Rainfed lowland rice production in lower Northeast Thailand is a complex and adaptive farming activity. Complexity arises from interconnections between multiple and intertwined processes, affected by harsh climatic and soil conditions, cropping practices and labor migrations. Having faced a spatially heterogeneous and dynamic environment for centuries, local rice farmers are very adaptive and a...

Livestock farming has recently come under close scrutiny, in response especially to environmental issues. Farmers are encouraged to redesign their livestock farming systems in depth to improve their sustainability. Assuming that modelling can be a relevant tool to address such systemic changes, we sought to answer the following question: 'How can livestock farming systems be modelled to help fa...

Poultry farms in Tanzania are characterized by inadequate management practices which mainly caused the lack of adequate systems to guide small-scale poultry farmers decision making. It is well-established that information a key factor making effective decisions numerous sectors including farming. Furthermore, various researchers have identified use mobile support tools be an way aiding informed...

Cropland abandonment has emerged as a prevalent phenomenon in the mountainous areas of China. While there is a general understanding that this new trend is driven by the rising opportunity cost of rural labor, rigorous theoretical and empirical analyses are largely absent. This paper first develops a theoretical model to investigate household decisions on farming scale when off-farm labor marke...

1 The first section of a three-part article on Compstat, an information-driven managerial process, examines four crime-reduction principles that form the basis of the technique. Agencies must ensure that they are prepared to handle situations involving officers in crisis. 26 Eight Supreme Court decisions of particular importance to law enforcement are summarized. Contributors' opinions and stat...

Although Medicaid is regarded as a federal entitlement program, nowhere does the Medicaid statute explicitly recognize a federal right of action to enforce recipients' rights. Arguably, the Supreme Court, rather than Congress, first recognized the right of Medicaid recipients to protection of federal law. A controversial 2001 federal court decision, however, called into question the continuing ...

Using a pooled data set consisting of 20 annual observations on each of eleven major industry groups, I estimate the effects of overtime pay regulation on weekly work schedules. After controlling for workweek trends within industries, the sharp expansions in overtime pay coverage resulting from legislative amendments and Supreme Court decisions produced no discernible impact on overtime hours. ...

Background: The EU-project Flourish intends to establish an autonomously operating precision farming system based on the interaction between unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For effective mission planning and site-specific ground intervention by the UGV, the growth, mineral nutrition, weed, and health status of the crop field must be evaluated efficiently. In...

To what extent is criminal behavior in adolescence attributable to risk appraisal? Using two large cross-sectional samples (N = 929, age range: 10-30 years; and N = 1,357, age range: 12-24 years), we examine whether (a) reward bias in risk appraisal is more prominent in adolescence and (b) the association between risk appraisal and criminal behavior is stronger during adolescence than at other ...