MEASURING HISTORICAL RISK IN QUARTERLY MILK PRICES

Various methods have been used to estimate risk indices with historical data. An industry perception of increasing milk price risk over time provides a standard for evaluating several techniques used to measure historical risk. Risk measures from a regression model and an ARIMA model were consistent with the perception of increasing risk.Risk and Uncertainty,

A FINANCIAL TRAINING PROGRAM FOR USDA/FSA BORROWERS: EVOLUTION AND IMPACTS

A financial training program designed by Cooperative Extension specialists was provided to over 2,000 USDA/FSA borrowers from the Northeast during the period 1994-1999. Key to the success of the workshops was an in-depth, user friendly curriculum that evolved over time, eventually replacing satellite-feed instruction with pre-taped videos. Cluster analysis classified nearly 70% of workshop participants as "Low Finance Priority" or "Low Finance Knowledge." Farmers in these clusters received a relatively greater educational benefit from the program than those not in these clusters. Impact analysis indicated that perceived annual gain in farm net worth from application of workshop tools ranged from approximately $5,000 to$10,000. The training addressed the needs of producers typically isolated from Cooperative Extension because the workshop was the only extension program attended that year by nearly two-thirds of them.Agricultural Finance,

Evaluation of DSS-14 pedestal-review of top surface repair procedures

Proposed repair procedures for the top surface of the pedestal supporting the hydrostatic bearing runner for the 64m Antenna are presented. These procedures included: (1) removal of existing grout and concrete to approximately 8 in. below original concrete surface using a presplitting technique with expansive cement followed by secondary breaking; (2) preparation of exposed concrete surface including an epoxy bonding agent; and (3) replacement of material removed with 8 in. of new concrete surface including an epoxy bonding agent; and (4) replacement of material removed with 8 in. of new concrete and 4 in. of new grout

Using the Regular Chains Library to build cylindrical algebraic decompositions by projecting and lifting

Cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD) is an important tool, both for quantifier elimination over the reals and a range of other applications. Traditionally, a CAD is built through a process of projection and lifting to move the problem within Euclidean spaces of changing dimension. Recently, an alternative approach which first decomposes complex space using triangular decomposition before refining to real space has been introduced and implemented within the RegularChains Library of Maple. We here describe a freely available package ProjectionCAD which utilises the routines within the RegularChains Library to build CADs by projection and lifting. We detail how the projection and lifting algorithms were modified to allow this, discuss the motivation and survey the functionality of the package

Even faster sorting of (not only) integers

In this paper we introduce RADULS2, the fastest parallel sorter based on radix algorithm. It is optimized to process huge amounts of data making use of modern multicore CPUs. The main novelties include: extremely optimized algorithm for handling tiny arrays (up to about a hundred of records) that could appear even billions times as subproblems to handle and improved processing of larger subarrays with better use of non-temporal memory stores

Sorting growing-finishing pigs by weight fails to improve growth performance or weight variation

A trial was conducted to determine the effects of sorting pigs by body weight at placement on growth performance and weight variation at finishing. Unsorted pigs and heavy sorted pigs had higher ADG than medium or light sorted pigs. By the end of the trial, final body weights ranked in the following descending order: heavy sorted, unsorted, medium sorted, and light sorted. Final weights of unsorted pigs were heavier than the average final weight of all sorted pigs. Additionally, differences in body weight variation were not detectable by the end of the study. These data suggest that sorting pigs uniformly by weight to pens has little effect on final variability in individual body weights and placing pigs into pens regardless of weight may increase the amount of pork produced from a system and reduce turnaround time in barns

Evaluation of irradiation and Termin-8® addition to spray-dried animal plasma, base mix and/or whole diet on growth performance of nursery pigs

Two studies were conducted to evaluate the effects of irradiation of spray-dried animal plasma and Termin-8 treatment to spray-dried animal plasma, base mix (specialty protein products, milk products, ground oat groats, soy flour, flow agent, vitamins, and minerals), or whole diet on nursery pig performance. Overall (d 0 to 14) in Exp. 1, pigs fed diets containing irradiated plasma had increased ADG and pigs fed Termin-8® treated plasma had increased ADG and ADFI compared to pigs fed diets with regular plasma or whole diets (containing either regular or irradiated plasma) treated with Termin-8. No differences in F/G were observed among treatments. In Exp. 2, pigs fed diets that contained either animal plasma or base mix treated with Termin-8 in the SEW diet had increased ADG and F/G from d 0 to 13 compared to no Termin-8 treatment, but no differences were observed overall (d 0 to 40). Therefore, the use of irradiated spray-dried animal plasma and Termin-8 treated spray-dried animal plasma and base mix improves growth performance in nursery pigs during the initial period after weaning

QuickXsort: Efficient Sorting with n log n - 1.399n +o(n) Comparisons on Average

In this paper we generalize the idea of QuickHeapsort leading to the notion of QuickXsort. Given some external sorting algorithm X, QuickXsort yields an internal sorting algorithm if X satisfies certain natural conditions. With QuickWeakHeapsort and QuickMergesort we present two examples for the QuickXsort-construction. Both are efficient algorithms that incur approximately n log n - 1.26n +o(n) comparisons on the average. A worst case of n log n + O(n) comparisons can be achieved without significantly affecting the average case. Furthermore, we describe an implementation of MergeInsertion for small n. Taking MergeInsertion as a base case for QuickMergesort, we establish a worst-case efficient sorting algorithm calling for n log n - 1.3999n + o(n) comparisons on average. QuickMergesort with constant size base cases shows the best performance on practical inputs: when sorting integers it is slower by only 15% to STL-Introsort