This article reports the results of an econometric evaluation of the effects of Plan Colombia, the largest US aid package ever received by a country in the western hemisphere. We assess how the aerial spraying of illegal crops affects both the size of the land cultivated with coca bushes as well as the dynamics of localized violence in the context of Colombia’s armed conflict. In particular, we...

Autonomous selective spraying could be a way for agriculture to reduce production costs, save resources, protect the environment and help to fulfill specific pesticide regulations. The objective of this paper was to investigate the use of a low-cost sonar sensor for autonomous selective spraying of single plants. For this, a belt driven autonomous robot was used with an attached 3-axes frame wi...

Indoor residual spraying with DDT was the principle method by which malaria transmission was eradicated or greatly reduced in many countries between the late 1940s and 1970s. Since then, decreasing use of DDT has been associated with a resurgence of malaria in India, Sri Lanka, former Soviet Central Asia, Zanzibar, Venezuela and several other Latin American countries. In India and Zanzibar, DDT...

Current EPA emission factors (AP42) for styrene emissions from the production of polyester-resin-reinforced plastic products represent a composite of spraying and post-spraying emissions (from curing molds) from shower stall/bathtub manufacturing plants that use compressed-air-powered spray guns to apply catalyzed styrene resins to prepared molds. Because each step of manufacture (gel coating, ...

Some day it may be said that the air age in insect control arrived with the discovery of the unusual values of DDT during the Second World War. In the two preceding decades, the application of insecticides by airplane had been tried against various pests, but the method was not used extensively except over cotton fields. Its advantages were recognized—large acreages could be covered quickly wit...

Intermittently connected mobile networks are wireless networks where most of the time there does not exist a complete path from a source to a destination. Researchers have proposed flooding based schemes for routing in such networks. While flooding based schemes are robust and have a high probability of delivery, they suffer from a huge overhead in terms of bandwidth, buffer space and energy di...

A novel technique suitable for noninvasive measurements of moss water content is presented. In this paper, colour image sensing is applied for measuring moss water content. Sunagoke moss Rhacomitrium canescens has been utilized as an active greening material to mitigate the urban heat island effect. The goal of this paper is to develop an intelligent image analysis system for water irrigation o...

To identify factors associated with incidence of visceral leishmaniasis (VL), we surveyed 13,416 households in Bihar State, India. VL was associated with socioeconomic status, type of housing, and belonging to the Musahar caste. Annual coverage of indoor residual insecticide spraying was 12%. Increasing such spraying can greatly contribute to VL control.

Cold spraying is a promising method for rapid prototyping due to its high deposition efficiency and high-quality bonding characteristic. However, many researchers have noticed that holes cannot be replenished and will grow larger and larger once formed, which will significantly decrease the deposition efficiency. No work has yet been done on this problem. In this paper, a computational simulati...