Comparative Study on Profitability of Sorghum-Legumes Intercropping Systems in Ethiopia

The imbalance between the crop production and population growth is currently the major issue in Ethiopia. To feed the growing population, increasing the production of food through growing more crop types in the same field as an intercropping is the right strategy. The study was aimed at evaluating the profitability of sorghum-legume intercropping on yield of sorghum. Intercropping sorghum with legumes crops increases the land productivity as its Land Equivalent Ratio is greater than one. In these cases, the land equivalent ratio is greater than one indicating the benefits of intercropping. In general, legume crops contributed to the yield of sorghum either intercropped with legume or grown up using residual contribution of legumes after a year. Therefore, for maximum sorghum production, farmers should plant either as intercrop or after residual effect of legumes crops. In addition to agronomic parameters used to compare the advantages of any cropping system in small scale farming conditions, total gross monetary value is also used to evaluate economic advantages of intercropping system.

The contribution of immigration from Ukraine to economic growth in Poland

From 2014 onwards Poland witnessed an unprecedented inflow of immigrant workers from Ukraine. Coupled with strong labour demand, this surge in labour supply provided a major contribution to Poland’s economic growth. However, due to problems with capturing immigration in Labour Force Survey data this contribution has remained hitherto largely unaccounted in official data. This paper uses a range of alternative official data sources to estimate the actual number of immigrants, and survey data on migrant characteristics, collected in four Polish cities, to estimate the effective labour supply of Ukrainian immigrants in terms of productivity-adjusted hours worked. The authors find that the arrival of Ukrainian workers was increasing the effective labour supply in Poland in 2013–2018 by 0.8% per annum. Imputing this additional labour supply in a growth accounting exercise they find that the (previously unaccounted) contribution of Ukrainian workers amounted to about 0.5 pp. per annum, i.e., about 13% of Poland’s GDP growth in 2013–2018. The same figure should be subtracted from the residual contribution of total factor productivity growth, suggesting that recent growth in Poland has been in fact much more labour-intensive than previously interpreted.

Influence of living in the same home on biomonitored levels of consumer product chemicals

Background Individuals living in the same home may share exposures from direct contact with sources or indirectly through contamination of the home environment. Objective We investigated the influence of sharing a home on urine levels of ten phenolic chemicals present in some consumer products. Methods We used data from Silent Spring Institute’s Detox Me Action Kit (DMAK), a crowdsourced biomonitoring program in the US. Of the 726 DMAK participants, 185 lived in the same home with one or more other DMAK participants (n = 137 pairs, up to six participants in a home). The concentration distributions included values below the detection limit so we used statistical methods that account for left-censored data, including non-parametric correlation estimation and hierarchical Bayesian regression models. Results Concentrations were significantly positively correlated between pair-members sharing a home for nine of the ten chemicals. Concentrations of 2,5-dichlorophenol were the most strongly correlated between pair-members (tau = 0.46), followed by benzophenone-3 (tau = 0.31) and bisphenol A (tau = 0.21). The relative contribution of personal product use reported product use of other household members (up to 5 others), and the residual contribution from a shared household, including exposures not asked about, varied by chemical. Paraben concentrations were largely influenced by personal behaviors whereas dichlorophenol and bisphenol concentrations were largely influenced by shared home exposures not related to reported behaviors. Significance Measuring the influence of personal and household practices on biomonitoring exposures helps pinpoint major sources of exposure and highlights chemical-specific intervention strategies to reduce them.

ECONOMIC PRODUCTIVITY: FACTOR APPROACHES

The article focuses on economic productivity and have stressed the theory of marginal utility (productivity). In modern researches such aggregate indicators as a total factor productivity and a multifactor productivity prevail. Total Factor Productivity is measured by combining the effects of all there sources used in the production of goods and services (labour, capital, materials, energy, etc.) and dividing it into the output. Multifactor productivity (MFP) is the ratio of total output to a subset of inputs. A subset of inputs might consist of only labour and materials or it could include capital. MFP is the residual contribution to output growth of an industry or economy after calculating the contribution from all its factor inputs. The OECD methodology examines key single-factor (aggregated) indicators of labour and capital productivity, considering total output and costs and, most importantly, the value added, which reflects the real increase in the welfare of the nation.

Performance of VERA in 10 micro-arcsecond astrometry

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) astrometry using the phase-referencing technique remains an open issue for the quantitative characterization of the observing conditions to achieve a feasible parallax precision of 10 micro-arcseconds (μas). To address this issue, we evaluated the astrometric performance of the VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry (VERA) through the parallax measurements of five distant star-forming regions under good observing conditions of close separations (${0{^{\circ}_{.}}5}$–${1{_{.}^{\circ}}3}$) and high elevations (≥50°). Their parallaxes measured 89–200 μas, corresponding to distances of 5–11 kpc with an error of 11–20 μas. Furthermore, we investigated the contributions to the position error budget and concluded that the tropospheric residual contribution is the dominant error source. We also confirmed that the astrometric error propagation strongly depends on the term $\Delta \sec Z$, which stands for the difference between $\sec Z$ of the target and its reference source, where Z is the zenith angle during the observations. We found that for a source pair with a $\Delta \sec Z$ less than 0.01 (for example, a set of a close separation of $\le {{0{^{\circ}_{.}}5}}$ and a high elevation of ≥50°), we can achieve the parallax precision of 10 μas using a typical monitoring program comprising 10 observing epochs over a span of two years.

A Fast and Accurate Radon Measurement Tool for Remedial Actions in Buildings

Continuous monitoring of radon concentration is an effective and fast method for assessing radon sources in buildings. For this purpose, fast response and absence of residual contribution from previous measurements is of primary importance to cut intervention time and cost in a remedial action. An instrument is described based on a scintillation cell. Counts from the detection assembly are processed by a microprocessor-based unit in order to compensate plateout and thus shorten the detector response step down to 15 min compared to the typical 3 h. A new treatment of the cell background, added to the algorithms, cancels the detector memory of previous measurements. The instrument has the ability to characterise both high and low activity environments in rapid sequence, even with a switch off/on operation in between, with almost no influence on the measure accuracy. A discussion of the computations and results from measurements is given.