4,391 research outputs found
Use of credit by farm families in southern Iowa and northern Missouri
Changing economic and social conditions necessitate adjustment by farm families. For many families, increased farm size and rising levels of consumption have resulted in larger outlays for the farm business as well as for family living. Increasingly, farm families have turned to credit to augment their own funds. Therefore, more information is needed about the extent to which credit is used, the uses to which credit is put and the association, if any, between credit use and selected family and economic characteristics. Such information should be useful to extension educators working with farm families in educational programs, to governmental policymakers or legislators who influence the legal framework affecting lending practices and to lending institutions interested in providing greater service to their clientele.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/specialreports/1032/thumbnail.jp
Is native speaker intuition reliable for high-frequency context creation?
This study determined whether native speaker intuition could be relied upon to producecontextual content that mostly fell into what is considered high-frequency vocabulary. Native speakers wrote over 160,000 tokens worth of example sentences for high-frequency multi-word units derived from a corpus. The resulting database was examined to determine whether the content added by the native speakers mostly stayed within the high-frequency realm.Results showed that not only did the vast majority of native speakers\u27 tokens fall into the high-frequency realm, the percentage that fell into the high-frequency realm only dropped by 0.84 percent in comparison to the multi-word units alone despite the large amount of data beingadded. This study highlighted how the intuition of experienced ESL practitioners can be relied upon to produce high-frequency contextual content
Panel: OASIS in the mirror: reflections on the impacts and research of IFIP WG 8.2
What has IFIP contributed to the field of information systems and organizations through the activities of Working Group 8.2, its central working group in information systems? What has WG 8.2 delivered to its constituents? What have the results and impacts of the WG 8.2 been on the larger community? This panel will not shy away from controversy as it discusses the history, contributions, and unrealized potential of research spawned by this working group over the past 30 years.The past and the future of information systems: 1976-2006 and beyondRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI
The Relationship Between Molecular Gas, HI, and Star Formation in the Low-Mass, Low-Metallicity Magellanic Clouds
The Magellanic Clouds provide the only laboratory to study the effect of
metallicity and galaxy mass on molecular gas and star formation at high (~20
pc) resolution. We use the dust emission from HERITAGE Herschel data to map the
molecular gas in the Magellanic Clouds, avoiding the known biases of CO
emission as a tracer of H. Using our dust-based molecular gas estimates,
we find molecular gas depletion times of ~0.4 Gyr in the LMC and ~0.6 SMC at 1
kpc scales. These depletion times fall within the range found for normal disk
galaxies, but are shorter than the average value, which could be due to recent
bursts in star formation. We find no evidence for a strong intrinsic dependence
of the molecular gas depletion time on metallicity. We study the relationship
between gas and star formation rate across a range in size scales from 20 pc to
~1 kpc, including how the scatter in molecular gas depletion time changes with
size scale, and discuss the physical mechanisms driving the relationships. We
compare the metallicity-dependent star formation models of Ostriker, McKee, and
Leroy (2010) and Krumholz (2013) to our observations and find that they both
predict the trend in the data, suggesting that the inclusion of a diffuse
neutral medium is important at lower metallicity.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ. FITS files of
the dust-based estimates of the H2 column densities for the LMC and SMC
(shown in Figures 2 and 3) will be available online through Ap
Assessing the impact of differences in malaria transmission intensity on clinical and haematological indices in children with malaria.
BACKGROUND: Malaria control interventions have led to a decline in transmission intensity in many endemic areas, and resulted in elimination in some areas. This decline, however, will lead to delayed acquisition of protective immunity and thus impact disease manifestation and outcomes. Therefore, the variation in clinical and haematological parameters in children with malaria was assessed across three areas in Ghana with varying transmission intensities. METHODS: A total of 568 children between the ages of 2 and 14 years with confirmed malaria were recruited in hospitals in three areas with varying transmission intensities (Kintampo > Navrongo > Accra) and a comprehensive analysis of parasitological, clinical, haematological and socio-economic parameters was performed. RESULTS: Areas of lower malaria transmission tended to have lower disease severity in children with malaria, characterized by lower parasitaemias and higher haemoglobin levels. In addition, total white cell counts and percent lymphocytes decreased with decreasing transmission intensity. The heterozygous sickle haemoglobin genotype was protective against disease severity in Kintampo (P = 0.016), although this was not significant in Accra and Navrongo. Parasitaemia levels were not a significant predictor of haemoglobin level after controlling for age and gender. However, higher haemoglobin levels in children were associated with certain socioeconomic factors, such as having fathers who had any type of employment (P < 0.05) and mothers who were teachers (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The findings demonstrate significant differences in the haematological presentation and severity of malaria among areas with different transmission intensity in Ghana, indicating that these factors need to be considered in planning the management of the disease as the endemicity is expected to decline after control interventions
Induction of a Prolonged Hypothermic State by Drug-induced Reduction in the Thermoregulatory Set-Point
The marked improvement in outcome following induction of hypothermia after cardiac arrest has spurred the search for better methods to induce cooling. A regulated decrease in core temperature mediated by a drug-induced reduction in the set point for thermoregulation may be an ideal means of inducing hypothermia. To this end, the exploratory drug HBN-1 was assessed as a means to induce mild and prolonged hypothermia
Does wage rank affect employees' well-being?
