Reduction of Yield and Income Risk Under Alternative Crop Insurance and Disaster Assistance Plans

This study compares the effectiveness of five crop insurance/disaster assistance plans: an individual farm yield insurance plan similar to the current FCIC multi-peril program ; two area yield insurance plans; a farm yield disaster assistance plan; and an area yield disaster assistance plan. These methods are examined for reduction in yield and gross income variability with and without participation in the government deficiency payment programs using farm-level yield data from 98 dryland wheat farms and 38 dryland corn farms in Kansas . Although individual farm yield insurance is complex, suffers from moral hazard and adverse selection problems, and is likely to be the most expensive to administer , it provides more yield and gross income risk reduction than any of the alternative insurance/disaster assistance plans.Crop Insurance, Crop Disaster Assistance, Risk, Wheat, Corn, Risk and Uncertainty,

"Revaccination."

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The hormonal control of protein synthesis. A study of the action of carbohydrate on protein metabolism

Section 1: The effect of carbohydrate and fat on the N retention of the fasting rat. 1. Experiments are described on adult rats, which had been stabilised on a protein-containing or a protein-free diet and after a 24 hour fast received either water, glucose or olive oil. 2. Carbohydrate administration significantly reduced the urinary M output in both dietary groups. Fat administration decreased the urinary E output to a less significant degree. 3. The protein M content of the liver was significantly reduced after carbohydrate administration. Fat administration did not significantly reduce the protein 1 content of the liver. 4. It was concluded that the feeding of carbohydrate resulted in N retention in the body in tissues other than the liver. Section 2: The uptake of 35S-methionine by liver and muscle protein after carbohydrate and fat administration. 1. A study was made of the effect of feeding glucose or olive oil on the incorporation of injected 35S-methionine the protein of the skeletal muscles and the livers of fasting rats. 2. It was found that neither glucose nor fat had any effect on the uptake of the labelled amino-acid by the liver. However, it was observed that glucose, but not fat, stimulated the uptake of 35S-methionine by skeletal muscle. Two hours after glucose feeding, the isotopic concentration was lower than that of e, fasting animal but the rate of appearance of the label increased more quickly than in the control until the isotopic concentration was significantly greater at the 6th hour. It was concluded that the amino-acids disappearing from the blood after glucose administration are deposited in muscle. Section 3: The effect of glucose and fat on the incorporation of 14C-2-glycine into the proteins of skeletal muscle and liver. 1. The specific activity of the free glycine pool of liver and muscle were examined, after glucose or fat Ingestion. 2. It was found that the specific activity of the free glycine pool of liver and muscle did not change significantly after water or fat administration. It was also found that carbohydrate ingestion did not alter the pattern of changes in the liver free glycine pool, while the muscle free glycine specific activities were elevated significantly above the control values, especially at the 4th and 6th hour. 3. The ratio of the muscle to liver whole protein radioactivity of the glucose-fed animals was initially below the control level but increased steadily to reach a higher value than the control some 6 hours after feeding. 4. It was cono3.uded that the changes in 14C-glycine and 35S-methionine deposition in muscle protein 4-6 hours after glucose administration were reflections of changes in - the labelling of the free amino-acid pool. Since the change in blood amino-acid level is maximal 1-2 hours after glucose feeding, it was concluded that some intermediate compound, such as a labile peptide or protein is deposited in the muscle and its subsequent breakdown causes the observed changes in amino-acid pool radioactivity. Section 4: The analysis of the acid-soluble fraction of skeletal muscle and liver after feeding: glucose, 1. Trichloracetic acid and tungstic acid extracts of muscle and liver were analysed for aniino-N by various methods. 2. Folin's ? -naphthaquinone method was found to be unreliable by the use of ion-exchange resins. 3. The ninhydrin titrimetric decarboxylation method failed to reveal any changes in the free or peptide amino-H content of the acid-soluble fractions of muscle and liver after glucose administration. These findings were confirmed by the colorimetric ninhydrin method. 4. It was concluded that glucose ingestion did not cause the temporary deposition of an acid-soluble peptide in muscle. Section 5: The examination of liver and muscle protein after glucose administration. 1. The treatment of the liver and muscle homogenate to obtain pure protein was reconsidered; in particular the stages involving heating in TCA and dissolving in NaOH. 2. It was found that, in animals injected with 14C-2-glyeine, a greater amount of radioactivity was present in the muscle protein of a glucose-fed animal, when the hot TCA and NaOH treatment was omitted. The radioactivity of the liver protein was unaltered when the hot TCA and NaOH treatment was omitted, whether or not the animal received glucose. It was therefore concluded that a SCA-labile protein is deposited in muscle following glucose administration. 3. The analysis of the hot TCA extract of muscle protein revealed that, after feeding glucose, more amino-N could be removed from the muscle protein than from the protein of the water fed control. The maximum amount of this extra amino-N occurred 2 hours after feeding glucose and fell to below control level 6 hours after feeding. 4. The hot TGA labile protein fraction of muscle was not demonstrable after 14C-1-leucine injection. 5. It was concluded that labile muso3.e protein occurred immediately after glucose administration, and that the observed dissimilarities between the uptake of 14C-glyoine and 14C -leucine are different expressions of the same mechanism

