AN EVALUATION OF COST OF PRODUCTION INFORMATION USAGE BY COUNTY AGENTS

County agents receive cost of production information primarily from state extension services and then disseminate it to agricultural producers. A survey gathered data on agent usage of this information. A Poisson regression analysis using count data was performed to determine the factors influencing the number of times county agents directly referred to published cost of production (enterprise budget) information in a year. The agent's understanding of budget information use in management decisions, the availability of budgets, and his/her receiving the budgets in multiple forms (e.g., sheets, booklets, or software) had significant positive impacts on the use of budgets by the agent.Production Economics, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

f-Flip strategies for unconstrained binary quadratic programming

Unconstrained binary quadratic programming (UBQP) provides a unifying modeling and solution framework for solving a remarkable range of binary optimization problems, including many accompanied by constraints. Current methods for solving UBQP problems customarily rely on neighborhoods consisting of flip moves that select one or more binary variables and “flip” their values to the complementary value (from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1). We introduce a class of approaches called f-flip strategies that include a fractional value f as one of those available to the binary variables during intermediate stages of solution. A variety of different f-flip strategies, particularly within the context of multi-start algorithms, are proposed for pursuing intensification and diversification goals in metaheuristic algorithms, accompanied by special rules for evaluating and executing f-flips efficiently

Enhancing Parallel Cooperative Trajectory Based Metaheuristics with Path Relinking

This paper proposes a novel algorithm combining path relinking with a set of cooperating trajectory based parallel algorithms to yield a new metaheuristic of enhanced search features. Algorithms based on the exploration of the neighborhood of a single solution, like simulated annealing (SA), have offered accurate results for a large number of real-world problems in the past. Because of their trajectory based nature, some advanced models such as the cooperative one are competitive in academic problems, but still show many limitations in addressing large scale instances. In addition, the field of parallel models for trajectory methods has not deeply been studied yet (at least in comparison with parallel population based models). In this work, we propose a new hybrid algorithm which improves cooperative single solution techniques by using path relinking, allowing both to reduce the global execution time and to improve the efficacy of the method. We test here this new model using a large benchmark of instances of two well-known NP-hard problems: MAXSAT and QAP, with competitive results.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Contribution of Scalar Loops to the Three-Photon Decay of the Z

I corrected 3 mistakes from the first version: that were an omitted Feynman integration in the function f^3_{ij}, a factor of 2 in front of log f^3_{ij} in eq.2 and an overall factor of 2 in Fig.1 c). The final result is changed drastically. Doing an expansion in the Higgs mass I show that the matrix element is identically 0 in the order (MZ/MH)^2, which is due to gauge invariance. Left with an amplitude of the order (MZ/MH)^4 the final result is that the scalar contribution to this decay rate is several orders of magnitude smaller than those of the W boson and fermions.Comment: 6 pages, plain Tex, 1 figure available under request via fax or mail, OCIP/C-93-5, UQAM-PHE-93/0