The study evaluated the effect of IFAD credit supply on rural farmers in Rivers State. Data for the study were collected using a structured questionnaire administered to 90 farmer’s beneficiaries using a multi-stage sampling technique. The regression result shows that semi-log function gave the best fit with the highest value of coefficient of multiple determination (R 2 ) of 0.8758 and seven e...

The objective of the present study was to investigate optimal group size in cattle in communal pastures where cattle from various farms are turned out: (1) to ascertain if cows derived from each farm form an affiliative group and (2) to investigate the effect of the number of farm mates on social and maintenance behaviours when farm mates form an affiliative group. Farm mates were defined as co...

As the size of livestock farms in The Netherlands is on the increase for economic reasons, an important question is how disease introduction risks and risks of onward transmission scale with farm size (i.e. with the number of animals on the farm). Here we use the epidemic data of the 1997-1998 epidemic of Classical Swine Fever (CSF) Virus in The Netherlands to address this question for CSF risk...

The widespread use of Twitter makes it very interesting to determine the opinions and the sentiments expressed by its users. The shortness of the length and the highly informal nature of tweets render it very difficult to automatically detect such information. This paper reports the results to a challenge, set forth by SemEval-2013 Task 2, to determine the positive, neutral, or negative sentime...

Structural transformation is a process by which the relative contribution of nonagricultural sectors to the overall economy rises as agriculture’s share declines in relative terms. In absolute terms, however, agriculture continues to grow and contribute to overall economic growth. Agricultural productivity growth and increased farm incomes are prerequisites for structural transformation. Increa...

Fish predation interferes with mussel seed population dynamic and is an important limiting factor on seed supply in several areas of mussel farming production. In the present study we assessed the impact of fish predation in a mussel farm sited in the Rıa de Ares-Betanzos (Galicia, NW Spain). To assess fish impact on recruitment, we have quantified mussel recruitment densities with or without e...

to compute the optic flow along intensity change curves. The flow is computed locally at corners, determined as edge points of high curvature, by cross correlation over time. The (full) flow is then computed along edge contours by means of a combined wave/diffusion process. MCMAP has been implemented on a Transputer array using a mixed paradigm of a pipeline and a processor farm. A fast algorit...

Clock-related operations are one of the many sources of replica non-determinism and of replica inconsistency in fault-tolerant distributed systems. In passive replication, if the primary server crashes, the next clock value returned by the new primary server might have actually rolled back in time, which can lead to undesirable consequences for the replicated application. The same problem can h...