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As the world begins to feel the effects of climate change, the frequency of droughts is increasing in the Horn of Africa. In Kenya, the drought and food crisis affect welfare through two main channels. The first channel is the increased mortality of livestock in drought-affected areas, which are home to 10 percent of the country's population. The second channel is by exacerbating increases in food prices, which are largely driven by worldwide price trends. Considering these two channels, this note identifies four broad policy changes that can reduce Kenya's future vulnerability to such shocks: (i) investment in people in the arid and semiarid lands; (ii) reform of Kenya's maize policy; (iii) review of the East African Community grain trade policy; and (iv) formulation of a unified social protection system.

Pomegranate (Punica granatum L.) is an ancient deciduous fruit tree crop in the family Lythraceae. Pomegranate juice is a highly valued beverage, long believed by many of the world’s cultures to possess medicinal properties. Recently the juice has been demonstrated to contain large quantities of polyphenolic compounds with powerful antioxidant properties. Commercial pomegranate planting area has increased substantially in the western hemisphere due to increased consumer interest. Low nursery inventory has caused many farmers to propagate their own trees and limited availability of only a few cultivars is believed to have contributed to the lack of diversity in the market. ‘Wonderful,’ the industry standard, has been propagated in the U.S. for decades and dominates the market, leading to the present-day monoculture. The USDA-ARS pomegranate germplasm collection conserves approximately 280 cultivars, many of which have not been evaluated for commercial production. In this dissertation, 14 preselected pomegranate cultivars from the USDA collection were evaluated: 1) to develop protocols that optimize propagation of pomegranate for nurseries and growers; 2) in new field trials planted specifically to determine establishment rates, productivity and eco-physiological performance of different cultivars in inland versus coastal environments; and 3) to establish dates of fruit maturity, identify unique cultivars with consumer-friendly traits, and to select candidates that meet or exceed juice quality parameters of Wonderful. The overall goal of this research was to identify promising pomegranate cultivars with the potential to be developed for commercial production in coastal and inland areas of southern and central California. Propagation experiments determined that some pomegranate cultivars were difficult to root. Establishment rates and precocity were significantly different among cultivars and between sites, with the inland planting producing more fruit than the coastal site. Juice quality for 14 cultivars was chemically analyzed with spectrophotometry, refractometry, titration, nuclear magnetic resonance, ion and liquid chromatography to identify candidate cultivars meeting or exceeding Wonderful juice quality specifications. This research was the first of its kind to establish experimental field trials of pomegranate germplasm in California to quantify and provide phenotypic, eco-physiological and horticultural data for growers, breeders, and the food and beverage industries.

The 2011 World development report looks across disciplines and experiences drawn from around the world to offer some ideas and practical recommendations on how to move beyond conflict and fragility and secure development. The key messages are important for all countries-low, middle, and high income-as well as for regional and global institutions: first, institutional legitimacy is the key to stability. When state institutions do not adequately protect citizens, guard against corruption, or provide access to justice; when markets do not provide job opportunities; or when communities have lost social cohesion-the likelihood of violent conflict increases. Second, investing in citizen security, justice, and jobs is essential to reducing violence. But there are major structural gaps in our collective capabilities to support these areas. Third, confronting this challenge effectively means that institutions need to change. International agencies and partners from other countries must adapt procedures so they can respond with agility and speed, a longer-term perspective, and greater staying power. Fourth, need to adopt a layered approach. Some problems can be addressed at the country level, but others need to be addressed at a regional level, such as developing markets that integrate insecure areas and pooling resources for building capacity Fifth, in adopting these approaches, need to be aware that the global landscape is changing. Regional institutions and middle income countries are playing a larger role. This means should pay more attention to south-south and south-north exchanges, and to the recent transition experiences of middle income countries.

View showing old tobacco beds after plowing. Watershed #III, Danville, Va.

The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) brings together the world s leading scholars and development practitioners for a lively debate on state-of-the-art thinking in development policy and the implications for the global economy. The 17th conference was held in Dakar, Senegal, on January 27, 2005. The theme of the conference was growth and integration, which was divided into five topics: growth and integration, financial reforms, economic development, trade and development, and investment climate.

