AGRICULTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT: LESSONS FOR CHRISTIAN GROUPS COMBATING PERSISTENT POVERTY

Persistent poverty is one of the core challenges faced by Christians and by development scholars and practitioners alike. There is no question that Jesus was concerned about the poor - both materially and spiritually. From his first public address in the Synagogue in Nazareth, His home town, where He concluded by saying that He had come to "preach good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18), Jesus lived the gospel in word and deed. We, as Christian men and women, whether researchers or practitioners, are called to do no less. When Jesus made His parting remarks to His disciples, He said (John 20:21) "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." emphasizing that we are to do likewise. This concern permeates the Old and New Testament, another example being the words of the prophet Micah (6:8): "He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." We are here to think through together some of the implications of this mandate for ourselves as researchers and practitioners. More specifically, to consider how the work we do as researchers can inform our work in the field as practitioners in such a way as to more effectively help those who are materially poor.Community/Rural/Urban Development, O1, Q12, Q18,

Spectra and binding energy predictions of chiral interactions for 7Li

Using the no-core shell model approach, we report on the first results for 7Li based on the next-to-next-to-leading order chiral nuclear interaction. Both, two-nucleon and three-nucleon interactions are taken into account. We show that the p-shell nuclei are sensitive to the subleading parts of the chiral interactions including three-nucleon forces. Though chiral interactions are soft, we do not observe overbinding for this p-shell nucleus and find a realistic description for the binding energy, excitation spectrum and radius.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure

Extrapolation Method for the No-Core Shell Model

Nuclear many-body calculations are computationally demanding. An estimate of their accuracy is often hampered by the limited amount of computational resources even on present-day supercomputers. We provide an extrapolation method based on perturbation theory, so that the binding energy of a large basis-space calculation can be estimated without diagonalizing the Hamiltonian in this space. The extrapolation method is tested for 3H and 6Li nuclei. It will extend our computational abilities significantly and allow for reliable error estimates.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, PRC accepte

Poverty traps and social protection

This paper demonstrates that there are potentially large returns to having a social protection policy that stakes out a productive safety net below the vulnerable and keeps them from slipping into a poverty trap. Much of the value of the productive safety net comes from mitigating the ex ante effects of risk and crowding in additional investment. The analysis also explores the implications of different mechanisms of targeting social protection transfers. In the presence of poverty traps, modestly regressive targeting based on critical asset thresholds may have better long-run poverty reduction effects than traditional needs-based targeting.Safety Nets and Transfers,Rural Poverty Reduction,Population Policies,Debt Markets

A compact micro-wave synthesizer for transportable cold-atom interferometers

We present the realization of a compact micro-wave frequency synthesizer for an atom interferometer based on stimulated Raman transitions, applied to transportable inertial sensing. Our set-up is intended to address the hyperfine transitions of Rubidium 87 atoms at 6.8 GHz. The prototype is evaluated both in the time and the frequency domain by comparison with state-of-the-art frequency references developed at LNE-SYRTE. In free-running mode, it features a residual phase noise level of -65 dBrad$^2.Hz^{-1} at 10-Hz offset frequency and a white phase noise level in the order of -120 dBrad^2.Hz^{-1} for Fourier frequencies above 10 kHz. The phase noise effect on the sensitivity of the atomic interferometer is evaluated for diverse values of cycling time, interrogation time and Raman pulse duration. To our knowledge, the resulting contribution is well below the sensitivity of any demonstrated cold atom inertial sensors based on stimulated Raman transitions. The drastic improvement in terms of size, simplicity and power consumption paves the way towards field and mobile operations.Comment: accepted for publication in Review of Scientific Instruments, 6 pages, 4 figure

Test of shell-model interactions for nuclear structure calculations

The binding energy and excitation spectra of 6Li are calculated in a no-core shell-model space giving encouraging results. The results of this calculation are then treated as a theoretical experiment, against which different effective-interaction approximations are compared. In this way insight into the perturbation expansion for the effective interaction is obtained

Perceptions of Risk within Pastoralist Households in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia

Perceptions of risk may vary within households as well as across households and communities. In this paper, we take advantage of panel survey data collected quarterly over a period of 2 ½ years to see how perceptions of risk vary across individuals over time. The surveyed households are in pastoralist communities in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia and the survey period coincides with a severe drought in this region and the beginning of the recovery. We identify the structural heterogeneity of the perceptions of risk of these individuals. Because of the nature of panel data, we can also test how the perceptions of risk are affected by shocks in previous periods. In particular, we ask how an individual's risk perceptions change when shocks happen to him or herself, to other members of his or her, family, or to members of his or her community. This allows us to ask how expectations adapt based on the things that are happening to others and allows us to look at issues of social networks and learning.Risk and Uncertainty,