1,720,957 research outputs found
Economics of anticipatory action: Can context-based cost and benefit analyses of anticipatory action accelerate ex-ante disaster investments?
No full textSummary of ongoing PhD research presented as a poster at the University of Edinburgh Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Systems Symposium, 15 March 202
Economics of anticipatory action
No full textPresented at Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action Community of Practice meeting, Nairobi, 14-15 May 202
Assessing the effectiveness of drought anticipatory action in Uganda's agro-pastoral drylands: A cost-benefit analysis
No full textPresented at the Jameel Observatory Community of Practice meeting and drylands food security and resilience early action research and evidence dialogue, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 13-16 May 202
Assessing the effectiveness of drought anticipatory action in Uganda’s agro-pastoral drylands: a cost-benefit analysis
Full text linkDroughts inherently disrupt economies, reverse development gains, and cause welfare losses. These impacts are more pronounced in climate-sensitive economies and drylands, where their frequency and intensity have increased due to climate change. Anticipatory Action (AA), a new practice based on climate early warning systems, has the potential to mitigate these impacts. However, quantitative insights into the costs and benefits of these AA interventions in Uganda’s drylands are lacking, making it difficult to support public investment aimed at protecting development gains and reducing welfare losses due to droughts. Therefore, the objective of this study was to conduct an ex-ante cost-benefit analysis of commonly proposed AA interventions, particularly drought-tolerant seeds and livestock vaccination, in the Napak and Moroto districts of the Karamoja region in Uganda.
Given the stochastic behaviour of drought, a stochastic benefit-cost models were set up in XLrisk for Excel over a 20-year horizon. These were developed to assess whether the benefits of implementing the two anticipatory interventions based on a drought return period of five years would outweigh the cost. Data were collated from the government of the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Agriculture Animal Resources and Fisheries (MAAIF), and the relevant literature.
On average, the Net Present Value (NPV) for drought-tolerant sorghum seeds was negative, whereas the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) anticipatory vaccination yielded positive values, even when indirect benefits were excluded. The benefit-cost ratio (BCR) for the sorghum seed intervention was below one in the baseline model with mean of 0.75 and (min =0.4 and max= 1.35), and improved to a mean of 1.30, (min 0.77and max 2.12) when indirect benefits were included. In contrast, the FMD vaccination model exhibited a BCR of 1.44 when considering direct avoided production losses, excluding potential benefits from averted trade losses and outbreak control costs. Sensitivity and correlation analyses indicated that vaccination costs had the most significant negative impact on the NPV of the FMD vaccination model, whereas training costs had similar effects on the drought-tolerant seed model.
Overall, the evaluated AA interventions produced mixed NPVs with wide ranges that included negative values during simulations. However, the proposed AA interventions for Karamoja appear to be more cost-effective when focused on protecting livestock livelihoods than crop livelihoods. Crop interventions can yield greater benefits if the autonomous adoption of these measures is promoted through increased awareness and improved access to affordable seeds
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
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