Practical nous as the aim of legal education?

There has been an implicit assumption that legal education should be about exposition and evaluation, and should reward facility in exposition and theoretical awareness. This theoretically based assumption generates a theory-induced blindness. Specifically, it obscures the dynamic relationship between law and legal practice, despite it being a familiar aspect of the world. The lawyer as rule entrepreneur is lost sight of. One alternative assumption about legal education would be that law is a game like activity; and legal education should be directed towards promoting those qualities that would enhance performance in this game. In this approach to legal education it would be practical nous that would be sought and rewarded, and such qualities as facility in exposition and theoretical awareness would receive recognition merely as qualities that can be ancillary to and elements of practical nous. Doctrinal legal education naturally pulls towards the first theory, and clinical legal education naturally pulls towards the second. We argue for a clearer awareness of the role of rule entrepreneurship in clinical programmes and in legal education generally

AN ANALYSIS OF THE IMPORTANCE OF AGRICULTURE AND THE FOOD SECTOR TO THE MICHIGAN ECONOMY

The number of workers on farms and in food processing represents about 16 percent of total employment in basic industries in Michigan. Converting farm labor to full time equivalents, however, reduces the proportion to about 11 percent. The industries dependent upon agriculture and food processing enhance the importance of this sector. Adding backward linked industries increases the total employment from about 100 thousand to 200 thousand and output from $15 billion to$27 billion. If Michigan agriculture's share of the forward linked industries of wholesaling and retailing is added, total employment related directly or indirectly to farming and food processing is estimated to be 500 thousand and output to be $37 billion. In terms of employment, this represents a ratio of nearly 10 jobs for every full time equivalent in farming or about 5 jobs for every employee in the combination of agriculture and food processing. The total direct and related employment in agriculture and the food system is about 1 million, about a fourth of total employment in the state. Not only does agriculture and food processing have a major presence in the state, this sector contributes to the stability of an economy heavily dependent on the manufacture of durable goods which are vulnerable to business cycles. Food processing tends to be located near metropolitan areas, facilitating employment shifts. Similarly, the proximity of alternative employment opportunities provides stability for households involved in agriculture and food processing. While gross farm income and expenditures have increased in nominal terms, trends in the 1980s and 1990s have been stable or negative in real terms. Real net farm income declined in the 1990s. However, both nominal and real farmland prices increased in the same period, a paradox reflecting a robust non-farm economy and the close rural-urban interface. Value added by Michigan food processors increased over time in both nominal and real terms until a reversal in the 1990s. Employment in food processing continued a secular decline at the close of the decade.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Modeling the U.S. Domestic Livestock Feed Sector in a Period of Rapidly Expanding By-Product Feed Supplies from Ethanol Production

Rapidly expanding ethanol production in the U.S. was given further impetus with the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandating a minimum production of 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2012. The availability of the by-product feeds of ethanol production (corn gluten feed and meal and DDG) has not only become a significant share of the protein feed sector, but also the increase has been and will be extensive. The challenge is how to incorporate these feeds into econometric models of U.S. agriculture and measure their impact on the utilization of other feeds, particularly coarse grain and soybean meal. Another task is to forecast prices on the by-product feeds. This paper suggests a couple of procedures embracing the entire sector of livestock concentrates, including both protein and energy feeds. The feeds were converted into protein equivalents and energy equivalents and introduced into regression equations predicting (1) the amounts of soybean meal and coarse grain fed and (2) the amount of protein feeds utilized in protein equivalents and the amount of all concentrate feeds utilized in energy equivalents. In case (2), the amounts of soybean meal and coarse grain fed were derived by deducting the protein and energy equivalents of the other feeds from the totals predicted. This case was the one selected to be incorporated into AGMOD, an econometric model of U.S. agriculture. To forecast prices on the by-product feeds of ethanol production, synthetic prices for protein and energy were derived from prices on soybean meal and corn. Applying these prices to the ethanol byproduct feeds, values for these feeds were generated. These values were the major explanatory variables associated with the by-product prices supplemented by variables representing the ratios of the utilization of the respective feeds in protein equivalents to the total utilization of protein feeds in protein equivalents. Prices on corn gluten feed and DDG have been declining relative to their values, with continued downward pressure in prospect for prices on DDG in the next 10 years.Livestock Production/Industries, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Forecasting World Crop Yields as Probability Distributions

Traditionally, agricultural forecasts, whether for the coming year or several years into the future, have been based on assumptions of normal weather and trend crop yields. That weather is seldom normal and that yields seldom fit trends are well recognized. However, relatively little attention has been given to projecting crop yields stochastically even though computer capacity and software programs are available to do so. One reason is that the task is more challenging than to assign standard deviations to various crop yields and simulate normal distributions using random number generators. For one, deviations of crop yields from trends may be correlated especially if the locations of the crops overlap such as is the case with US corn and soybeans. To model US agriculture, those correlations must be taken into account. Secondly, deviations of crop yields from trends may not be normal. Typically, crop yield deviations are skewed to the low side, with yields lower in poor crop years than higher in favorable crop years. This paper demonstrates how computer software programs can be used to generate probability distributions of yields taking into consideration correlations among crops and non-normality in distributions. Included are thirteen crops and crop aggregates with global coverage of coarse grains, wheat and oilseeds. Probability forecasts are made for 2006 and illustrated for US corn, soybeans and wheat.Crop yields Crop yield correlations, Stochastic forecasting Econometric modeling, Non-normal crop yield distribution Risk assessment, Crop Production/Industries, C6, Q11,

The USDA/Land Grant Extension Outlook Program -- A History and Assessment

Base Document for a Power-Point Presentation Extension Section and Senior Section Track Session AAEA Centennial ThemeTeaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Agriculture as a source of fuel prospects and impacts, 2007 to 2017

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

EVALUATING THE IMPACTS OF AN INCREASE IN FUEL-ETHANOL DEMAND ON AGRICULTURE AND THE ECONOMY

Fuel ethanol demand is projected to increase because of proposed ban on methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) in gasoline, renewable fuels standard, and the revised eight-hour ozone standards. In this paper, several scenarios of increased fuel ethanol demand and its effects on crop and feed prices, farm income and state finances under current tax-subsidy structure, are analyzed using a multi-sector econometric model AGMOD.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Improving medical image perception by hierarchical clustering based segmentation

It has been well documented that radiologists' performance is not perfect: they make both false positive and false negative decisions. For example, approximately thirty percent of early lung cancer is missed on chest radiographs when the evidence is clearly visible in retrospect. Currently computer-aided detection (CAD) uses software, designed to reduce errors by drawing radiologists' attention to possible abnormalities by placing prompts on images. Alberdi et al examined the effects of CAD prompts on performance, comparing the negative effect of no prompt on a cancer case with prompts on a normal case. They showed that no prompt on a cancer case can have a detrimental effect on reader sensitivity and that the reader performs worse than if the reader was not using CAD. This became particularly apparent when difficult cases were being read. They suggested that the readers were using CAD as a decision making tool instead of a prompting aid. They conclude that "incorrect CAD can have a detrimental effect on human decisions". The goal of this paper is to explore the possibility of using hierarchical clustering based segmentation (HSC), as a perceptual aid, to improve the performance of the reader

Grid-enabled Workflows for Industrial Product Design

This paper presents a generic approach for developing and using Grid-based workflow technology for enabling cross-organizational engineering applications. Using industrial product design examples from the automotive and aerospace industries we highlight the main requirements and challenges addressed by our approach and describe how it can be used for enabling interoperability between heterogeneous workflow engines