167,504 research outputs found
Technical Efficiency of Rice Farmers in Northern Ghana
Examining the level of farm-specific technical efficiency of farmers growing irrigated and non-irrigated rice in Northern Ghana, this study fitted cross-sectional data into a transcendental logarithmic (translog) production frontier. The study concludes that rice farmers are technically inefficient. There is no significant difference in mean technical efficiencies for non-irrigators (53%) and irrigators (51%). The main determinants of technical efficiency in the study area are education, extension contact, age and family size. Providing farmers with both formal and informal education will be a useful investment and a good mechanism for improving efficiency in rice farming. There is also need for training more qualified extension agents and motivating them to deliver
The Visible and Near Infrared module of EChO
The Visible and Near Infrared (VNIR) is one of the modules of EChO, the
Exoplanets Characterization Observatory proposed to ESA for an M-class mission.
EChO is aimed to observe planets while transiting by their suns. Then the
instrument had to be designed to assure a high efficiency over the whole
spectral range. In fact, it has to be able to observe stars with an apparent
magnitude Mv= 9-12 and to see contrasts of the order of 10-4 - 10-5 necessary
to reveal the characteristics of the atmospheres of the exoplanets under
investigation. VNIR is a spectrometer in a cross-dispersed configuration,
covering the 0.4-2.5 micron spectral range with a resolving power of about 330
and a field of view of 2 arcsec. It is functionally split into two channels
respectively working in the 0.4-1 and 1.0-2.5 micron spectral ranges. Such a
solution is imposed by the fact the light at short wavelengths has to be shared
with the EChO Fine Guiding System (FGS) devoted to the pointing of the stars
under observation. The spectrometer makes use of a HgCdTe detector of 512 by
512 pixels, 18 micron pitch and working at a temperature of 45K as the entire
VNIR optical bench. The instrument has been interfaced to the telescope optics
by two optical fibers, one per channel, to assure an easier coupling and an
easier colocation of the instrument inside the EChO optical bench.Comment: 26 page
Higher order and infinite Trotter-number extrapolations in path integral Monte Carlo
Improvements beyond the primitive approximation in the path integral Monte
Carlo method are explored both in a model problem and in real systems. Two
different strategies are studied: the Richardson extrapolation on top of the
path integral Monte Carlo data and the Takahashi-Imada action. The Richardson
extrapolation, mainly combined with the primitive action, always reduces the
number-of-beads dependence, helps in determining the approach to the dominant
power law behavior, and all without additional computational cost. The
Takahashi-Imada action has been tested in two hard-core interacting quantum
liquids at low temperature. The results obtained show that the fourth-order
behavior near the asymptote is conserved, and that the use of this improved
action reduces the computing time with respect to the primitive approximation.Comment: 19 pages, RevTex, to appear in J. Chem. Phy
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Lessons Learned and Next Steps in Energy Efficiency Measurement and Attribution: Energy Savings, Net to Gross, Non-Energy Benefits, and Persistence of Energy Efficiency Behavior
This white paper examines four topics addressing evaluation, measurement, and attribution of direct and indirect effects to energy efficiency and behavioral programs: Estimates of program savings (gross); Net savings derivation through free ridership / net to gross analyses; Indirect non-energy benefits / impacts (e.g., comfort, convenience, emissions, jobs); and, Persistence of savings
Changes in Cascading Failure Risk with Generator Dispatch Method and System Load Level
Industry reliability rules increasingly require utilities to study and
mitigate cascading failure risk in their system. Motivated by this, this paper
describes how cascading failure risk, in terms of expected blackout size,
varies with power system load level and pre-contingency dispatch. We used Monte
Carlo sampling of random branch outages to generate contingencies, and a model
of cascading failure to estimate blackout sizes. The risk associated with
different blackout sizes was separately estimated in order to separate small,
medium, and large blackout risk. Results from secure models of the IEEE
RTS case and a 2383 bus case indicate that blackout risk does not always
increase with load level monotonically, particularly for large blackout risk.
The results also show that risk is highly dependent on the method used for
generator dispatch. Minimum cost methods of dispatch can result in larger long
distance power transfers, which can increase cascading failure risk.Comment: Submitted to Transmission and Distribution Conference and Exposition
(T&D), 2014 IEEE PE
MUSE: Modularizing Unsupervised Sense Embeddings
This paper proposes to address the word sense ambiguity issue in an
unsupervised manner, where word sense representations are learned along a word
sense selection mechanism given contexts. Prior work focused on designing a
single model to deliver both mechanisms, and thus suffered from either
coarse-grained representation learning or inefficient sense selection. The
proposed modular approach, MUSE, implements flexible modules to optimize
distinct mechanisms, achieving the first purely sense-level representation
learning system with linear-time sense selection. We leverage reinforcement
learning to enable joint training on the proposed modules, and introduce
various exploration techniques on sense selection for better robustness. The
experiments on benchmark data show that the proposed approach achieves the
state-of-the-art performance on synonym selection as well as on contextual word
similarities in terms of MaxSimC
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