Issues and Impacts of the Apricot Value Chain on the Upland Farmers in the Himalayan Range of Pakistan

The livelihood of the people in the Himalayan range of Pakistan is largely dependent on the cultivation of fruits. Apricot and apple are the major fruits of this region, which are marketed throughout the country and also exported to other countries. Due to high perishability and the poor farm-to-market infrastructure in the region, farmers are unable to get maximum returns. This study was conducted keeping in view the importance of the region and the impacts of fruits on the livelihood of the farmhands. Cross-sectional data from 200 respondents were collected through a multistage random sampling technique. Factor analysis was employed to find out the constraint in the apricot production and propensity score matching estimates were employed to see the impact of apricot production on the farming communities in the study area. The results of the factor analysis show the most important group of constraints in the growth of the apricot industry is awareness, which is an internal factor. This is followed by production, policy, and marketing constraints. The least important is processing technology. Furthermore, the results show that apricot production has a significant positive impact on decreasing the poverty level of the household, depicting a great potential for the development of resilient livelihoods.

Credible Research Designs for Minimum Wage Studies

The authors assess the critique by Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2014) of minimum wage studies that found small effects on teen employment. Data from 1979 to 2014 contradict NSW; the authors show that the disemployment suggested by a model assuming parallel trends across U.S. states mostly reflects differential pre-existing trends. A data-driven LASSO procedure that optimally corrects for state trends produces a small employment elasticity (–0.01). Even a highly sparse model rules out substantial disemployment effects, contrary to NSW’s claim that the authors discard too much information. Synthetic controls do place more weight on nearby states—confirming the value of regional controls—and generate an elasticity of −0.04. A similar elasticity (−0.06) obtains from a design comparing contiguous border counties, which the authors show to be good controls. NSW’s preferred matching estimates mix treatment and control units, obtain poor matches, and find the highest employment declines where the relative minimum wage falls. These findings refute NSW’s key claims.

Multisensory mechanisms for perceptual disambiguation. A classification image study on the stream–bounce illusion

Sensory information is inherently ambiguous, and a given signal can in principle correspond to infinite states of the world. A primary task for the observer is therefore to disambiguate sensory information and accurately infer the actual state of the world. Here, we take the stream–bounce illusion as a tool to investigate perceptual disambiguation from a cue-integration perspective, and explore how humans gather and combine sensory information to resolve ambiguity. In a classification task, we presented two bars moving in opposite directions along the same trajectory meeting at the centre. We asked observers to classify such ambiguous displays as streaming or bouncing. Stimuli were embedded in dynamic audiovisual noise, so that through a reverse correlation analysis, we could estimate the perceptual templates used for the classification. Such templates, the classification images, describe the spatiotemporal statistical properties of the noise, which are selectively associated to either percept. Our results demonstrate that the features of both visual and auditory noise, and interactions thereof, strongly biased the final percept towards streaming or bouncing. Computationally, participants’ performance is explained by a model involving a matching stage, where the perceptual systems cross-correlate the sensory signals with the internal templates; and an integration stage, where matching estimates are linearly combined to determine the final percept. These results demonstrate that observers use analogous MLE-like integration principles for categorical stimulus properties (stream/bounce decisions) as they do for continuous estimates (object size, position, etc.). Finally, the time-course of the classification images reveal that most of the decisional weight for disambiguation is assigned to information gathered before the physical crossing of the stimuli, thus highlighting a predictive nature of perceptual disambiguation.