Flight range and time, as well as autonomous flights in complex environments, are two challenges preventing quadcopters from being more widely used in the industry. This thesis reduces the effect of these two problems via several motion planning methods.This thesis is composed of three parts. In the first part, two methods are proposed to improve the flight time (endurance) and distance (range) of quadcopters. The first method does so by finding the optimal flight speed using extremum seeking control. The second method extends the first method by finding the optimal flight sideslip as well as speed, and adds a step size adapter to the extremum seeking controller to improve its convergence speed. Both methods do not require the power consumption modeling of the quadcopters and can thus adapt to changing payloads and disturbances.In the next part, we focus on the problem of fast collision avoidance flight in cluttered environments. First, we propose a computationally efficient memoryless planner for fast outdoor flights, using a depth camera for sensing obstacles and using the visual inertial odometry (VIO) for state estimation. Since the VIO may function poorly in areas with very few visual features or when the flight is overly aggressive. We then take the state estimation quality of the VIO into account during the trajectory planning. This perception-aware planner is able to guide the vehicle to areas with more VIO features and avoid overly aggressive trajectories. It improves the VIO's accuracy and reduces its failure rate, while only slightly reducing the flight speed.Finally, an inertial navigation motion planning strategy is introduced. This state estimation method only requires the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and can be used as a backup when other methods fail. By breaking a long trajectory into multiple short "hopping trajectories'' and introducing zero velocity updates when the vehicle is stationary on the ground, the state estimation variance can be drastically reduced and can be used in closed-loop control of quadcopters.

Gage station from upstream side. Car (BelAir) on bridge.

Simulation plays a crucial role in modern academic study, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The simulation environment can mimic real-world scenarios, allowing the AI agent to learn, adapt, and make decisions in a controlled and safe setting. This thesis tackles two important problems in building the next generation of artificial general intelligence (AGI): how to efficiently train an AI agent with values and how to overcome the simulation to reality gap to bring the training results to real-world applications. The current studies of AI mainly consider learning about the potential or energy function (U), referring to understanding the impact of the outside environment. The U function helps the agent apprehend the physical world laws, natural potentials, and social norms. However, taking into account the value learning, usually representing modeling one's inside thinking, benefits the agent to derive its goals, intents, and social values. Our research shows that both U and V learning are equally important to the pathway to AGI. The learning of U is usually data-driven. It enables the agent to imitate and complete the task through statistical learning. By incorporating the value function, the agent can spontaneously specify a task plan and its behavior is more in line with human cognition and value.This thesis consists of three parts: (1) Potential function learning, which explores the process of acquiring knowledge or skills that are useful and practical for a particular purpose. (2) Value learning when learning the potential (U) function can not satisfy all the learning goals, which investigates situations where utility-based learning approaches might be limited or ineffective. (3) Combining U and V learning, which focuses on the integration of simulation-based learning and data-driven learning methods. We primarily focus on assessing the effectiveness of U learning within a simulated environment. Our investigation commences with agents operating in a controlled simulated setting, where the action space is intentionally kept small. Through rigorous testing and iterative refinement, we gradually expand the scope of our analysis to encompass agents dealing with increasingly complex and continuous action spaces. Upon achieving compelling results in the simulated realm, we proceed to the crucial next step: transferring the knowledge and expertise gained from the well-trained agents in the simulation space to real-world scenarios. This process entails adapting the learned policies, strategies, and decision-making capabilities of the agents to navigate the intricacies and uncertainties of genuine environments.

Watershed management has come to be recognized as a critical issue in the Nile Basin. Upstream land use can cause degradation and soil erosion, resulting in lower agricultural yields locally and causing sedimentation downstream. The increased sediment load causes economic problems by reducing water quality, and irrigation and hydropower potential, as well as increasing flooding. This note shows how, through Basin-wide cooperation, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) has led efforts to address these problems, developing successful projects to deliver real results to restore the Nile.

This report presents an update on the economic challenges facing Ethiopia with a focus on the shared goal of accelerating equitable growth. The starting point is the Government's own Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP), which is in the process of finalization, and is designed to cover the period 2005-2010. This report proposes that the growth strategy should more explicitly adopt a "two-legged" approach that would both (a) consolidate and deepen an essentially balanced, broad-based and inclusive growth strategy and (b) adopt a more selective approach to speed up growth, allowing for identification and support for dynamic new activities, based on private and public sector discoveries, innovations, and partnerships. This report suggests ways forward to complement and strengthen the PASDEP. It brings together recent analysis and thinking from a range of sources, to put forth a storyline and key elements of the strategy in Part I. The second part provides a series of chapters on key themes - viz. recent and longer term economic developments, rural development, the private sector, the infrastructure challenge, and the institutions and governance. The report seeks to provide adequate coverage of the major challenges facing Ethiopia in its efforts to accelerate equitable growth, drawing on work across a range of themes including the Institutional and Governance Review.