Agri-environmental Resource Management by Large-scale Collective Action: Determining KEY Success Factors

Purpose: Large-scale collective action is necessary when managing agricultural natural resources such as biodiversity and water quality. This paper determines the key factors to the success of such action. Design/Methodology/Approach: This paper analyses four large-scale collective actions used to manage agri-environmental resources in Canada and New Zealand. These case studies were selected based on an analytical framework that identifies the main types of collective actions. They were analysed after an extensive literature review, interviews with group participants, and the preparation and discussion of the background reports of each case.Findings: Three categories of factors are identified based on the stages of developing a large-scale collective action. The first stage identifies issues. This paper finds that the key actors (farmers and concerned others) within the relevant geographical and ecological boundaries must discuss and share information about resource issues in order to come to a common understanding. In the second stage, leadership and support from both governments and non-governmental groups are important to undertake large-scale collective action. The third stage manages collective action. Here, rules need to be adjusted to the local resource conditions and institutions.Practical Implications: This paper shows how these key factors could be incorporated into agri-environmental policies.Originality/Value: Previous studies of agri-environmental resource management have focused on individual actions by farmers, with little discussion on the importance of collective action. In particular, there has been little research on large-scale collective action in developed countries.     

Changes in transverse relaxation time of quadriceps femoris muscles after active recovery exercises with different intensities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the changes in the metabolic state of quadriceps femoris muscles using transverse relaxation time (T2), measured by muscle functional magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, after inactive or active recovery exercises with different intensities following high-intensity knee-extension exercise. Eight healthy men performed recovery sessions with four different conditions for 20 min after high-intensity knee-extension exercise on separate days. During the recovery session, the participants conducted a light cycle exercise for 20 min using a cycle (50%, 70% and 100% of the lactate threshold (LT), respectively: active recovery), and inactive recovery. The MR images of quadriceps femoris muscles were taken before the trial and after the recovery session every 30 min for 120 min. The percentage changes in T2 for the rectus femoris and vastus medialis muscles after the recovery session in 50%LT and 70%LT were significantly lower than those in either inactive recovery or 100%LT. There were no significant differences in those for vastus lateralis and vastus intermedius muscles among the four trials. The percentage changes in T2 of rectus femoris and vastus medialis muscles after the recovery session in 50%LT and 70%LT decreased to the values before the trial faster than those in either inactive recovery or 100%LT. Those of vastus lateralis and vastus intermedius muscles after the recovery session in 50%LT and 70%LT decreased to the values before the trial faster than those in 100%LT. Although the changes in T2 after active recovery exercises were not uniform in exercised muscles, the results of this study suggest that active recovery exercise with the intensities below LT are more effective to recover the metabolic state of quadriceps femoris muscles after intense exercise than with either intensity at LT or inactive recovery.     

Diversified search evaluation: lessons from the NTCIR-9 INTENT task

The evaluation of diversified web search results is a relatively new research topic and is not as well-understood as the time-honoured evaluation methodology of traditional IR based on precision and recall. In diversity evaluation, one topic may have more than one intent, and systems are expected to balance relevance and diversity. The recent NTCIR-9 evaluation workshop launched a new task called INTENT which included a diversified web search subtask that differs from the TREC web diversity task in several aspects: the choice of evaluation metrics, the use of intent popularity and per-intent graded relevance, and the use of topic sets that are twice as large as those of TREC. The objective of this study is to examine whether these differences are useful, using the actual data recently obtained from the NTCIR-9 INTENT task. Our main experimental findings are: (1) The $\hbox{D}\,\sharp$ evaluation framework used at NTCIR provides more “intuitive” and statistically reliable results than Intent-Aware Expected Reciprocal Rank; (2) Utilising both intent popularity and per-intent graded relevance as is done at NTCIR tends to improve discriminative power, particularly for $\hbox{D}\,\sharp$ -nDCG; and (3) Reducing the topic set size, even by just 10 topics, can affect not only significance testing but also the entire system ranking; when 50 topics are used (as in TREC) instead of 100 (as in NTCIR), the system ranking can be substantially different from the original ranking and the discriminative power can be halved. These results suggest that the directions being explored at NTCIR are valuable.     

Assessing the impact of a wildlife education program on Japanese attitudes and behavioral intentions

Human–wildlife conflicts are common in agricultural communities and mountainous villages in Japan. Tochigi prefecture has one of the highest amounts of agricultural damage caused by wildlife in the country. To reduce conflicts, the Nature Preservation Division of Tochigi Prefecture launched a wildlife damage prevention program. We evaluated the effects of this program on residents’ attitudes and behavioral intentions by comparing a model district receiving the treatment program to a nearby control district. We conducted a survey of all households registered either in the residential organization or telephone book in each district (n?=?423), with a 46% response rate. The model district did not differ from the control except for greater perceived behavioral control regarding wildlife damage among residents in the model district (F?=?3.83, df?=?1, p?=?0.05). An unanticipated outcome was the development of a community-based wildlife group in the model district. In both model and control districts, subjective norm (perceived social pressure to engage or not to engage in a behavior) was the strongest predictor of behavioral intentions, unlike results of studies conducted in the US.     