How do workers make wage comparisons? Both an experimental study and an analysis of 16,000 British employees are reported. Satisfaction and well-being levels are shown to depend on more than simple relative pay. They depend upon the ordinal rank of an individual's wage within a comparison group. “Rank” itself thus seems to matter to human beings. Moreover, consistent with psychological theory, quits in a workplace are correlated with pay distribution skewness
Panel: OASIS in the mirror: reflections on the impacts and research of IFIP WG 8.2
What has IFIP contributed to the field of information systems and organizations through the activities of Working Group 8.2, its central working group in information systems? What has WG 8.2 delivered to its constituents? What have the results and impacts of the WG 8.2 been on the larger community? This panel will not shy away from controversy as it discusses the history, contributions, and unrealized potential of research spawned by this working group over the past 30 years.The past and the future of information systems: 1976-2006 and beyondRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI
A Nd Isotopic Study of Southern Sourced Waters and Indonesian Throughflow at Intermediate Depths in the Cenozoic Indian Ocean
We present Nd isotopic data for fossil fish teeth recovered from the past 40 m.y. at ODP Site 757, currentlylocated at 1650m water depth on the Ninetyeast Ridge in the Indian Ocean. Although Site 757 sits in a regionstrongly influenced by weathering inputs from the Himalayas and volcanic inputs from the Indonesian arc, the pattern of Nd isotopic variations does not appear to respond to these potential sources of Nd. Instead, secular variations correlate to changes in the composition of intermediate to deep water masses bathing thesite and circulation patterns in the Indian Ocean. From ~40 to 10 Ma, eNd values and the pattern of change at Site 757 closely match those of ODP Site 1090, a deep water site in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. Comparison to data from several Fe-Mn crusts in the Indian Ocean suggests that intermediate to deep waterflow paths were similar to the modern distribution of Circumpolar DeepWater. At approximately 10 Ma, Ndisotopic values increase in a step function by 2 eNd units, suggesting that plate motions had carried Site 757into a region influenced by Indonesian Throughflow. Estimates of the vertical and horizontal position of thissite at 10 Ma imply that Indonesian Throughflow extended as far south as ~20S and to a depth of ~1500 m. From 10 to 0 Ma, Nd isotopic variations at Site 757 appear to record variations in Indonesian Throughflow. From 10 to 5.5 Ma, values at Site 757 overlap with those from crusts located in the southwest Pacific,indicating extensive flow through the Indonesian Seaway. From 5.5 to 3.4 Ma, eNd values become lessradiogenic at Site 757 and more radiogenic in the southwest Pacific, suggesting increasing closure of theseaway and concomitant rerouting of equatorial Pacific waters. Beginning at 3.4 Ma, eNd values becomemore radiogenic again at Site 757, which may be attributed to enhanced opening of the seaway or to a changein the source of Throughflow waters from a southern to a northern Pacific region
SeaWiFS technical report series. Volume 17: Ocean color in the 21st century. A strategy for a 20-year time series
Beginning with the upcoming launch of the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), there should be almost continuous measurements of ocean color for nearly 20 years if all of the presently planned national and international missions are implemented. This data set will present a unique opportunity to understand the coupling of physical and biological processes in the world ocean. The presence of multiple ocean color sensors will allow the eventual development of an ocean color observing system that is both cost effective and scientifically based. This report discusses the issues involved and makes recommendations intended to ensure the maximum scientific return from this unique set of planned ocean color missions. An executive summary is included with this document which briefly discusses the primary issues and suggested actions to be considered
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