EXAMINING CROSS-COUNTRY AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY DIFFERENCES

This paper computes Malmquist agricultural productivity indexes for 125 countries over the period 1961-2001. These are decomposed into efficiency change (i.e., pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency changes) and technical change (i.e., input bias and magnitude components). Results show that developing and developed countries derive their growth from efficiency change and technical change, respectively. Input bias technical change is evident for both developing and developed countries.Productivity Analysis,

CANONICAL CORRELATION ANALYSIS OF POVERTY AND LITERACY LEVELS IN EKITI STATE, NIGERIA

Literacy is seen as antecedent of poverty. This paper has assumed that literacy has a direct influence on poverty level. Poverty is the lack of income necessary to ensure access to a set of basic needs while literacy is the ability to read and write. This paper aims at investigating the extent to which selected poverty related variables correlate with literacy related variables and the pattern of such correlation. The poverty levels was categorized into poverty by expenditure, household size, per capita expenditure while literacy levels was categorized into years of formal education, educational age group. These variables were analyzed using the multivariate analysis technique known as the canonical correlation analysis, first described by Hotelling (1935), which is used in a wide range of disciplines to analyze the relationships between several independent and several dependent variables. Statistica software package was employed in running the analysis. The results reveal that there is a significant positive correlation between the levels of poverty and literacy. In addition, some of the levels of literacy had a significant correlation with that of poverty levels when correlation matrix was employed. The results show that literacy is one of the strong factors that determine poverty

Adaptive Thresholding Heuristic for KPI Anomaly Detection

A plethora of outlier detectors have been explored in the time series domain, however, in a business sense, not all outliers are anomalies of interest. Existing anomaly detection solutions are confined to certain outlier detectors limiting their applicability to broader anomaly detection use cases. Network KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) tend to exhibit stochastic behaviour producing statistical outliers, most of which do not adversely affect business operations. Thus, a heuristic is required to capture the business definition of an anomaly for time series KPI. This article proposes an Adaptive Thresholding Heuristic (ATH) to dynamically adjust the detection threshold based on the local properties of the data distribution and adapt to changes in time series patterns. The heuristic derives the threshold based on the expected periodicity and the observed proportion of anomalies minimizing false positives and addressing concept drift. ATH can be used in conjunction with any underlying seasonality decomposition method and an outlier detector that yields an outlier score. This method has been tested on EON1-Cell-U, a labeled KPI anomaly dataset produced by Ericsson, to validate our hypothesis. Experimental results show that ATH is computationally efficient making it scalable for near real time anomaly detection and flexible with multiple forecasters and outlier detectors

AI Product Security: A Primer for Developers

Not too long ago, AI security used to mean the research and practice of how AI can empower cybersecurity, that is, AI for security. Ever since Ian Goodfellow and his team popularized adversarial attacks on machine learning, security for AI became an important concern and also part of AI security. It is imperative to understand the threats to machine learning products and avoid common pitfalls in AI product development. This article is addressed to developers, designers, managers and researchers of AI software products.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

Uncovered coping strategies adopted by children living in homes with marital conflicts for their own survival

Research indicates that marital conflict pertains to three particular dimensions of communication including affect, conflict behaviours and conflict management and these affect conflict choice of management strategies. This paper explored the problems and coping strategies of children from homes with marital conflicts in Tanga City, Tanzania. An exploratory technique with multiple research methods was used to facilitate the study. 100 social workers, couples, class teachers and/or school counselors informed the study. The study employed purposive, stratified, simple random and snowball sampling techniques with survey questionnaires and interview to recruit participants and data collection. Problems facing children living in homes with marital conflicts are discussed. The result suggest that newlywed couples and those contemplating marriage should obtain marital counselling in order to build strong family relations that can reduce family life tensions, attending family training which developing marital problem-solving skills. The theoretical and practical implications of the problems facing children living in homes with marital conflicts in Tanzania are discussed. Key words: coping strategies, children suffering, marital anxiety, sources of marital conflicts, marital conflict

Flow-injection atomic spectrometry: A new analytical technique

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Flow Injection Manifolds with Membrane Filters for Pre-concentration and Interference Removal by Precipitation Flow Injection Flame Atomic Absorption Spectrometry

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Architecture and Applications of IoT Devices in Socially Relevant Fields

Number of IoT enabled devices are being tried and introduced every year and there is a healthy competition among researched and businesses to capitalize the space created by IoT, as these devices have a great market potential. Depending on the type of task involved and sensitive nature of data that the device handles, various IoT architectures, communication protocols and components are chosen and their performance is evaluated. This paper reviews such IoT enabled devices based on their architecture, communication protocols and functions in few key socially relevant fields like health care, farming, firefighting, women/individual safety/call for help/harm alert, home surveillance and mapping as these fields involve majority of the general public. It can be seen, to one's amazement, that already significant number of devices are being reported on these fields and their performance is promising. This paper also outlines the challenges involved in each of these fields that require solutions to make these devices reliableComment: 1