Alternative Cropping Systems for Traditional Monoculture Wheat Acres in the Southern Plains for Two Farm Sizes

The economics of five alternative crop production systems for the Southern Plains winter wheat production region, for both conventional tillage and no-till, for two farm sizes, was determined. Yield data were obtained from a three-year experiment conducted on three farm fields in the region. Tillage costs differ across farm size.Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management,

Optical Notch Filter Utilizing Electric Dipole Resonance Absorption

PatentAn optical notch filter having a suspension of small absorbing particles which checks a narrow band of frequencies. The small absorbent particles are suspended as a colloidal system which can have either a solid, liquid or gas as host material. The absorbing particles can be incorporated in a solid matrix as a transmission filter or used on the surface of a mirror as a reflection filter. The filter can be tuned by an externally applied electric field or by applying hydrostatic pressure

Space shuttle abort separation pressure investigation. Volume 2, Part B: Orbiter data at Mach 5

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Knowledge and Awareness Among Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease Stage 3

Knowledge is a prerequisite for changing behavior, and is useful for improving outcomes and reducing mortality rates in patients diagnosed with chronic kidney disease (CKD). The purpose of this article is to describe baseline CKD knowledge and awareness obtained as part of a larger study testing the feasibility of a self-management intervention. Thirty patients were recruited who had CKD Stage 3 with coexisting diabetes and hypertension. Fifty-four percent of the sample were unaware of their CKD diagnosis. Participants had a moderate amount of CKD knowledge. This study suggests the need to increase knowledge in patients with CKD Stage 3 to aid in slowing disease progression

Automatic fluid separator supplies own driving power

Centrifugal separator suspended in the fuel tank of a space vehicle selects and vents gas vapor at zero gravity. Escaping vapor is used to drive an expander turbine that is magnetically coupled to the separator

REDUCING BLACKBIRD DAMAGE TO NEWLY PLANTED RICE WITH A NONTOXIC CLAY-BASED SEED COATING

At 3 sites in Chambers County, Texas, the estimated sprout loss in 1-ac plots sown with clay-coated rice seed averaged 17.0% compared to 36.5% in adjacent 1-ac control plots. In one field, bird use of the control plot was 14 times that of the treated plot. Average feeding rates of red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) were 1.5 seeds/min and 8.4 seeds/min in the treated and control plots, respectively. Roadside counts of territorial male redwings and evening flightline counts of birds going to roost indicated a depredating population consisting mainly of nonbreeding, roosting birds early in April with increasing proportions of breeding birds as the rice-planting season progressed. The results of this study are consistent with previous laboratory findings and with predictions from foraging theory. Further development and field testing of the seed coating will be required before the technique becomes generally available as a method for reducing bird damage to sprouted rice

A Very Low Resource Language Speech Corpus for Computational Language Documentation Experiments

Most speech and language technologies are trained with massive amounts of speech and text information. However, most of the world languages do not have such resources or stable orthography. Systems constructed under these almost zero resource conditions are not only promising for speech technology but also for computational language documentation. The goal of computational language documentation is to help field linguists to (semi-)automatically analyze and annotate audio recordings of endangered and unwritten languages. Example tasks are automatic phoneme discovery or lexicon discovery from the speech signal. This paper presents a speech corpus collected during a realistic language documentation process. It is made up of 5k speech utterances in Mboshi (Bantu C25) aligned to French text translations. Speech transcriptions are also made available: they correspond to a non-standard graphemic form close to the language phonology. We present how the data was collected, cleaned and processed and we illustrate its use through a zero-resource task: spoken term discovery. The dataset is made available to the community for reproducible computational language documentation experiments and their evaluation.Comment: accepted to LREC 201

Mirror symmetry breaking as a problem in dynamical critical phenomena

The critical properties of the Frank model of spontaneous chiral synthesis are discussed by applying results from the field theoretic renormalization group (RG). The long time and long wavelength features of this microscopic reaction scheme belong to the same universality class as multi-colored directed percolation processes. Thus, the following RG fixed points (FP) govern the critical dynamics of the Frank model for d<4: one unstable FP that corresponds to complete decoupling between the two enantiomers, a saddle-point that corresponds to symmetric interspecies coupling, and two stable FPs that individually correspond to unidirectional couplings between the two chiral molecules. These latter two FPs are associated with the breakdown of mirror or chiral symmetry. In this simplified model of molecular synthesis, homochirality is a natural consequence of the intrinsic reaction noise in the critical regime, which corresponds to extremely dilute chemical systems.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure