The problems of agriculture and poverty cannot be addressed without reducing the number of workers and their families dependent on land, thereby raising productivity. There are substantial rural-urban and male-female differences in rates of labor force participation, employment, and unemployment, as well as informality of employment that exist within and across South Asian countries. Also, most...

Private and political interests routinely conspire to sideline and misrepresent science and evidence in the public policy process. The Center for Science and Democracy, a new initiative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, endeavors to change this dynamic to strengthen the role of science in decision making.

In this work we develop a SD model for a make-to-order (MTO) three-stage capacitated production/inventory system. We employ a production order release mechanism affiliated with the automated pipeline inventory and order based production control system (APIOBPCS) policies family. The production rates at each stage are defined under alternative policies. One of the policies considers the human be...

Section 78 of PACE gives the courts a discretion to exclude from a criminal trial evidence which has been obtained unfairly. The section has resulted in much case law. This article is an attempt to analyse the principles which the courts use to decide whether or not to exercise the discretion to exclude. It starts by examining the decisions of the appellate courts in order to try to identify th...

'no'. It was thought that the disadvantages of such policies currently outweigh the advantages. The meeting agreed that high quality research as well as relevance to rheumatic diseases should remain as the cornerstones on which the ARC makes its funding decisions. The need to be able to respond rapidly and effectively to new directions in science was thought to be best handled by having an effe...

Usually, public health actors do not have the power to make public policy decisions, and they represent only one voice among many: policy making is influenced by numerous groups and organizations with an interest in the outcome (Milio, 2001). It is therefore important to present the public health perspective while remaining aware of the other perspectives being expressed and how these may reson...

To maximize herd profits, dairy farmers are faced with the complex dilemma of minimizing costs that are associated with rearing heifers while ensuring or enhancing lifetime economic productivity. Decisions about heifer management interact with underlying biological aspects of growth, thereby influencing future profitability. A thorough understanding of these biological interactions is lacking. ...

Integrated – economic, environmental, and social – assessment tools can provide a clear indication of both the positive and the negative impacts of trade liberalisation from which effective policies to reduce the negative impacts, and strengthen the positive ones can be developed. Assessments feeding into the policy development process can promote increased integration of environmental and soci...

Suppose an agent builds a policy that satisfactorily solves a decision problem; suppose further that some aspects of this policy are abstracted and used as starting point in a new, different decision problem. How can the agent accrue the benefits of the abstract policy in the new concrete problem? In this paper we propose a framework for simultaneous reinforcement learning, where the abstract p...