. Using the FAO food security framework, there were 18 key indicators covered farmers’ meaning and perception of food security. Based on new modified indicators, the community's self-assessment showed that each village had reached different levels of food security. Thus understanding farmers’ perception and assessment of their food security would have practical implications for enhancing community food security
Factors Impact on Farmers’ Adaptation to Drought in Maize Production in Highland Area of Central Vietnam
No full textAbstractThis paper assesses factors impact on adaptation to drought in maize production of farmers in Dakrong district – a highland district of Central Vietnam. The study was conducted with 180 farmers, being selected randomly from three communes of the district. Factor analysis and Multinomial Logit regression indicated six main groups of factors impacting on four separate adaptation options (called ADP) in maize production in the area. In which, the increasing in household's capitals, experience, maize production scale, and gender and non-farm income significantly increased the probability of applying at least one adaptation measure in maize production of the farmers
Building Local Capacities in Natural Resources Management for Food Security in the Highlands of Northern Thailand
No full textAbstractThe objectives were to assess vulnerability context of the Karen community and to enhance community-based natural resource management in relation to agricultural systems and food security. We facilitated key informant and focus group discussions, and conducted household interviews. In the study area of Mae Khanad watershed, the Karen's traditional rice based farming livelihoods were threatened by demographic change and movement, accelerating environment degradation, declining access to suitable agricultural land, and increasing restricted use of forest resources. A few households experienced rice deficits from 3 to 7 months. Despite the income disparity between the lowland and upland-highland villages, the bonding relationships between the northern Thai and the Karen communities enabled an effective management of communal irrigation systems, and mutual understanding between the local conservation officials and the Karen communities helped lessened in land use disputes, and paved way for promising co-management of natural resources. A tentative step-wise procedure for utilizing natural resources was proposed. Unfortunately the local administrative organization was less active and less supportive about community's collective action in natural resource management
Assessing the Social-ecological Resilience of Organic Farmers in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand
Get PDFSince resilience is continuing to make its rise to the top of the sustainable development policies, monitoring resilience has become critical because it provides stakeholders with practical actions that can strengthen the state of adaptability to cope with all kinds of change. In this study, resilience, and social theories, such as grounded theory and technography, were integrated as a conceptual framework to produce a specific set of indicators, which yielded forty-seven indices, called social-ecological resilience indicators (SERIs). This study attempts to manage the temporal and spatial scales of resilience systems and to make such indicators suitable for organic rice production systems in four districts of Chiang Mai Province. A questionnaire was utilized to survey fifty-three organic farmers, and the results of the descriptive data analysis indicated that 0.54 (1.00 = the maximum) had been the respondents’ average score. Meanwhile, the highest and the lowest scores were serially 0.69 and 0.40. In addition, the findings revealed that Kendall’s Tau-b rank correlation’s numeric value came closer to +, which meant that the respondents had demonstrated an average tendency to be resilient. Generally, the highest score of resilience existed for those organic farmers, who had been outstanding in creating opportunities for self-organization, such as considerably relying on food and farm materials from the availability of local resources. Moreover, the majority of them were found to have a secondary on-farm profession that was not only subsidizing additional incomes but was also providing new knowledge and opportunities. This contrasted with the group with lowest score. The farmers, who exhibited unsatisfactory resilience, were centralized in dimensions, ranging from a having a lack of diverse water sources to having sufficient competency to exploit the benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). They are, therefore, more prone to being affected by negative pressures. It is recommended that for building resilience, the ‘holy grail’ is boosting self-reliance. This capacity is key to reducing the risk of losing sustenance and enabling stakeholders to apply the appropriate strategies in times of chang
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
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