Quasi-variational coupled-cluster theory: Performance of perturbative treatments of connected triple excitations

Quasi-variational coupled-cluster methods are applied to a selection of diatomic molecules. The potential energy curves, spectroscopic constants, and size consistency errors are calculated and compared to those obtained from both single- and multi-reference methods. The effects of connected triple excitations are introduced with either the standard perturbative (T) formulation, or in the renormalised form, and its symmetrised approximation. It is found that the renormalised ansatz is significantly superior to the standard formulation when describing bond breaking and that in most circumstances, the computationally simpler symmetrisation gives nearly identical results

Stigma in Male Depression and Suicide: A Canadian Sex Comparison Study

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Stigma in men’s depression and suicide can restrict help-seeking, reduce treatment compliance and deter individuals from confiding in friends and family. In this article we report sex comparison findings from a national survey of English-speaking adult Canadians about stigmatized beliefs concerning male depression and suicide. Among respondents without direct experience of depression or suicide (n = 541) more than a third endorsed the view that men with depression are unpredictable. Overall, a greater proportion of males endorsed stigmatizing views about male depression compared to female respondents. A greater proportion of female respondents endorsed items indicating that men who suicide are disconnected, lost and lonely. Male and female respondents with direct personal experience of depression or suicide (n = 360) strongly endorsed stigmatizing attitudes toward themselves and a greater proportion of male respondents indicated that they would be embarrassed about seeking help for depression

VISIT-TS: A multimedia tool for population studies on tic disorder

Population-based assessment of Tourette syndrome (TS) and other tic disorders produces a paradox. On one hand, ideally diagnosis of tic disorders requires expert observation. In fact, diagnostic criteria for TS explicitly require expert assessment of tics for a definite diagnosis. On the other hand, large-scale population surveys with expert assessment of every subject are impracticable. True, several published studies have successfully used expert assessment to find tic prevalence in a representative population (e.g. all students in a school district). However, extending these studies to larger populations is daunting. We created a multimedia tool to demonstrate tics to a lay audience, discuss their defining and common attributes, and address features that differentiate tics from other movements and vocalizations. A first version was modified to improve clarity and to include a more diverse group in terms of age and ethnicity. The result is a tool intended for epidemiological research. It may also provide additional benefits, such as more representative minority recruitment for other TS studies and increased community awareness of TS

Brief of Corporate Law Professors as Amici Curie in Support of Respondents

The Supreme Court has looked to the rights of corporate shareholders in determining the rights of union members and non-members to control political spending, and vice versa. The Court sometimes assumes that if shareholders disapprove of corporate political expression, they can easily sell their shares or exercise control over corporate spending. This assumption is mistaken. Because of how capital is saved and invested, most individual shareholders cannot obtain full information about corporate political activities, even after the fact, nor can they prevent their savings from being used to speak in ways with which they disagree. Individual shareholders have no “opt out” rights or practical ability to avoid subsidizing corporate political expression with which they disagree. Nor do individuals have the practical option to refrain from putting their savings into equity investments, as doing so would impose damaging economic penalties and ignore conventional financial guidance for individual investors

Deviance Information Criterion for Comparing Stochastic Volatility Models

Bayesian methods have been e#cient in estimating parameters of stochastic volatility models for analyzing financial time series. Recent advances made it possible to fit stochastic volatility models of increasing complexity, including covariates, leverage effects, jump components and heavy-tailed distributions. However, a formal model comparison via Bayes factors remains difficult. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate that model selection is more easily performed using the deviance information criterion (DIC). It combines a Bayesian measure-of-fit with a measure of model complexity. We illustrate the performance of DIC in discriminating between various di#erent stochastic volatility models using simulated data and daily returns data on the S&P100 index

The Kondo Box: A Magnetic Impurity in an Ultrasmall Metallic Grain

We study the Kondo effect generated by a single magnetic impurity embedded in an ultrasmall metallic grain, to be called a ``Kondo box''. We find that the Kondo resonance is strongly affected when the mean level spacing in the grain becomes larger than the Kondo temperature, in a way that depends on the parity of the number of electrons on the grain. We show that the single-electron tunneling conductance through such a grain features Kondo-induced Fano-type resonances of measurable size, with an anomalous dependence on temperature and level spacing.Comment: 4 Latex pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let