670 research outputs found
Chronicles of Oklahoma
Article reports on the excavation of a bluff shelter within east central Oklahoma. This shelter was a cave dwelling for those who lived within Oklahoma centuries ago
The Electrochemistry of Simple Inorganic Molecules in Room Temperature Ionic Liquids
The electrochemistry of simple inorganic compounds in room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) is reviewed and some new work in this area is presented. This paper focuses on the comparison between electrochemical behaviour in RTILs and in conventional aprotic solvents. Some compounds (iodides, O2, NO2, SO2, NH3) display similar reactions and mechanisms in RTILs as in aprotic solvents (as is observed for organic compounds). However other species (nitrates, PCl3, POCl3) show remarkably different behaviour to traditional solvents. This makes RTILs very promising media for the study of inorganic compounds, and highlights the need for more investigations in this exciting area
New Methods to Assess Climate Change Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation of Agricultural Production Systems: The experience of AgMIP’s Regional Integrated Assessments in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia
The climate change research community has recognized that new pathway and scenario concepts are needed to implement impact and vulnerability assessment that is logically consistent across global, regional and local scales. The most common challenge is that global models do not provide context-specific answers, while scientists and decision makers require data and information about climate change, vulnerability, adaptation, mitigation and impacts at the local scale. The Agricultural Model Inter-comparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) provides the link between global climate change projections and sector-specific and regional pathways and scenarios (Antle et al., 2015; Rosenzweig et al., 2013). AgMIP, through a trans-disciplinary process involving both scientists and stakeholders, is developing Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs) for agricultural systems at both global and regional scales. In addition to climate modeling, RAPs include bio-physical and socio-economic drivers, associated capabilities, challenges and opportunities. RAPs can then be translated as components of the AgMIP Regional Integrated Assessments (RIA) of climate vulnerability and impacts
Renegotiation and Relative Performance Evaluation: Why an Informative Signal may be Useless
Although Holmström's informativeness criterion provides a theoretical foundation for the controllability principle and inter firm relative performance evaluation, empirical and field studies provide only weak evidence on such practices. This paper refines the traditional informativeness criterion by abandoning the conventional full-commitment assumption. With the possibility of renegotiation, a signal's usefulness in incentive contracting depends on its information quality, not simply on whether the signal is informative. This paper derives conditions for determining when a signal is useless and when it is useful. In particular, these conditions will be met when the signal's information quality is either sufficiently poor or sufficiently rich
Using AgMIP Regional Integrated Assessment Methods to Evaluate Vulnerability, Resilience and Adaptive Capacity for Climate Smart Agricultural Systems
The predicted effects of climate change call for a multi-dimensional method to assess the performance of various agricultural systems across economic, environmental and social dimensions. Climate smart agriculture (CSA) recognizes that the three goals of climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience must be integrated into the framework of a sustainable agricultural system. However, current methods to determine a systems’ ability to achieve CSA goals are lacking. This paper presents a new simulation-based method based on the Regional Integrated Assessment (RIA) methods developed by the Agricultural Model Inter-comparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) for climate impact assessment. This method combines available data, field- and stakeholder-based surveys, biophysical and economic models, and future climate and socio-economic scenarios. It features an integrated farm and household approach and accounts for heterogeneity across biophysical and socioeconomic variables as well as temporal variability of climate indicators. This method allows for assessment of the technologies and practices of an agricultural system to achieve the three goals of CSA. The case study of a mixed crop livestock system in western Zimbabwe is highlighted as a typical smallholder agricultural systems in Africa
MYND: Unsupervised Evaluation of Novel BCI Control Strategies on Consumer Hardware
Neurophysiological studies are typically conducted in laboratories with
limited ecological validity, scalability, and generalizability of findings.
This is a significant challenge for the development of brain-computer
interfaces (BCIs), which ultimately need to function in unsupervised settings
on consumer-grade hardware. We introduce MYND: A framework that couples
consumer-grade recording hardware with an easy-to-use application for the
unsupervised evaluation of BCI control strategies. Subjects are guided through
experiment selection, hardware fitting, recording, and data upload in order to
self-administer multi-day studies that include neurophysiological recordings
and questionnaires. As a use case, we evaluate two BCI control strategies
("Positive memories" and "Music imagery") in a realistic scenario by combining
MYND with a four-channel electroencephalogram (EEG). Thirty subjects recorded
70.4 hours of EEG data with the system at home. The median headset fitting time
was 25.9 seconds, and a median signal quality of 90.2% was retained during
recordings.Neural activity in both control strategies could be decoded with an
average offline accuracy of 68.5% and 64.0% across all days. The repeated
unsupervised execution of the same strategy affected performance, which could
be tackled by implementing feedback to let subjects switch between strategies
or devise new strategies with the platform.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to PNAS. Minor revisio
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