Search results for "DIVERSIFICATION"

Agriculture in a Sicilian inland area: Strategies and motivations of conversion towards multifunctional activities

2016

The main topic of the paper concerns multifunctional farms, their activities and motivations for starting up, and on the other hand visitor satisfaction. To this purpose, a preliminary sample survey was carried out addressed to 13 farms in 3 Sicilian provinces. The aim was to identify positive and negative aspects of the services offered. The most relevant findings of the survey are the variety of activities and services, a widespread use of internet services, efficient means of communications and a significant growth in labour force. On the other side, long time is generally needed in order to obtain administrative authorizations or to carry out farm plants, as well as excessive pay-back t…

Revamping Research on Unrelated Diversification Strategy: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges for Future Inquiry

2015

With the aim of achieving an advanced understanding of current research on unrelated diversification and providing fruitful groundwork to foster active interchange between disciplinary traditions, this paper detects articles from two relevant research streams; i.e., strategic management and financial economics. We first provide a brief overview of management thinking on unrelated diversification strategy. Then, we present a conceptual map that offers a comprehensive appreciation of unrelated diversification strategy antecedents (i.e., environmental and institutional, organizational value-enhancing, and managerial drivers), implementation process (i.e., managerial complexity, misallocation o…

Débuter la diversification alimentaire : une décision influencée par la croissance de l'enfant ?

2019

National audience; Les pratiques d'alimentation des nourrissons sont soumises à des influences multiples. Ainsi, l'âge de début de diversification varie selon de nombreux facteurs comme les caractéristiques maternelles (tabagisme, âge, niveau d'études, corpulence, pays de naissance) ou infantiles (sexe) (Bournez et al., 2017). Nous voulions étudier si cet âge pouvait de plus dépendre de la croissance de l'enfant, et traduire ainsi une sensibilité de la mère à cet aspect du développement. Nous avons envisagé que les enfants les plus grands (ou lourds, ou corpulents) pourraient être diversifiés plus tôt que les enfants de taille « moyenne ». Les données de la cohorte ELFE (Etude Longitudinale…

Backbone of credit relationships in the Japanese credit market

2016

We detect the backbone of the weighted bipartite network of the Japanese credit market relationships. The backbone is detected by adapting a general method used in the investigation of weighted networks. With this approach we detect a backbone that is statistically validated against a null hypothesis of uniform diversification of loans for banks and firms. Our investigation is done year by year and it covers more than thirty years during the period from 1980 to 2011. We relate some of our findings with economic events that have characterized the Japanese credit market during the last years. The study of the time evolution of the backbone allows us to detect changes occurred in network size,…

“Are They Singing the National Anthem?” : Football Followers’ Responses to the Ethnic Diversification of Finland Men’s National Football Team

2017

Intelligent Multi-Start Methods

2018

Heuristic search procedures aimed at finding globally optimal solutions to hard combinatorial optimization problems usually require some type of diversification to overcome local optimality. One way to achieve diversification is to re-start the procedure from a new solution once a region has been explored, which constitutes a multi-start procedure. In this chapter we describe the best known multi-start methods for solving optimization problems. We also describe their connections with other metaheuristic methodologies. We propose classifying these methods in terms of their use of randomization, memory and degree of rebuild. We also present a computational comparison of these methods on solvi…

Biodiversity dynamics and their driving factors during the Cretaceous diversification of Spatangoida (Echinoidea, Echinodermata)

2004

Abstract Variations in recorded diversity over time present a scrambled signal that is modulated by a large number of variables: the potential of particular life forms to generate evolutionary innovations, external constraints induced by the environment in its broad sense, the heterogeneity of the fossil record and the analytical artefacts due to sampling bias. A key question is how to characterise and quantify the separate input of any given factor in the overall diversity signal. This paper explores the structure of diversity data for spatangoid heart urchins and the sensitivity of recorded diversity to different factors of analytical bias (length of geological periods, proportion of pala…

User session level diverse reranking of search results

2018

Most Web search diversity approaches can be categorized as Document Level Diversification (DocLD), Topic Level Diversification (TopicLD) or Term Level Diversification (TermLD). DocLD selects the relevant documents with minimal content overlap to each other. It does not take the coverage of query subtopics into account. TopicLD solves this by modeling query subtopics explicitly. However, the automatic mining of query subtopics is difficult. TermLD tries to cover as many query topic terms as possible, which reduces the task of finding a query's subtopics into finding a set of representative topic terms. In this paper, we propose a novel User Session Level Diversification (UserLD) approach bas…

Where is the line? Phylogeography and secondary contact of western Palearctic coal tits (Periparus ater: Aves, Passeriformes, Paridae)

2013

In this study, a phylogeographic scenario of the coal tit (Periparus ater) was reconstructed based on a fragment of the mitochondrial control region, and within- and between-population genetic diversity was analysed with a focus on the western Palearctic breeding range. We inferred a first pan-European delimitation of a postulated secondary contact zone among coal tits from the north-eastern Palearctic ater subspecies group and those from the south-western Palearctic abietum group. Generally, between-population differentiation was greatest in the Mediterranean range, which was explained by a greater separation in multiple Pleistocene refuge areas compared to the lower differentiation across…

Potential of crop mixtures to reduce pesticide use in France. A data analysis

2022

Over the last 50 years, agricultural intensification has led to simplified agricultural systemshighly dependent on fertilisers and pesticides, causing biodiversity loss, changes in the balanceof nutrients, water and soil contamination. The total amount of pesticides applied each yearin France makes it the main consumer of plant protection products in Europe, and arable cropsare currently the most pesticide-consuming production systems. Reducing pesticide use inarable crops is thus a major challenge. There is now evidence that crop diversification in time,with more diversified rotations, and in space, through crop mixtures, can help restoreecosystem services and represent a potential key lev…