Equipment-related injuries in agriculture: an international perspective

Injuries related to agricultural equipment are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, in both high-income and low-income countries. Tractors are most often associated with severe injuries and fatalities. All age groups sustain injuries. Injuries to children are also prevalent because the sites of agricultural work overlap homes in rural areas. In the majority of papers reviewed, preventive methods are mostly targeted at behaviour modification and effective medical facilities, whereas only a few authors have highlighted design changes and passive measures for injury control. The effectiveness of suggested interventions is not discussed in the majority of papers except those related to roll-over protection structures, fodder cutting machines and thresher safety devices.     

Does Self Help Group Participation Lead to Asset Creation?

We evaluate the effect of Self Help Group participation on a long-term impact parameter, namely, asset creation. Indian Self Help Groups (SHGs) are unique in that they are mainly NGO-formed microfinance groups but later funded by commercial banks. The results reveal that longer membership in SHGs positively impacts asset creation, robust to various asset specifications. With longer participation in SHGs, members move away from pure agriculture as an income source toward other sources such as livestock income. Training by NGOs positively impacts asset creation but the type of SHG linkage per se has no effect.     

Robustness of Williams Square change-over designs

In literature, Williams Square change-over designs balanced for first residual effects of treatments have been proved to be universally optimal. Here, an attempt has been made to show that these designs are robust against missing of last α [≤v−1; v being the number of periods in the design for v treatments] observations from an experimental unit. Received May 2000     

An Experimental Analysis of Face to Face versus Computer Mediated Communication Channels

Experimental research on Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) has generally focused on democratic groups whose members typically share the same objectives. In organizations, however, there are many situations where groups have a leader who has the power to override the group's recommendation, the objective of the leader may not be the same as the objective of each member, and not everyone may have the same information. This paper reports the results of an experiment in which the groups, having a designated leader, worked on a mixed-motive task. Within this context, we analyze group decision outcomes and processes for groups that use a face-to-face channel of cormnunication and those that utilize computer mediated communication. We compare performance of the leader and members with respect to an objective measure of performance, the efficient frontier. The results indicate that for this task groups using face-to-face channel outperform groups using computer mediated communication.     

Performance of alliances: formative stages and changing organizational and environmental influences

There is near unanimous agreement that the performance of alliances usually falls short of expectations. Studies have identified several generic reasons for poor performance: inadequate communication, lack of trust, insufficient complementarity of resources, inappropriate organizational structures and processes, and so on. While we broadly agree with these, knowledge of these self-evident reasons does not seem to have turned the tide of bad news in any way. We show in this paper that it is important to unpack a broad set of antecedent variables, including the ones identified above, and to track them over the crucial formative stages of an alliance. Based on our interviews with 24 senior and middle level managers and professionals of a focal company about 10 of its major alliances, we identify the following four formative stages of an alliance: (1) Recognition , (2) Research , (3) Relationship Set-up , and (4) Ramp up . We show that the primary predictors of success across these stages are not identical, nor their effect uniform. Further, proper completion of all the preceding stages is essential for the success of subsequent stages. We finally show that the compaction of the various successful stages, in particular of the Ramp-Up stage, is one of the best predictors of overall success of an alliance.     

Changes in the field of R&D management over the past 20 years

Abstract
The purpose of this bibliographic study is to identify trends of interest in the field of the management of technology in the last 20 years. The data used are based mainly on a classification of the topics covered by papers printed in this journal since its first publication in 1970.
On the whole, interest in most of the topics has remained steady, notably in economics of R&D, communication, innovation and creativity. The only notable decrease in interest has been in project evaluation and selection. Relative to their importance, the authors remark that in some areas in which interest has remained steady, such as creativity and innovation, not enough is being done. Areas in which interest has increased include organizational issues, the interface between R&D and production and the impact of information technology. Interest in technology strategy increased over the early part of the review period but has recently declined.
The authors conclude by listing topics which strongly deserve attention by workers in the field. They cite integration of R&D into corporate strategy, organizing for technological flexibility, technology assessment and transfer, speeding up the R&D process, measuring the impact of new information technology, intrapreneurship and defining the role of basic R&D in technology development.     

Prehospital trauma care evolution,practice and controversies: need for a review

Abstract

Modern medicine and surgery is historically very recent, and most interventions that are so commonly done in a hospital now are only 60 to 70?years old. Understanding of emergency care of the injured is more recent; however, for the sake of temporal convenience trauma care has become compartmentalized into phases: first aid, bystander care, prehospital care, emergency care, definitive levels of care and rehabilitation. The injured patient’s body physiology is changing continuously from the time of the impact at the injury site.. The outcome of trauma is dependent not only on what is done in the prehospital phase but also on hospital care and rehabilitation. Our understanding of the changes and the response to interventions in a trauma patient has been evolving over the years. This paper discusses the need to review recent advances in our understanding of the care process and how we need to improve it and how there is a pressing need to generate valid evidence on what we do in emergency care.     

Bank-moneylender linkage as an alternative to bank competition in rural credit markets

This paper proposes a new method in which banks and moneylenderscan link in rural credit markets. Banks and moneylenders, twoof the major lenders in rural credit markets, differ in theirinformation on borrowers and costs of funds. Due to informationconstraints, banks must deny further loans to borrowers whocannot repay a certain amount. In the linkage, these borrowersobtain loans from moneylenders, repay the banks, and have continuingaccess. We then evaluate conditions under which the linkagewould be preferred to bank competition and find that the linkagedominates for a wide range of parameters. In light of recentproposals to liberalize Indian banking, the analysis providesa cautionary note to the limits of introducing banking competitionin rural credit markets and provides an alternative.     

A series of resolvable PBIB(3) designs with two replicates

A new series of resolvable PBIB(3) designs with two replications has been proposed along with a simple method of analysis. These designs form a generalization of circular lattice designs of Rao (1956).     

FRACAS: A Computerized Aid for Reasoning in Tax

Problem solving in the tax domain requires two kinds of knowledge: of the law itself and of how the law has been applied in the past. The need for the second factor arises as a result of the ambiguity of natural language. The problem solver requires information on how the courts have adjudicated specific cases in the past. This information would then provide the basis for reasoning about the current case. In this paper we address the issue of developing a system which will retrieve relevant historical cases. The cases are stored using a frame representation scheme and the users can retrieve cases by specifying either attributes alone or attributes and values associated with them. Currently the system has been implemented in Pascal on a Cray. The case base contains 250 cases relating to Section 183 of the tax code.