On-chip actuation transmitter for enhancing the dynamic response of cell manipulation using a macro-scale pump

An on-chip actuation transmitter for achieving fast and accurate cell manipulation is proposed. Instead of manipulating cell position by a directly connected macro-scale pump, polydimethylsiloxane deformation is used as a medium to transmit the actuation generated from the pump to control the cell position. This actuation transmitter has three main advantages. First, the dynamic response of cell manipulation is faster than the conventional method with direct flow control based on both the theoretical modeling and experimental results. The cell can be manipulated in a simple harmonic motion up to 130 Hz by the proposed actuation transmitter as opposed to 90 Hz by direct flow control. Second, there is no need to fill the syringe pump with the sample solution because the actuation transmitter physically separates the fluids between the pump and the cell flow, and consequently, only a very small quantity of the sample is required (<1 μl). In addition, such fluid separation makes it easy to keep the experiment platform sterilized because there is no direct fluid exchange between the sample and fluid inside the pump. Third, the fabrication process is simple because of the single-layer design, making it convenient to implement the actuation transmitter in different microfluidic applications. The proposed actuation transmitter is implemented in a lab-on-a-chip system for red blood cell (RBC) evaluation, where the extensibility of red blood cells is evaluated by manipulating the cells through a constriction channel at a constant velocity. The application shows a successful example of implementing the proposed transmitter.     

On information retrieval metrics designed for evaluation with incomplete relevance assessments

Modern information retrieval (IR) test collections have grown in size, but the available manpower for relevance assessments has more or less remained constant. Hence, how to reliably evaluate and compare IR systems using incomplete relevance data, where many documents exist that were never examined by the relevance assessors, is receiving a lot of attention. This article compares the robustness of IR metrics to incomplete relevance assessments, using four different sets of graded-relevance test collections with submitted runs—the TREC 2003 and 2004 robust track data and the NTCIR-6 Japanese and Chinese IR data from the crosslingual task. Following previous work, we artificially reduce the original relevance data to simulate IR evaluation environments with extremely incomplete relevance data. We then investigate the effect of this reduction on discriminative power, which we define as the proportion of system pairs with a statistically significant difference for a given probability of Type I Error, and on Kendall’s rank correlation, which reflects the overall resemblance of two system rankings according to two different metrics or two different relevance data sets. According to these experiments, Q′, nDCG′ and AP′ proposed by Sakai are superior to bpref proposed by Buckley and Voorhees and to Rank-Biased Precision proposed by Moffat and Zobel. We also point out some weaknesses of bpref and Rank-Biased Precision by examining their formal definitions.

On the reliability of information retrieval metrics based on graded relevance

This paper compares 14 information retrieval metrics based on graded relevance, together with 10 traditional metrics based on binary relevance, in terms of stability, sensitivity and resemblance of system rankings. More specifically, we compare these metrics using the Buckley/Voorhees stability method, the Voorhees/Buckley swap method and Kendall’s rank correlation, with three data sets comprising test collections and submitted runs from NTCIR. Our experiments show that (Average) Normalised Discounted Cumulative Gain at document cut-off l are the best among the rank-based graded-relevance metrics, provided that l is large. On the other hand, if one requires a recall-based graded-relevance metric that is highly correlated with Average Precision, then Q-measure is the best choice. Moreover, these best graded-relevance metrics are at least as stable and sensitive as Average Precision, and are fairly robust to the choice of gain values.     

隐私和世间观念:中国大陆与日本之比较

日本人对于我们所生活的这个世界有着一系列共同的看法,可以称之为基于世间的看法。这些基于世间的看法与人们对隐私、社会主流问题以及包括互联网在内的各种传播媒介等的态度有着极大关系,而这些基于世间的看法似乎是受到了以佛教、神道教、儒教、对自然的宗教解释和对良好的人际关系的确定以及崇尚心灵的纯洁与真诚等为基础的传统文化或本土文化的影响。在中国内蒙及大陆其它地区和日本的研究,结果显示中国人的观念中存在着（类似于）基于世间的看法。来自中国的数据中也发现了世间观念与隐私之间意义重大的联系。理解中国人和日本人对于隐私的看法,不能与根植于一个共同的观念世界的传统价值或态度割裂开来,基于世间的观点在这个共同的观念世界中起着重要的作用。