Green jobs and decent work: An agenda for sustainable agriculture in India

The paper seeks to explore the opportunities created by climate change and mitigation efforts in agriculture sector in India for creating more, newer and better jobs. These new jobs which are termed as green jobs are not always going to be decent jobs and there is also uncertainty about the number of jobs so created vis-à-vis number of jobs destroyed in traditional fossil fuel based economy. Pivotal role played by agriculture in developing country's economy makes it ideal sector to study in this context. There is growing consensus that organic, sustainable agricultural practices can provide synergistic benefits that include adaptation and mitigation of climate change with addressing concerns like livelihood, employment and working conditions. In an emerging country like India, sustainable agriculture can help in meeting twin challenges of food security and job creation. This so called Double Dividend can positively affect the thinking of policy makers and public at large towards contributing to meeting of mitigation and adaption challenge with respect to climate change. However, this requires close integration of agricultural, environmental and labour policy. The present study is based on extensive literature survey and expert interaction. Paper seeks to integrate these varied factors and it is argued that emphasis on sustainable/organic farming will create more and better jobs in India and help in poverty reduction and improving life standards. --Agriculture,Green Jobs,India

Bures distance and transition probability for α\alpha-CPD-kernels

If the symmetry (fixed invertible self adjoint map) of Krein spaces is replaced by a fixed unitary, then we obtain the notion of S-spaces which was introduced by Szafraniec. Assume $\alpha$ to be an automorphism on a $C^*$-algebra. In this article, we obtain the Kolmogorov decomposition of $\alpha$-completely positive definite (or $\alpha$-CPD-kernels for short) and investigate the Bures distance between $\alpha$-CPD-kernels. We also define transition probability for these kernels and find a characterization of the transition probability.Comment: 18page

Optimal experiment design in a filtering context with application to sampled network data

We examine the problem of optimal design in the context of filtering multiple random walks. Specifically, we define the steady state E-optimal design criterion and show that the underlying optimization problem leads to a second order cone program. The developed methodology is applied to tracking network flow volumes using sampled data, where the design variable corresponds to controlling the sampling rate. The optimal design is numerically compared to a myopic and a naive strategy. Finally, we relate our work to the general problem of steady state optimal design for state space models.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS283 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org