Impact of the Ethanol Boom on Livestock and Dairy Industries: What Are They Going to Eat?

Increased demand for corn for ethanol production has helped push grain prices to record levels. This has increased livestock production costs, and producers have responded with changes to production systems. This paper explores the degree to which costs can be mitigated with alternative feeds, the effect this might have on physical performance, and the impact of alternative feeds on the competitive position of different species.cattle feeding, corn, cost of production, ethanol, Agribusiness, Farm Management, Livestock Production/Industries, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Q12, Q13,

Generic Connectivity-Based CGRA Mapping via Integer Linear Programming

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) are programmable logic devices with large coarse-grained ALU-like logic blocks, and multi-bit datapath-style routing. CGRAs often have relatively restricted data routing networks, so they attract CAD mapping tools that use exact methods, such as Integer Linear Programming (ILP). However, tools that target general architectures must use large constraint systems to fully describe an architecture's flexibility, resulting in lengthy run-times. In this paper, we propose to derive connectivity information from an otherwise generic device model, and use this to create simpler ILPs, which we combine in an iterative schedule and retain most of the exactness of a fully-generic ILP approach. This new approach has a speed-up geometric mean of 5.88x when considering benchmarks that do not hit a time-limit of 7.5 hours on the fully-generic ILP, and 37.6x otherwise. This was measured using the set of benchmarks used to originally evaluate the fully-generic approach and several more benchmarks representing computation tasks, over three different CGRA architectures. All run-times of the new approach are less than 20 minutes, with 90th percentile time of 410 seconds. The proposed mapping techniques are integrated into, and evaluated using the open-source CGRA-ME architecture modelling and exploration framework.Comment: 8 pages of content; 8 figures; 3 tables; to appear in FCCM 2019; Uses the CGRA-ME framework at http://cgra-me.ece.utoronto.ca

Optimal Constellation Design for Orbital Munitions Delivery System

Rather than delivering conventional munitions through the airspace of uncooperative nations, a constellation of space-stored weapons could potentially target any point on the Earth and arrive within the time it takes to de-orbit and re-enter through the atmosphere. The research involves applying the dynamics of atmospheric re-entry to a Common Aero Vehicle (CAV) and defining a footprint of attainable touchdown points. The footprint is moved forward to create a swath representing all the possible touchdown points in a 90 minute window. A nominal constellation of CAVs is established using a streets of coverage technique, and both analytic studies and numeric genetic algorithm techniques are used to modify the nominal constellation. A minimum number of CAVs is identified which ensures payload delivery to an area of interest within 90 minutes

Hydrothermally stable heterogeneous catalysts for biorenewable-derived molecule conversions to chemicals

