Distribution data describing the current shea range were obtained from John Hall (University of Wales, Bangor); for details, see previous reports and Vitellaria paradoxa: a monograph (Hall et al., 1996). In 2010, these records were supplemented with shea plot data from Burkina Faso, Mali and Ghana, and with the collection localities of herbarium specimens held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew ...

I argue that if citizens systematically underestimate what their government can and should do for them, then they will hold politicians to a lower standard and sanction poor performers less often. A large-scale experiment across 95 localities in Mali in which some voters received information about potential government performance identifies effects of raising voter expectations. Survey experime...

We present a brief report on the collision search for the reduced SHA-1. With a few improvements to our previous work, directed at efficient parallelization on a GPU cluster, we managed to construct a new collision for 75-step reduced SHA-1

We partnered with a micro‐lender in Mali to randomize credit offers at the village level. Then, in no‐loan control villages, we gave cash grants to randomly selected households. These grants led to higher agricultural investments and profits, thus showing that liquidity constraints bind with respect to agricultural investment. In loan‐villages, we gave grants to a random subset of farmers wh...

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For the time being, this experimental process, financed by the Government of the Netherlands, is limited to three developing countries – Honduras, Mali and Sri Lanka; if found successful, this process can be replicated in many other developing countries. In each country, a national diagnosis is to be developed through the concerted efforts of government ministries, representatives of employers ...

Where the poor form a majority or near-majority, why don’t they vote themselves to power in democracies? In Madagascar, Mozambique, Mali, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, and Bangladesh, where the poor constitute 71, 70, 64, 56, 53, 52, and 50 percent of the population, respectively, why don’t poor groups emerge and take power democratically? Even in countries where the poor form a smaller but still...

Modern Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) offer significant performance speedup over conventional processors. Programming on GPU for general purpose applications has become an important research area. CUDA programming model provides a C-like interface and is widely accepted. However, since hardware vendors do not disclose enough underlying architecture details, programmers have to optimize their a...

In simulation-based design optimization, one of the greatest challenges is the intensive computing burden. In order to reduce the computational time, a parallel implementation of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm on graphic processing unit (GPU) is presented in this paper. Instead of executed on the central processing unit (CPU) in a serial manner, the PSO algorithm is executed in...

Cloud computing has become an emerging virtualization-based computing paradigm for various applications such as scientific computing and databases. Buffer management is an important factor for the I/O performance of the virtualized platform. In this study, we propose to leverage the memory and the computation power of the graphics processors (GPUs) to improve the effectiveness of buffer managem...