Factors Responsible for Paddy Growers’ Diversification

In Tamil Nadu, a constituent state of India, the cultivable area under paddy had reduced over the period of time due to various factors. This study aims to enumerate the factors responsible for paddy growers’ diversification in the study area. Altogether 60 respondents were asked for the factors responsible for diversification. The major push factor responsible for diversification was inadequate labour availability & irrigation and availability of farm inputs was the major pull factor

Narrative, Sensemaking, and Improvisation in Participatory Hypermedia Construction

In this paper we describe research into a form of practitioner sensemaking in the context of participatory hypermedia construction sessions, in which groups of people build knowledge maps. We discuss how constructs from narrative theory and improvisation have helped us understand what happens at the moments when practitioners encounter dilemmas and obstacles. We provide brief examples from case studies and discuss possible contributions to broader themes in sensemaking research

Coherence, engagement, and usefulness as sensemaking criteria in participatory media practice

When skilled practitioners create media artifacts such as web pages, newspaper articles, videos, or business presentations, they are engaging in a pursuit which has consequences for the people who will interact with those artifacts. The juncture of practice, artifact, and consequences involves diverse normative considerations. We have summarized these into three criteria: coherence, engagement, and usefulness. In this paper we report on initial progress to develop a method for assessing these criteria in a particular form of skilled real-time media practice

Mass Justice: The Limited and Unlimited Power of Courts

The role of courts in mass tort litigation is examined. The courts\u27 interests in such cases, the power that courts have to aggregate claims, limits on that power and the flexibility that courts have to get around limits are discussed. Ways that courts\u27 interests in resolving mass tort litigation interfere with judicial promulgation and consistent application of legal rules are also discussed

Can one identify non-equilibrium in a three-state system by analyzing two-state trajectories?

For a three-state Markov system in a stationary state, we discuss whether, on the basis of data obtained from effective two-state (or on-off) trajectories, it is possible to discriminate between an equilibrium state and a non-equilibrium steady state. By calculating the full phase diagram we identify a large region where such data will be consistent only with non-equilibrium conditions. This regime is considerably larger than the region with oscillatory relaxation, which has previously been identified as a sufficient criterion for non-equilibrium.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, J. Chem. Phys. (2010) (in press

Diffusion-based method for producing density equalizing maps

Map makers have long searched for a way to construct cartograms -- maps in which the sizes of geographic regions such as countries or provinces appear in proportion to their population or some other analogous property. Such maps are invaluable for the representation of census results, election returns, disease incidence, and many other kinds of human data. Unfortunately, in order to scale regions and still have them fit together, one is normally forced to distort the regions' shapes, potentially resulting in maps that are difficult to read. Many methods for making cartograms have been proposed, some of them extremely complex, but all suffer either from this lack of readability or from other pathologies, like overlapping regions or strong dependence on the choice of coordinate axes. Here we present a new technique based on ideas borrowed from elementary physics that suffers none of these drawbacks. Our method is conceptually simple and produces useful, elegant, and easily readable maps. We illustrate the method with applications to the results of the 2000 US presidential election, lung cancer cases in the State of New York, and the geographical distribution of stories appearing in the news.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Engaging Citizens with Televised Election Debates through Online Interactive Replays

In this paper we tackle the crisis of political trust and public engagement with politics by investigating new methods and tools to watch and take part in televised political debates. The paper presents relevant research at the intersection of citizenship, technologies and government/democracy, and describes the motivation, requirements and design of Democratic Replay, an online interactive video replay platform that offers a persistent, customisable digital space for: (a) members of the public to express their views as they watch online videos of political events; and (b) enabling for a richer collective understanding of what goes on in these complex media events

Adoption Behaviour of Cashew Growers in Cuddalore District

India has a creditable record of attaining good amount of foreign exchange by way of export of cashew kernels. Among the Agri-Horticultural commodities getting exported fromIndia cashew ranks the 2nd position. The main objective of the study was to analyse the relationship of socio-personal and socio-psychological characteristics with their level ofadoption.The study was conducted in four village of Virudhachalam block of Cuddalore district. The sample size consisted of 120 cashew growers under NHM. Proportionaterandom sampling procedure was employed in selecting the respondents. The extent of adoption of different cultural practices taught in NHM training programmes was studiedthrough a teacher made test and that majority (65 %) of the respondents exhibited high level of adoption of technologies taught in NHM training programme

Hypermedia support for argumentation-based rationale: 15 years on from gIBIS and QOC

Having developed, used and evaluated some of the early IBIS-based approaches to design rationale (DR) such as gIBIS and QOC in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we describe the subsequent evolution of the argumentation-based paradigm through software support, and perspectives drawn from modeling and meeting facilitation. Particular attention is given to the challenge of negotiating the overheads of capturing this form of rationale. Our approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the representational scheme as simple as possible to enable real time meeting mediation and capture, attending explicitly to the skills required to use the approach well, particularly for the sort of participatory, multi-stakeholder requirements analysis demanded by many design problems. However, we can then specialize the notation and the way in which the tool is used in the service of specific methodologies, supported by a customizable hypermedia environment, and interoperable with other software tools. After presenting this approach, called Compendium, we present examples to illustrate the capabilities for support security argumentation in requirements engineering, template driven modeling for document generation, and IBIS-based indexing of and navigation around video records of meetings

Methods for the rapid diagnosis and control of bacterial diseases in shellfishes and finfishes

The culture of finfish and shellfish are often threatened by disease causing bacteria. At times it is difficult to distinguish between infection with a pathogen and disease that may result from such infections. In addition, the stressed animals (physiological or environmental) are easily predisposed to encounter bacterial infections as well as diseases