The Constitutionality of Generic Advertising Checkoff Programs

Agricultural and Food Policy, Marketing, K10, Q18,

An Analysis of the 2002 Farm Bill’s Value-Added Producer Grants Program

Our objective is to identify the determinants for success among USDA’s Value- Added Producer Grants (VAPG) program recipients. Business development has become an important program in departments of agricultural economics. Market share was found to be an important determinant of VAPG success. Size variables including greater sales and increased grant dollars, as well as a lower number of producers, were also determinants of business success. Departments of agricultural economics are likely best able to assist VAPG recipients by providing information on price discovery, explaining their relationship to potential plant location, and providing education on best management practices to help producers avoid costly mistakes.agribusiness, business development, value-added, Agribusiness, Financial Economics, Productivity Analysis,

Identifying Cancer-Related Cognitive Impairment Using the FACT-Cog Perceived Cognitive Impairment.

Cancer-related cognitive impairment (CRCI) is a concerning problem for many cancer survivors. Evaluating patients for CRCI has been a challenge, in part because of a lack of standardized practices. Self-report instruments are often used to assess CRCI, but there are no validated cutpoints. We present the results of receiver operating characteristic curve analysis identifying cutpoints of the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Cognition perceived cognitive impairment (PCI) in female breast cancer survivors for identifying CRCI cases. We defined presence of CRCI based on elevated complaints on the Patient's Assessment of Own Functioning Inventory compared with healthy control scores. Our results indicate that scores less than 54 in PCI scores using 18 items and scores less than 60 in PCI scores using 20 items exhibited good ability to discriminate CRCI cases from noncases (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.84 [95% CI = 0.73 to 0.94]). These preliminary results represent an important contribution toward standardizing practices across CRCI studies

High resolution satellite imagery orientation accuracy assessment by leave-one-out method: accuracy index selection and accuracy uncertainty

The Leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) was recently applied to the evaluation of High Resolution Satellite Imagery orientation accuracy and it has proven to be an effective method alternative with respect to the most common Hold-out-validation (HOV), in which ground points are split into two sets, Ground Control Points used for the orientation model estimation and Check Points used for the model accuracy assessment. On the contrary, the LOOCV applied to HRSI implies the iterative application of the orientationmodel using all the known ground points as GCPs except one, different in each iteration, used as a CP. In every iteration the residual between imagery derived coordinates with respect to CP coordinates (prediction error of the model on CP coordinates) is calculated; the overall spatial accuracy achievable from the oriented image may be estimated by computing the usual RMSE or, better, a robust accuracy index like the mAD (median Absolute Deviation) of prediction errors on all the iterations. In this way it is possible to overcome some drawbacks of the HOV: LOOCVis a reliable and robustmethod, not dependent on a particular set of CPs and on possible outliers, and it allows us to use each known ground point both as a GCP and as a CP, capitalising all the available ground information. This is a crucial problem in current situations, when the number of GCPs to be collected must be reduced as much as possible for obvious budget problems. The fundamentalmatter to deal with was to assess howwell LOOCVindexes (mADand RMSE) are able to represent the overall accuracy, that is howmuch they are stable and close to the corresponding HOV RMSE assumed as reference. Anyway, in the first tests the indexes comparison was performed in a qualitative way, neglecting their uncertainty. In this work the analysis has been refined on the basis of Monte Carlo simulations, starting from the actual accuracy of ground points and images coordinates, estimating the desired accuracy indexes (e.g. mAD and RMSE) in several trials, computing their uncertainty (standard deviation) and accounting for them in the comparison. Tests were performed on a QuickBird Basic image implementing an ad hoc procedure within the SISAR software developed by the Geodesy and Geomatics Team at the Sapienza University of Rome. The LOOCV method with accuracy evaluated by mAD seemed promising and useful for practical case

Monitoring urban heat island through google earth engine. Potentialities and difficulties in different cities of the United States

The aim of this work is to exploit the large-scale analysis capabilities of the innovative Google Earth Engine platform in order to investigate the temporal variations of the Urban Heat Island phenomenon as a whole. A intuitive methodology implementing a large-scale correlation analysis between the Land Surface Temperature and Land Cover alterations was thus developed. The results obtained for the Phoenix MA are promising and show how the urbanization heavily affects the magnitude of the UHI effects with significant increases in LST. The proposed methodology is therefore able to efficiently monitor the UHI phenomenon

Measuring sunk costs in agricultural and food industry assets: why some assets sell below appraisal

Asset obsolescence or external obsolescence is a decline in the economic value of capital because of a decrease in demand for the capital’s services. Measurements of sunk costs typically use appraised values of capital. In food and agricultural industries facing asset obsolescence due to government policy, appraised values may be greatly overstated and this has implications for research on industrial structure. A theoretical model to account for the appraisal error is developed and the method is applied to the U.S. sugar beet industry. The sugar beet industry displays symptoms of asset obsolescence. Our estimates indicate that plant appraisals using currently accepted practices greatly overstated the true value of these assets in 2006

