The study pertains to the economic issues of risk and uncertainties associated with financing hill agriculture from the twin angles of risk of farmers to utilize the credit and of bankers to disburse the agricultural loan. The issues discussed are: first, why the financial institutions are reluctant to lend agricultural advances? Second, whether the farm income or rate of return on equity and n...

It is widely recognised that microhabitats are important for a variety of marine organisms, yet this knowledge has rarely been applied in the construction of engineered structures as a means of enhancing biodiversity or populations of species at risk. Here we examined the influence of microhabitats on the distribution and survival of the exploited limpet Patella candei on natural shores before ...

The growing demanding from consumers for healthier foods, produced using environmentally friendly farming practices has resulted in the rapid expansion of organic farming. There are numerous studies about the importance of organic farming but the majority of the results are sometimes contradictory, inconsistent and show no clear link between organic farming practices and enhancement of the nutr...

respect Respect for nature Abstract liking Expressing a positive but abstract attitude towards nature (e.g. "I enjoy nature" vs. the moreliking Expressing a positive but abstract attitude towards nature (e.g. "I enjoy nature" vs. the more concrete, "I enjoy walks in the woods") Abstract knowledge Expressing learning goals abstractly (e.g. "I want to learn about nature" vs. the more concrete, "I...

Coral-associated gobies are highly specialized reef fishes with high host-coral fidelity. Flexibility in habitat choice, however, is important to compensate for potential habitat alteration or loss, but detailed information about the postsettlement movement behavior of such gobies is lacking. We examined movement patterns in Gobiodon histrio, both under natural conditions and during subsequent ...

Many-Task Computing (MTC) is a widely used computing paradigm for large-scale task-parallel processing. One of the key issues in MTC is to schedule a large number of independent tasks onto heterogeneous resources. Traditional task-level scheduling heuristics, like Min-Min, Sufferage and MaxStd, cannot readily be applied in this scenario. As most of MTC tasks are usually fine-grained, the resour...

the necessity and importance of teaching pragmatics has come to light by many researchers (e.g. rose & kasper, 2001). due to the consensus over the need to teach pragmatic competence, the main issue now centers on the question of how we should teach this competence in the most effective way. consistent with this line of research, the present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of d...

the purpose of this research was to analyze efl writing tasks in the most popular esol (english for speakers of other languages) exam preparation courses in iran: ielts, toefl, fce and cae. having collected the criteria of writing task appropriateness in light of the process-oriented approach to writing instruction, 114 learner participants were asked to rate efl writing tasks based on a checkl...

This article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study was designed to explore the effects of changing complexity dimensions on listening task performance and to achieve two aims: to see how listening comprehension task performance was aff...