Comparing Profitability and Cash Flows of Agroforestry and Agriculture on Australian Farms

This paper is a summary of a project that compared the relative profitability of existing, emerging and prospective agroforestry systems with profitability of conventional agricultural land uses in the cropping zones of Western Australia and New South Wales. The project explored the economic boundary conditions under which several promising agroforestry systems may be viable in the lower rainfall zones. Partial budgeting and discounted cash flow techniques were used to conduct the comparative analysis of alternative land use scenarios. The profitability, cash flows and debt associated with each of the scenario are reported. The analysis underpinning this research provides estimates of the economic value of the temporal and spatial interaction effects of trees on agricultural crops and pastures.Farm Management,

EverFarm® - Climate adapted perennial-based farming systems for dryland agriculture in southern Australia

AbstractAustralian dryland agriculture will be affected by climate change in a number of ways. First, higher temperatures and changes to rainfall are likely to create greater variability of crop yields and livestock productivity. Second, government policies introduced to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions are likely to influence production costs and commodity prices. Third, global trade patterns are likely to alter as populations increase, and as climate change continues to affect producers and consumers worldwide. This will create both challenges and opportunities for Australian agriculture.Farmers will have to respond to the additional challenge of climate change even when it is compounded by existing long term stresses associated with declining terms of trade, climate variability and existing environmental issues. Investing in new land-use options to combat climate change, with their associated risks, is made more difficult by being set against a backdrop of declining profitability. The opportunity to create transformational change in farming enterprises was tested by combining the multiple components of the potential future perennial‐based dryland farming systems and assessing their expected contribution to climate change adaptation. This project has found that adopting perennial pastures for livestock grazing and tree crops for biomass production, when planted on appropriate soils, can improve profitability when compared to the existing land uses facing a changing climate.  In some farming systems increased cropping is likely to result in improved future farm profits.This work demonstrated that Mallees as a biomass tree crop can be cohesively integrated into existing farming systems with minimal interruption to normal operations of livestock and cropping enterprises. A woody biomass crop can be profitable and diversify revenue risk by enabling farmers to supply biomass and sequester carbon to relevant markets. This work demonstrates suitable designs of a mallee belt planting layout that minimizes costs and maximizes benefits when planted in appropriate agro‐climatic zones and where there are adequate soil conditions. Knowledge developed from this work will help build farmers capacity about climate change adaptation and assist in achieving positive social, environmental and economic outcomes.Please cite this report as:Farquharson, R, Abadi, A, Finlayson, J, Ramilan, T,  Liu, DL, Muhaddin, A, Clark, S, Robertson, S, Mendham, D, Thomas, Q,  McGrath, J 2013 EverFarm® – Climate adapted perennial-based farming systems for dryland agriculture in southern Australia, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast, pp. 159.AbstractAustralian dryland agriculture will be affected by climate change in a number of ways. First, higher temperatures and changes to rainfall are likely to create greater variability of crop yields and livestock productivity. Second, government policies introduced to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions are likely to influence production costs and commodity prices. Third, global trade patterns are likely to alter as populations increase, and as climate change continues to affect producers and consumers worldwide. This will create both challenges and opportunities for Australian agriculture.Farmers will have to respond to the additional challenge of climate change even when it is compounded by existing long term stresses associated with declining terms of trade, climate variability and existing environmental issues. Investing in new land-use options to combat climate change, with their associated risks, is made more difficult by being set against a backdrop of declining profitability. The opportunity to create transformational change in farming enterprises was tested by combining the multiple components of the potential future perennial‐based dryland farming systems and assessing their expected contribution to climate change adaptation. This project has found that adopting perennial pastures for livestock grazing and tree crops for biomass production, when planted on appropriate soils, can improve profitability when compared to the existing land uses facing a changing climate.  In some farming systems increased cropping is likely to result in improved future farm profits.This work demonstrated that Mallees as a biomass tree crop can be cohesively integrated into existing farming systems with minimal interruption to normal operations of livestock and cropping enterprises. A woody biomass crop can be profitable and diversify revenue risk by enabling farmers to supply biomass and sequester carbon to relevant markets. This work demonstrates suitable designs of a mallee belt planting layout that minimizes costs and maximizes benefits when planted in appropriate agro‐climatic zones and where there are adequate soil conditions. Knowledge developed from this work will help build farmers capacity about climate change adaptation and assist in achieving positive social, environmental and economic outcomes