A multi-century meteo-hydrological analysis for the Adda river basin (Central Alps). Part I: Gridded monthly precipitation (1800–2016) records

The 1800–2016 monthly precipitation record for the upper Adda river basin is presented. It is computed by applying the anomaly method to a quality-checked and homogenized observation database. The reconstruction accuracy and its evolution over the study period is evaluated at both station and grid-cell levels. The anomaly-based interpolation provides rather robust estimates even for the early years of sparse station coverage with basin precipitation reconstruction errors around 10%. The Theil-Sen trend analysis on the basin precipitation series shows significant (Mann-Kendall p value <.05) long-term tendencies of −3.8 ± 1.9% and −9.3 ± 3.8% century−1 for annual and autumn precipitation, respectively, even though the annual trend is not significant by excluding the first decades from the evaluation. As the basin precipitation record is expected to be underestimated due to the rain-gauge snow undercatch, the monthly precipitation fields are subjected to a correction procedure which allows to derive the multiplicative correcting constant to be applied to the basin annual precipitation series. The comparison between 1845 and 2016 yearly corrected precipitation and runoff records highlights current annual water losses of about 400 mm while the annual runoff coefficients exhibit a long-term significant decrease of −6.4 ± 1.0% century−1. This change in the hydrological cycle is mostly to be ascribed to the strong long-term reduction in annual runoff values (−11.8 ± 3.2% century−1) driven by increasing evapotranspiration due to both temperature increase and, likely, land-use changes

Linking behavior in the physics education research coauthorship network

Citation: Anderson, K. A., Crespi, M., & Sayre, E. C. (2017). Linking behavior in the physics education research coauthorship network. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 13(1), 10. doi:10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.13.010121There is considerable long-term interest in understanding the dynamics of collaboration networks, and how these networks form and evolve over time. Most of the work done on the dynamics of social networks focuses on well-established communities. Work examining emerging social networks is rarer, simply because data are difficult to obtain in real time. In this paper, we use thirty years of data from an emerging scientific community to look at that crucial early stage in the development of a social network. We show that when the field was very young, islands of individual researchers labored in relative isolation, and the coauthorship network was disconnected. Thirty years later, rather than a cluster of individuals, we find a true collaborative community, bound together by a robust collaboration network. However, this change did not take place gradually-the network remained a loose assortment of isolated individuals until the mid 2000s, when those smaller parts suddenly knit themselves together into a single whole. In the rest of this paper, we consider the role of three factors in these observed structural changes: growth, changes in social norms, and the introduction of institutions such as field-specific conferences and journals. We have data from the very earliest years of the field, a period which includes the introduction of two different institutions: the first field-specific conference, and the first field-specific journals. We also identify two relevant behavioral shifts: a discrete increase in coauthorship coincident with the first conference, and a shift among established authors away from collaborating with outsiders, towards collaborating with each other. The interaction of these factors gives us insight into the formation of collaboration networks more broadly

Variability of orographic enhancement of precipitation in the Alpine region

Climate change impacts are non uniformly distributed over the globe. Mountains have a peculiar response to large scale variations, documented by elevation gradients of surface temperature increase observed over many mountain ranges in the last decades. Significant changes of precipitation are expected in the changing climate and orographic effects are important in determining the amount of rainfall at a given location. It thus becomes particularly important to understand how orographic precipitation responds to global warming and to anthropogenic forcing. Here, using a large rain gauge dataset over the European Alpine region, we show that the distribution of annual precipitation among the lowlands and the mountains has varied over time, with an increase of the precipitation at the high elevations compared to the low elevations starting in the mid 20 century and peaking in the 1980s. The simultaneous increase and peak of anthropogenic aerosol load is discussed as a possible source for this interdecadal change. These results provide new insights to further our understanding and improve predictions of anthropic effects on mountain precipitations, which are fundamental for water security and management

Trasformazione tra datum e sistemi cartografici in ambito nazionale: implementazione di un software in ambiente GRASS e sue prestazioni

Selected paper presentato a GeoExplora Workshop 2004 - 6° Congresso MondoGIS Il lavoro illustra le caratteristiche e le prestazioni di un comando GRASS sviluppato per gestire le trasformazioni tra i sistemi geodetici (datum), (ed i corrispondenti cartografici) più utilizzati in ambito nazionale, Roma1940 (Gauss-Boaga), ED1950 (UTM-ED1950) e WGS84-ETRF89 (UTMWGS84- ETRF89) per scopi cartografici a scala medio-grande (1:5000)