1,720,957 research outputs found
Bee-keeping and honey production as alternative livelihood strategies among the Pokot of Baringo County, Kenya
Get PDFMwaka’s MA thesis is a study on an alternative livelihood strategy which (formerly) pastoral households took to during the past two decades. Honey harvesting has been a traditional livelihood strategy among Pokot pastoralists. However, honey was only harvested by a very limited number of specialized people. Traditionally, it were individuals of specific patri-lineal clans who dealt with honey harvesting preferably. In recent years a number of development projects propagated the commoditization of honey. Apparently honey is widely available in large quantities due to the specific structure of the bush/tree vegetation. Since the 1980s development projects have preached that the abundance of honey as a resource should be used to improve food security. Improved hives were advertised widely and apparently got used throughout the region. Due to flaring prices for honey on urban markets incentives were high to invest more time into honey production. In some communities the income from honey production seems to parallel incomes from livestock husbandry. It is interesting that apparently communities
which – due to ecological givens – did not have a chance to diversify into the direction of agriculture, keenly took the chance to take up honey production
Agricultural improvement? Persistence and change in agricultural development ideas and farmers' responses in Kilombero Valley, Tanzania (1900-2015)
Get PDFThe Kilombero valley in south-central Tanzania has undergone a series of agricultural development experiments since German colonialism. These experiments have largely failed to meet their goals of increasing production and quality of agricultural products. However, experiments similar to earlier ventures are still being implemented in the valley today under the auspices of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT). This raises one central question: why, despite the failures of earlier strategies, have similar recipes for agricultural development persisted in the valley? I approach this question by analyzing the discourses and practices of agricultural development in the valley since the German colonial time.
Following the footsteps of post-developmentalists like Ferguson (1990) and Li (2005) I ask what these agricultural development strategies have done in the valley such that they are replicated over time. A focus on discourses and policies allows conceiving agricultural development projects as having certain effects, which give their strategies persistence.
I furthermore investigate how the recipients of the agricultural development projects in the valley perceive such initiatives and how they respond to them. Previous research in the valley (e.g. Monson, 1995) and research elsewhere on development topics (see for instance Li, 2005; Venkatesan and Yarrow, 2014) have shown that people either resist or comply with such initiatives. However, it is necessary to examine the nature and effects of such responses as well. For if recipients “resist” a development project, what is the nature of such resistance? Does it lead to modifying the development strategy? Does it intensify it, or lead to a complete overhaul? And if recipients comply, how does compliance affect policy and practice?
I, therefore, analyze the history of agricultural development in the valley, considering colonial and post-colonial policies and the diverse actors that attempted to improve its agricultural production. In so doing, I examine the consequences of these policies and the outcomes of different actions in shaping the agricultural development landscape in the valley. However, considering the state of agriculture in the valley, this book can be read in two ways: on the one hand, as an exploration of the history of agricultural development in Kilombero Valley and on the other, as a critique of the development experiments that continue to reappear in new forms
Analysis of audit quality in the public sector in Uganda: A case of The Office of the Auditor General
Get PDFA research report submitted to the College of Business and Management Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the Masters of Business Administration Degree of Makerere UniversityThe purpose of this study was to analyse audit quality in the public Sector in Uganda. This was driven by the fact that there was an increasing trend of unqualified audit opinions issued by the office of Auditor General and in specific this trend was significant in the reports for Local Authorities. The key objectives that this research addressed were to identify the extent to which International standards of supreme audit institutions were implemented by auditors to ensure quality audits in the public sector and also identify Auditors’ perceptions of the factors that significantly affect audit quality in Uganda.
The research approach used was the mixed approach where both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. I went on to use a descriptive research design where I made a detailed description of findings on the objectives of the research. My unit of analysis involved auditors from the Directorate of Local Authorities in the Office of Auditor General.
The findings of my study indicated that majority of auditors comply with the International Standards of Supreme Audit Institutions (ISSAI) but standards on supervision by seniors and Audit managers at every stage of the audit and also audit of Adjusting and non- Adjusting events of the Local Authorities were still poorly complied with.
The study has also revealed that Auditors perceive Skills and Qualifications of an auditor as well as Audit Quality Assurance review to have the most significant impact on audit Quality in the public sector while Auditor tenure at the entity and Compliance with the ethical requirements were considered to have the least impact on Audit quality
Agricultural Improvement? Stability in Agricultural Development Ideas and Farmers’ Responses in Kilombero Valley, Tanzania, 1900-2015 (mit Universität Köln, Zweitgutachten)
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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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