Analysis of the Elementary School Students Difficulties of in Solving Perimeter and Area Problems

The purpose of this study was to analyze the types (concepts, principles, and verbal) and forms of difficulties that elementary school students did in solving problems of perimeter and area of plane figures based on their level of completion ability. This research method is qualitative with a case study type. The technique of taking research subjects used purposive sampling by selecting three subjects of fifth-grade elementary school students based on the level of mathematical ability (low, moderate, and high) in solving perimeter and area of plane figures. Data collection techniques using tests and interviews. Data analysis techniques include data reduction, data presentation, and concluding. The results showed that students with low levels of ability experienced verbal difficulties in not working on the questions according to the instructions. Students with a moderate level of ability face conceptual difficulties in the form of being unable to make relevant decisions according to the requirements of the questions. In addition, students experience principle difficulties in the form of an inability to determine the relevant factors and incorrectly using the perimeter unit for the area unit. Students with a high level of ability experience principle difficulties in using formulas, so they tend to experience inaccuracies in solving problems. Other findings in this study provide that elementary school students have difficulty solving problems of perimeter and area of a plane figure because of basic problems, namely experiencing obstacles in verbal problems and inadequate conceptual knowledge

Head Trauma in Children: An Epidemiological Study

Introduction: Brain injury is one of the most common causes of death among victims of trauma in various accidents. The type of accident and outcome could be different in children from adults. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the epidemiology of traumatic head injury in children. Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 114 patients (age≤15 years) with head trauma, who were admitted to trauma ward of Imam Reza hospital in 2018 were enrolled in the study. Data regarding the demographic characteristics, mechanism of trauma, season of trauma, hemodynamic findings and outcome of the patients were collected. Results: The mean age amongst victims of trauma was 6.52±3.95 years and majority of them (70.2%) were male. Most of traumatic accidents took place in the spring (27.2%) and summer (32.5%). Traffic accidents (pedestrians or passenger) (55.3%) and falling (39.5%) were the most common mechanism of trauma. Also, epidural hematoma (EDH) and brain contusion were the most encountered type of brain injury (1.75%). Nine patients (7.89%) underwent brain surgery. Eventually, eight patients (7.17%) died. Conclusion: Falling and vehicle accidents are the main causes of head injury among children. Increasing the parents’ awareness toward these types of accidents and proper preventive measures can reduce traumatic brain injury

Pricing decisions in a two-echelon decentralized supply chain using bi-level programming approach

Abstract Pricing is one of the major aspects of decision making in supply chain. In the previous works mostly a centralized environment is considered indicating the retailers cannot independently apply their decisions on the pricing strategy. Although in a two-echelon decentralized environment it may be possible that supply chain contributors have encountered with different market power situations which provide that some of them try to impose their interests in pricing and/or volume of the products. In such situations the leader-follower Stackelberg game or more specifically bi-level programming seems to be the best approach to overcome the problem. Furthermore, in this study we consider the impacts of disruption risk caused by foreign exchange uncertainty on pricing decisions in a multi-product two-echelon supply chain. Also it is assumed that the market is partitioned to domestic and international retailers with segmented market for each retailer. The purpose of this paper is to introduce decisions policy on the pricing such that the utility of both manufacturer and retailers is met. Since the proposed bi-level model is NP-hard, a simulated annealing method combining with Tabu search is proposed to solve the model. A numerical example is presented to investigate the effect of foreign exchange variation on the decision variables through different scenarios. The results from numerical example indicate that the international retailers are indifferent to the manufacture undergoes changes where the domestic retailers react to changes, dramatically

SEMI-BLIND SIGNAL SEPARATION AND CHANNEL ESTIMATION IN MIMO COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS BY TENSOR FACTORIZATION