The biorenewables filed seeks to emulate the petroleum model for chemical production; from a select few chemicals a plethora of products are produced. This emulation of the modern petroleum refinery-henceforth called the biorefinery-would allow greater penetration of biorenewable feedstocks into the typically petroleum based chemicals industry. Of great important to this idea is the development of catalysts capable of handling the conditions inherent to biorenewable feedstocks. Water presents a significant challenge to today\u27s catalysis. Using biorenewables, especially sugars, forces the processing to be in the condensed phase as they have little to no volatility. Water is the solvent of choice with most bio-based systems. In addition, the reactions desired to create the chemicals (like esterification) will also create water. This work sought to overcome this difficulty by developing new catalysts with a hydrothermally stable scaffold and active group. From this work the development of the carbon catalyst is shown. First, I investigated of the hydrothermal stability of the current carbon catalysts in literature. Second, some model compound work showed which active site configurations, if possible, would increase the hydrothermal stability of the acid catalyst. The last two are papers developing the first and second generation of hydrothermally stable acid catalysts. This work increases the possibility of chemicals derived from biorenewables. Hydrothermal stability of carbon based acid catalysts synthesized by sulfonating carbohydrates pyrolyzed at moderate temperatures (300-600°C) has been reported previously. To test the effect of carbon structure on hydrothermal stability, we produced catalysts by dry pyrolysis at 350ºC and 450ºC or by hydrothermal carbonization, followed by sulfonation with fuming sulfuric acid, as well as by direct sulfonation of glucose. The catalysts were characterized by BET, titration, Raman spectroscopy, TGA, XPS, reaction testing, and 13C solid state NMR. Catalysts were hydrothermally treated and then analyzed for sulfur retention and catalytic activity. The lower temperature carbon catalysts showed the best stability, however all showed significant activity loss. Solid state NMR characterized the structural details to attempt to correlate functional groups to hydrothermal stability of catalyst active sites. Structural models generated from NMR data showed that the most stable catalysts contained a significant fraction of furan rings and hardly any polycondensed aromatic rings. Development of heterogeneous catalysts for the biorenewables industry requires catalyst materials that are resistant to hydrothermal degradation. Unlike metal oxides and silica, carbon materials are recalcitrant to hydrothermal conditions. However, for solid-acid sulfonated carbon materials, there are conflicting reports on the stability of the sulfonic-acid groups on the aromatic rings for commercial applications. Currently, incomplete understanding remains about the relationship between hydrothermal stability and the immediate electronic hybridization of the carbon atoms adjacent to the sulfonic-acid active group. To test this relation systematically, model compounds containing sulfonic acid groups linked to aromatic, alkane, or cycloalkane carbon atoms were subjected to hydrothermal conditions (100°, 130°, and 160°C DI water up to 24 h). The structural integrity of the compounds was monitored with solution NMR. While the aromatic-sulfonic compounds degrade readily, the changes in the molecules with alkyl sulfonic acid linkages are negligible. Therefore, a hydrothermally stable sulfonic-acid catalyst needs to contain the sulfur attached via alkyl linkers. We combined research showing typical electrophilic substitution methods for sulfonated carbon catalysts to be inadequate with initial testing of model compounds and a proof of concept of glucose and taurine. This use of the Malliard reaction resulted in a catalyst stable under hydrothermal conditions but initially in colloidal form. Since this is undesireable in industrial processing, we sought to further stabilize the carbon backbone with the addition of more glucose. We found that the ratio of the glucose to the glucose taurine mixture is not as important as the ion used for the precursor. The potassium ion increased the amount of sulfur on the carbon catalyst, thereby increasing the reaction rate on a mass basis. These catalysts suffer from low surface area so we supporting them on SBA-15 and mesoporous carbon nanoparticles. With these two supports, the catalysts showed good activity on a similar sulfur basis. From previous research the Maillard reaction was successfully used to create hydrothermally stable carbon catalysts through pyrolysis synthesis. The Maillard reaction was used to create a new catalyst through a hydrothermal synthesis. The combination of glucose and taurine in a hydrothermal synthesis creates a solid that retains the sulfur-from the active group-even better than through pyrolysis synthesis. The synthesis temperatures ranged from 200-300ºC and it was found that the most stable catalysts were synthesized at 250ºC. The catalytic activity seemed insensitive to differences in the changes of the glucose to taurine ratio from 1:1 to 2:1 at the 250ºC synthesis. At the 200ºC synthesis temperature, the activity is not stable through the hydrothermal testing and at the 300ºC synthesis temperature; the sulfur retention is not as stable as the catalysts synthesized at 250ºC. From this work the development of the carbon catalyst is shown. First, the initial work showed the hydrothermal instability of the current carbon catalysts in literature because of their attachment of the sulfonic acid through an aromatic carbon. Second, model compounds showed an active site configuration connecting the sulfonic acid to the backbone through an aliphatic carbon, if possible, would increase the hydrothermal stability of the acid catalyst. The last two are papers developing the first and second generation of hydrothermally stable acid catalysts whereby glucose and taurine are used to make a catalyst through the Millard reaction. This work increases the possibility of chemicals derived from biorenewables

Methods and Applications of Synthetic Data Generation

The advent of data mining and machine learning has highlighted the value of large and varied sources of data, while increasing the demand for synthetic data captures the structural and statistical characteristics of the original data without revealing personal or proprietary information contained in the original dataset. In this dissertation, we use examples from original research to show that, using appropriate models and input parameters, synthetic data that mimics the characteristics of real data can be generated with sufficient rate and quality to address the volume, structural complexity, and statistical variation requirements of research and development of digital information processing systems. First, we present a progression of research studies using a variety of tools to generate synthetic network traffic patterns, enabling us to observe relationships between network latency and communication pattern benchmarks at all levels of the network stack. We then present a framework for synthesizing large scale IoT data with complex structural characteristics in a scalable extraction and synthesis framework, and demonstrate the use of generated data in the benchmarking of IoT middleware. Finally, we detail research on synthetic image generation for deep learning models using 3D modeling. We find that synthetic images can be an effective technique for augmenting limited sets of real training data, and in use cases that benefit from incremental training or model specialization, we find that pretraining on synthetic images provided a usable base model for transfer learning

Shaping 21st Century Journalism: Leveraging a "Teaching Hospital Model" in Journalism Education

Calls on journalism programs to become "anchor institutions" in the digitally networked age by pursuing a broader, community-oriented mission, testing new journalism models, exploring how journalistic ecosystems evolve, and shaping policymaking processes