1,720,956 research outputs found
Cost recovery for sanitation services : the case of poor urban areas in Zimbabwe
No full textEThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
Building links for improved sanitation in poor urban settlements
No full text"Building Links" is based on a detailed study of sanitation in twelve poor, urban settlements in southern Africa and demonstrates very clearly that the situation is dire and needs urgent attention. The residents of these areas recognise the problem and want an improvement in their situation, but lack the resources to bring this about. One of the keys to bringing about such improvement lies in developing better channels of communication - or links - between sanitation agencies of all kinds and the local communities. The agencies need a better understanding of the circumstances, wishes and resources of the local residents, and the communities themselves need a fuller knowledge of how the agencies work and what their responsibilities are.The book identifies the many impediments to these links - political, social, economic and institutional - and suggests how, in some cases in the short-term, and in others over much longer timescales, these need to be tackled. The recommendations are addressed both to policy-makers and to those working in a wide range of agencies to promote, plan and implement the development of effective urban sanitation with communities living in poverty
An Economic Determination of the Optimal Price and Harvest Rates for Sustainable Commercial Indigenous Timber Management in Zimbabwe: A Case Study of Mzola in Matebeleland
No full textA number of reports (see Judge, 1975, World Bank, 1993, Forestry Commission, 1995, Mushove, 1994) show that Commercial Indigenous Timber (CIT) appears to be exploited at an unsustainable rate. Over-exploitation and wasteful utilization of the forest resource may be due to undervaluing of the resource and wrong pricing mechanisms. The main objective of this study was to determine the optimal price and the Maximum Sustainable Economic Yield (MSEY) which will maximize the Net Present Value of the forest resource. This study differs from previous studies because it does not just explain the problems and causes of over exploitation of the forest resource, but it goes beyond by determining the prices and the MSEY which will encourage sustainable CIT management.
To achieve the study objectives, we use the residual approach to determine the residual stumpage value (the value of a standing tree in the forest) of teak and mukwa. The results show that both teak and mukwa are undervalued by 76% and 77% respectively since the FC is charging Z700/m^ for mukwa yet the results of this study show that the stumpage value of teak is Z3119/m^. This method was also used by Mushove, 1994 and he found that mukwa was undervalued by 63%. However, the residual approach has the major weakness of calculating a residual stumpage value which depends on the logging, transportation, and processing costs of the Finns. If the firms are inefficient the resulting residual value will be low thus rewarding inefficiency. The residual approach also determine a static value which does not reflect the scarcity value of the resource and does not help in achieving intertemporal allocative efficiency.
To overcome these weaknesses a model which incorporates biological and economic information (Bioeconomic Model) was developed to determine the MSEY and the Marginal User Cost (MUC) over time. The results show that in order to achieve intertemporal allocative efficiency of the resource, the exploitation rate should fall progressively until the harvest rate equals the growth rate of the resource and the price of the resource should increase as the resource become scarce. The results at 5% discount rate show that a maximum Net Present Value of Z700/m^ to Z$1500/m^ in real terms during the same period.
This study has not concentrated effort on the institutions and the political economics which underline the allocatory and pricing decisions of state owned and communal resources but it has established criteria which the Forestry Commission can use to reduce political manipulation of prices.
It is recommended that the Forestry Commission should charge per tree fees to encourage efficient utilization of the forest resource. It is also recommended that the price calculated using the Bioeconomic model should form the minimum prices below which timber may not be sold
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
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
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