Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

7 results

  • 8 - Technology

  • Jim Ife, Curtin University, Perth, Rimple Mehta, Western Sydney University, Sharlotte Tusasiirwe, Western Sydney University
  • Book:
    Re-imagining Social Work
    Published online:
    07 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023, pp 139-156

  • Summary

    Technological development typically has outcomes that can be perceived as both positive and negative for humanity. In a capitalist society, the benefits of new technology are often evaluated in economic terms, whereas the negative impacts are often evaluated in social, health-related or environmental terms – the externalities of conventional economics. The benefits of a new technology are often immediately obvious, while the negative consequences appear rather later. In this chapter, we examine four areas of major development or change: industrial technology, agricultural technology, medical technology, and digital and communication technology. Each has had, and continues to have, a significant impact on individuals, families, communities and societies, as well as on the understanding and practice of social work. These are discussed using the questions identified above: Who owns? Who uses? Who or what benefits? Who or what loses? This allows us to consider their implications for social work and for the re-imagining of social work in the twenty-first century.

  • Chapter 4 - Twentieth-Century Georgic and Agricultural Technology

  • from Part I - Turnings
  • Edited by Paddy Bullard, University of Reading
  • Book:
    A History of English Georgic Writing
    Published online:
    01 December 2022
    Print publication:
    15 December 2022, pp 99-118

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that the way in which authors of both fiction and non-fiction wrote how agriculture changed around the years of the Second World War. For the first fifty years of the century the extent and popularity of georgic writing was sufficient for the cultural significance of the countryside to outweigh its economic importance. However, those works that dealt seriously with farming tended to emphasise its problems, and mostly described a technology that had changed little since the nineteenth century. During and just after the Second World War farming memoirs in particular became far more celebratory of technical change, but there were no serious novelists, and not many memoirists, to commemorate the dramatic technical changes that transformed agriculture in the second half of the twentieth century in the way that writers such as Adrian Bell and A. G. Street had portrayed the pre-war years.

  • Farm production, market access and dietary diversity in Malawi

  • Stefan Koppmair, Menale Kassie, Matin Qaim
  • Journal:
    Public Health Nutrition / Volume 20 / Issue 2 / February 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    09 September 2016, pp. 325-335
    • Article
      • You have access
      • Open access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation
  • Objective

    The association between farm production diversity and dietary diversity in rural smallholder households was recently analysed. Most existing studies build on household-level dietary diversity indicators calculated from 7d food consumption recalls. Herein, this association is revisited with individual-level 24 h recall data. The robustness of the results is tested by comparing household- and individual-level estimates. The role of other factors that may influence dietary diversity, such as market access and agricultural technology, is also analysed.

    Design

    A survey of smallholder farm households was carried out in Malawi in 2014. Dietary diversity scores are calculated from 24 h recall data. Production diversity scores are calculated from farm production data covering a period of 12 months. Individual- and household-level regression models are developed and estimated.

    Setting

    Data were collected in sixteen districts of central and southern Malawi.

    Subjects

    Smallholder farm households (n 408), young children (n 519) and mothers (n 408).

    Results

    Farm production diversity is positively associated with dietary diversity. However, the estimated effects are small. Access to markets for buying food and selling farm produce and use of chemical fertilizers are shown to be more important for dietary diversity than diverse farm production. Results with household- and individual-level dietary data are very similar.

    Conclusions

    Further increasing production diversity may not be the most effective strategy to improve diets in smallholder farm households. Improving access to markets, productivity-enhancing inputs and technologies seems to be more promising.

  • 6 - Technology

  • from Part I - Determinants of Economic Performance
  • Edited by Walter Scheidel, Stanford University, California, Ian Morris, Stanford University, California, Richard P. Saller, Stanford University, California
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    29 November 2007, pp 144-172

  • Summary

    Recent studies of the history of technology increasingly take as their theme, besides invention, the transfer of technology, that is the adoption of technological knowledge from other societies or the transfer of one's own technology to other regions. The development of Greek civilization in archaic times was to a high degree based on the appropriation of the technological achievements of Egypt and Mesopotamia; while the historically relevant process of Romanization, especially in the western Mediterranean and in north-western Europe, also included the spread of Roman technology in the provinces. An important result of modern research in the history of technology is the insight into the interdependency of technological and economic developments. In ancient agriculture, numerous innovations are attested, for example in the threshing of grain for which rotating sledges were used. Technical advances that were of economic relevance such as grain mill, oil presses, wine presses, can be substantiated in various areas of the ancient economy.

  • Research and agriculture: Challenging the public system

  • David B. Danbom
  • Journal:
    American Journal of Alternative Agriculture / Volume 7 / Issue 3 / September 1992
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    30 October 2009, pp. 99-104
    Print publication:
    September 1992

  • The publicly sponsored agricultural research system in the United States has always had to deal with the tension between public expectations and scientific practices and standards. The equilibrium it established between those two contradictory demands has been unraveling since the 1960s. The contemporary challenge to the system is to redefine its public and scientific roles in an environment of rapid scientific change and of public debate and disunity.

  • Improving the relevance of formal education and training in preparing international students as change agents for low-input agriculture

  • Kristin Cashman, Edgar Persons
  • Journal:
    American Journal of Alternative Agriculture / Volume 3 / Issue 1 / Winter 1988
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    30 October 2009, pp. 35-40
    Print publication:
    Winter 1988

  • The frequent assumption that there are relevant and meaningful parallels between agriculture in the U.S. and in Less Industrialized Countries (LICs) is critically examined. Based on the results of a survey of LIC students enrolled in the College of Agriculture at the University of Minnesota, recommendations are made to more carefully focus the approach and direction of LIC student eduction. We conclude that the education and training of agriculturalists in U.S. institutions of higher learning does not relate sufficiently to the resource base and domestic needs of farming cultures in the LIC countries. A case is made for the benefit of practical experience through work with farmers whose practices and applications accommodate and reflect the realities of low-input farming practices in the LICs. Appropriate paralleled farming systems in the U.S. are typified as “organic,” “biological,” “regenerative,” or “sustainable,” and LIC students could be given experience on these farms as a part of their degree program in school.