Rethinking the development, dissemination and adoption of agricultural technologies

This paper focuses on the higher order factors affecting successful adoption of technologies. Drawing on the "actor-oriented perspective" in rural sociology, it is argued that successful examples of adoption at this higher level result from a complex conjunction of people and events, with outcomes that may have been quite unanticipated at the outset. From this perspective, research and extension projects and programs are viewed as arenas in which social actors–village leaders, farmers, researchers (local and international), aid officials, municipal agents, extension workers, and traders–pursue their own short- and long-term objectives and strategies. To this end, they maneuver, negotiate, organize, cooperate, participate, coerce, obstruct, form coalitions, adopt, adapt, and reject, all within a specific geographical and historical context.

Small-World Effect in Epidemics Using Cellular Automata

The spread of an infectious disease in a population involves interactions leading to an epidemic outbreak through a network of contacts. Extending on Watts and Strogatz (1998) who showed that short-distance connections create a small-world effect, a model combining short-and long-distance probabilistic and regularly updated contacts helps considering spatial heterogeneity. The method is based on cellular automata. The presence of long-distance connections accelerates the small-world effect, as if the world shrank in proportion of their total number.