A new country record for Chrysina diversa (Ohaus, 1912) (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Rutelinae) in Central America

Chrysina diversa (Ohaus, 1912) is recorded for the first time from Belize. Detailed information on its capture in that country is presented.Chrysina diversa (Ohaus, 1912) est signalée pour la première fois de Belize. Des informations détaillées sur sa capture dans cette pays sont présentées ici

Positioning Cotton in the Market for Quality: An Application of Market Segmentation for West Texas

This study provides guidance for cotton marketing efforts by determining major market segments with quality thresholds for West Texas. Given its present quality performance, great potential segments are from higher-end international segments with significant value-added. Moreover, the potential to serve these market segments is growing with improvements in production technology.cotton economics, market segmentation, needs assessment, West Texas cotton, Marketing, Q130, M310,

OPTIMAL GRADE DEFINITIONS FOR MULTIPLE QUALITY CHARACTERISTICS

The growing importance of quality in agricultural markets makes effective segregation and grading essential to efficient marketing strategy. In this paper, we develop an economic model, potentially applicable to many products, to determine optimal segregation strategies based on multiple stochastic quality measures. The model is applied to Oklahoma wheat quality data.Marketing,

MEASURING COMPETITION FOR TEXTILES: DOES THE U.S. MAKE THE GRADE?

U.S. textile manufacturing is coming under increasing pressure from foreign competition. This paper evaluates the U.S. competitive position in the yarn segment using established quantifiable measures and provides an overall competitive assessment. The study found the industry in a relatively weak competitive position but that U.S. competitive position is improving.competitiveness, cotton yarn, revealed comparative advantage, tariff equivalent, International Relations/Trade, F29, L67, O57,

The Bradford & Airedale Health of Men initiative: a study of its effectiveness in engaging with men

The Health of Men (HoM) network received funding from the Big Lottery Fund in 2003 to establish a five year programme of dedicated work with men and boys. This enabled a team of practitioners to be creative and to build upon their existing skills to generate models of working with those men in the community that are usually seen as hard to reach. The research which has accompanied of the work of team has explored why men use these new services and has demonstrated the following: • Men do care about their health • Men are willing and able to engage with their health when services are tailored to their needs • Men from different culture groups and socio-economic backgrounds who are normally seen as hard to reach were accessed. • A model encompassing a dedicated team working with men is worthy of further development Much has been learnt from this project that has great relevance to the local Primary Care Trust (PCT), but has also proved a great source of information for the development of services to men on a Regional, National and International level

Evaluating the influence of lake morphology, trophic status and diagenesis on geochemical profiles in lake sediments

Recent geochemical studies provide evidence that changes in vertical distributions of nutrients in lake sediments are driven by anthropogenic activities, based primarily on trends of increasing concentrations in upper sediment layers. However, we show that vertical concentration profiles of carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in lake sediments can be higher in the upper, most recently deposited sediment strata, driven largely by natural diagenetic processes and not eutrophication alone. We examined sediment cores from 14 different lakes in New Zealand and China ranging from oligotrophic to highly eutrophic and shallow to deep, and found that the shape of vertical profiles of total P, a key nutrient for lake productivity, can be similar in sediments across gradients of widely differing trophic status. We derived and applied empirical and mechanistic diagenesis steady state profile models to describe the vertical distribution of C, N and P in the sediments. These models, which focus on large scale temporal (decades) and spatial (up to 35 cm in the vertical) processes, revealed that density-differentiated burial and biodiffusive mixing, were strongly correlated with vertical concentration gradients of sediment C, N and P content, whereas lake trophic status was not. A sensitivity analysis of parameters included in the diagenetic model further showed that the processes including flux of organic matter to the sediment-water interface, burial (net sedimentation), breakdown of organic matter and biodiffusion all significantly can influence the vertical distribution of sediment P content. We conclude that geochemical studies attempting to evaluate drivers of the vertical distribution of sediment C, N, and P content in lake sediments should also account for the natural diagenetic drivers of vertical concentration gradients, assisted with application of similar models to those presented in this study. This would include quantification of key sediment diagenesis model parameters to separate out the influence of anthropogenic activities

Temporal and spatial variations in phytoplankton productivity in surface waters of a warm-temperate, monomictic lake in New Zealand

Surface phytoplankton productivity measurements were carried out in morphologically complex Lake Rotoiti with the objective of defining variations between sites and seasons, and the dominant environmental drivers of these variations. Measurements were carried out monthly at two depths at each of three morphologically diverse stations for 1 year throughout the lake. Productivity at the surface of the shallow embayment was significantly higher in most months of the year compared with the surface of the other two stations but there were no significant differences from September to December 2004. There were no relationships between measured environmental variables and primary productivity or specific production. Inorganic nutrient concentrations at the surface of the shallow station were low throughout the whole year but at the other two stations they showed a typical pattern for monomictic lakes of higher levels during winter mixing and declining concentrations during thermal stratification. The high variability between sites found in this study indicates that it is important to account for local differences in productivity in morphologically diverse lakes, and that whole lake productivity estimates may vary greatly depending on the location and depth of productivity measurements

The Small Stellated Dodecahedron Code and Friends

We explore a distance-3 homological CSS quantum code, namely the small stellated dodecahedron code, for dense storage of quantum information and we compare its performance with the distance-3 surface code. The data and ancilla qubits of the small stellated dodecahedron code can be located on the edges resp. vertices of a small stellated dodecahedron, making this code suitable for 3D connectivity. This code encodes 8 logical qubits into 30 physical qubits (plus 22 ancilla qubits for parity check measurements) as compared to 1 logical qubit into 9 physical qubits (plus 8 ancilla qubits) for the surface code. We develop fault-tolerant parity check circuits and a decoder for this code, allowing us to numerically assess the circuit-based pseudo-threshold.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figures, comments welcome! v2 includes updates which conforms with the journal versio