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Title
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Challenges to agricultural financing in Mali
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Creator
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Konare, Kadidia
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Date
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2001
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Collection
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
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Description
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In Mali, like in many Sub-Saharan countries, inadequate access to credit has remained a central concern for farmers and a key constraint to the modernization and diversification of their activities. The commercial banks' limited participation in agricultural financing and the hard terms and conditions for obtaining individual loans have penalized many smallholders and small traders. The vast majority of these people have little to no access to financial services, limiting their productivity,...
Show moreIn Mali, like in many Sub-Saharan countries, inadequate access to credit has remained a central concern for farmers and a key constraint to the modernization and diversification of their activities. The commercial banks' limited participation in agricultural financing and the hard terms and conditions for obtaining individual loans have penalized many smallholders and small traders. The vast majority of these people have little to no access to financial services, limiting their productivity, income, investment and overall quality of life. Inadequate regulatory/legal frameworks, monetary policies, inappropriate agricultural loan evaluations and threats to sound microfinance activities are constraining agricultural financing in Mali.
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Title
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Minimum embedding dimension from the perspective of persistent homology
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Creator
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Sukhu, Christopher Lloyd
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Date
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2019
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Collection
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
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Description
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"We investigate the use of 1-dimensional persistence diagrams to determine minimum embedding dimension. In particular, we test the claim that persistence diagrams look qualitatively the same once the correct dimension is reached. In some cases, this appears to not be true so we turn to a quantitative measure, the bottleneck distance, to see if the persistence diagrams are close once the minimum embedding dimension is attained. In some instances, we see that the persistence diagrams fail to...
Show more"We investigate the use of 1-dimensional persistence diagrams to determine minimum embedding dimension. In particular, we test the claim that persistence diagrams look qualitatively the same once the correct dimension is reached. In some cases, this appears to not be true so we turn to a quantitative measure, the bottleneck distance, to see if the persistence diagrams are close once the minimum embedding dimension is attained. In some instances, we see that the persistence diagrams fail to converge experimentally under the bottleneck distance. The main issue appears to be that it is difficult to explicitly characterize the persistent homology of delay embeddings of arbitrary time series. Instead we restrict to periodic time series where there exists such an explicit characterization. We apply Fourier analysis to see that that number of peaks in the frequency spectrum of a delay embedded time series is related to the minimum embedding dimension. Moreover, we give a method to filter out less significant peaks while not altering the persistent homology much, with respect to the bottleneck distance."--Page ii.
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Title
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The effectiveness of mirror imitation training on the generalization of imitation skills for children with autism spectrum disorder
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Creator
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Galimberti, Anjela Janai
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Date
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2019
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Collection
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
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Description
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"The ability to imitate is a foundational skill related to multiple aspects of social, play, and language development in children. However, many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not imitate as effectively as their typically developing peers and therefore need direct instruction to acquire imitative repertoires. The current study investigated the effectiveness of Mirror Imitation Training: a relatively novel instructional procedure which uses a mirror as a tool to teach...
Show more"The ability to imitate is a foundational skill related to multiple aspects of social, play, and language development in children. However, many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not imitate as effectively as their typically developing peers and therefore need direct instruction to acquire imitative repertoires. The current study investigated the effectiveness of Mirror Imitation Training: a relatively novel instructional procedure which uses a mirror as a tool to teach imitation skills. Three children with autism spectrum disorder who did not demonstrate a generalized imitation repertoire despite exposure to conventional imitation training methods were selected for participation. For all three participants, mirror imitation training was effective at producing skill acquisition across two sets of imitation targets and increased responding to the remaining untrained sets of imitation targets. Supplemental findings also showed 2 of the 3 participants required fewer sessions to criteria on set 2 after meeting criterion for their set 1 with MIT. These findings identify mirror imitation training as a promising teaching method to promote generalized imitation skills in children with ASD who do not demonstrate generalized imitation skills when taught with more traditional methods of imitation instruction."--Page ii.
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