ABSTRACT In this paper, we introduce a tensor-factorization method for signal detection in MIMO applications. We address the detection problem through a 3-way tensor analysis. We represent the 4 × 4 MIMO received signals as a third-order tensor with modes: receiver antennas, user data symbols at each packet, and finally number of packets. Then, we demonstrate that by multi-way analysis using PARAFAC2 we can successfully solve the blind MIMO signal detection problem. In order to solve the permutation and scaling ambiguities of the detected signals we used different M-Sequence training symbols are used. For evaluating the method we compared our BER results with those of MMSE-VBLAST signal detection method

Effect of temperature, heating rate and zeolite-based catalysts on the pyrolysis of high impact polystyrene (HIPS) waste to produce fuel-like products

Pyrolysis of high impact polystyrene (HIPS) waste has been investigated under different process parameters, such as temperature, heating rate and types of zeolitic catalysts to produce valuable liquid products. Liquid, gas and coke as products of pyrolysis and aromatic, naphthene, olefin and paraffin as liquid components were obtained and their molecular weight distributions were studied with changing the process parameters in a stirred reactor. Aromatic-rich hydrocarbons within the gasoline range were the main pyrolysis products. Type of zeolitic catalysts, temperature and heating rate had significant effects on the products quality and quantity. Non-isothermal mass losses of high impact polystyrene were measured using a thermo-gravimetric analyzer (TGA) at heating rates of 5, 15, 30, 45 and 90°C min-1 until the furnace wall temperature reached 600°C. The DTG (differential thermal gravimetric) curves showed that heating rate had no obvious effect on the degradation trends in the studied range, and by increasing heating rate, the activation energies were decreased obviously from 222.5 to183.6 kJ mol-1

On generalization based on Bi et al. Iterative methods with eighth-order convergence for solving nonlinear equations

The primary goal of this work is to provide a general optimal three-step class of iterative methods based on the schemes designed by Bi et al. (2009). Accordingly, it requires four functional evaluations per iteration with eighth-order convergence. Consequently, it satisfies Kung and Traub's conjecture relevant to construction optimal methods without memory. Moreover, some concrete methods of this class are shown and implemented numerically, showing their applicability and efficiency.The authors thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments and for the suggestions to improve the readability of the paper. This research was supported by Islamic Azad University, Hamedan Branch, and Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia MTM2011-28636-C02-02.Lotfi, T.; Cordero Barbero, A.; Torregrosa Sánchez, JR.; Abadi, MA.; Zadeh, MM. (2014). On generalization based on Bi et al. Iterative methods with eighth-order convergence for solving nonlinear equations. 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An Improvement of Ostrowski’s and King’s Techniques with Optimal Convergence Order Eight. Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 153(1), 225-236. doi:10.1007/s10957-011-9929-9Soleymani, F., Karimi Vanani, S., & Afghani, A. (2011). A General Three-Step Class of Optimal Iterations for Nonlinear Equations. Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 2011, 1-10. doi:10.1155/2011/469512Soleymani, F., Vanani, S. K., Khan, M., & Sharifi, M. (2012). Some modifications of King’s family with optimal eighth order of convergence. Mathematical and Computer Modelling, 55(3-4), 1373-1380. doi:10.1016/j.mcm.2011.10.016Soleymani, F., Karimi Vanani, S., & Jamali Paghaleh, M. (2012). A Class of Three-Step Derivative-Free Root Solvers with Optimal Convergence Order. Journal of Applied Mathematics, 2012, 1-15. doi:10.1155/2012/568740Thukral, R. (2010). A new eighth-order iterative method for solving nonlinear equations. 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How to Architect a Query Compiler

This paper studies architecting query compilers. The state of the art in query compiler construction is lagging behind that in the compilers field. We attempt to remedy this by exploring the key causes of technical challenges in need of well founded solutions, and by gathering the most relevant ideas and approaches from the PL and compilers communities for easy digestion by database researchers. All query compilers known to us are more or less monolithic template expanders that do the bulk of the compilation task in one large leap. Such systems are hard to build and maintain. We propose to use a stack of multiple DSLs on different levels of abstraction with lowering in multiple steps to make query compilers easier to build and extend, ultimately allowing us to create more convincing and sustainable compiler-based data management systems. We attempt to derive our advice for creating such DSL stacks from widely acceptable principles. We have also re-created a well-known query compiler following these ideas and report on this effort