ESTIMATING RETURNS TO AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, EXTENSION, AND TEACHING AT THE STATE LEVEL

The majority of decisions concerning investment and allocation of public funds for agricultural research, extension, and teaching (RET) are made at the state-level, while most of the quantitative RET evaluations are made on a national basis. This paper illustrates an approach for conducting a disaggregated state-level evaluation of agricultural research, extension, and teaching. Ridge regression is employed to handle multicollinearity problems.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Economic Valuation for Wrongful Death

At common law, there was no right to recover damages for the wrongful death of another. North Carolina General Statutes § 28A-18-2, however, provides a cause of action for wrongful death in North Carolina, and provides the basis upon which damages may be awarded. The primary concerns of a plaintiff proceeding under the statute often center around proving those factors listed in the statute as possible components of the damage award. The difficulty inherent in a wrongful death action lies in reaching a fair and reasonable estimate of the lost income the decedent could have earned but for an untimely death, and the loss of such intangibles as decedent\u27s society and companionship. This article examines one method of offering evidence on those factors listed in section (b) of the statute, particularly loss of income and the value of services rendered by the decedent, through the use of an expert economist. Sections III and IV of the article present the approach of two expert economists to this task through the use of two hypothetical case studies

Dentistry

The specialty of Dental Surgery has progressed from the "blood and acrylic" of the early seventies. Dentistry has undergone a quantum leap over the past twenty-five years, with improvements in both technique and technology, bringing us the sophisticated procedures used in today's practice.peer-reviewe

Cascading nonlinearities in an organic single crystal core fiber: The Cerenkov regime

The large nonlinear phase shifts imparted to the fundamental beam during Cerenkov second harmonic generation (SHG) in a DAN, 4-(N,N-dimethylamino)-3-acetamidonitrobenzene, single crystal core fiber are explained and modelled numerically. Cascading upconversion and downconversion processes leads to nonlinear phase shifts produced by the second order nonlinear coupling of the guided fundamental mode and the component of the Cerenkov second harmonic field trapped in the fiber cladding

Vegetable Oil as an Emergency Fuel

The unstable world political situation combined with the fact that a large amount of the world\u27s oil reserves is located in the Middle East means we must continue to search for an alternate fuel source for our agricultural machinery. It is well-known that there is a limited amount of fossil fuels and even with no world political problems the demand will exceed supply in the not-too-distant future. The United States currently imports fossil fuels because we use more than we produce. Vegetable oils are a renewable resource. They offer a means of keeping our agricultural equipment operating in an oil emergency

Error Analysis of the DtN-FEM for the Scattering Problem in Acoustics via Fourier Analysis

In this paper, we are concerned with the error analysis for the nite elementsolution of the two-dimensional exterior Neumann boundary value problem inacoustics. In particular, we establish an explicit priori error estimates in H1and L2- norms including both the eect of the truncation of the DtN mappingand that of the numerical discretization. To apply the nite element method(FEM) to the exterior problem, the original boundary value problem is reducedto an equivalent nonlocal boundary value problem via a Dirichlet-to-Neumann(DtN) mapping represented in terms of the Fourier expansion series. We discussessential features of the corresponding variational equation and its modicationdue to the truncation of the DtN mapping in appropriate function spaces. Nu-merical tests are presented to validate our theoretical results

Numbers of calling whales in the North Pacific

Since November 1995, the U. S. Navy's Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) and other hydrophone arrays were used to regularly sample the occurance of whale sounds in the four regions bordering the continental margins across the North Pacific. The numbers of whales heard calling varied with the season and location for each species, Blue whales (Balaenoptera musculas), fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus), and humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). For blue whales, calling during the fall season averaged 5 whales per event, winter averaged 1.5 whales per event, spring averaged 1 whale, and summer averaged 1.5 whales. For fin whales the number of whales heard ("F" calls from individuals) during winter averaged 3 whales per event, spring and fall calling averaged 1.5 whales, and summer averaged 1 whale. The "J" calling events, regardless of season, were judged to be from at least 6 fin whales. Humpback singing typically was from 3 whales. These numbers demonstrated seasonal variations in calling whales for each region.Funding was provided by CNO N45 Environmental Program and US Army Corps of Engineers (DCA87-00-H-0026) with funding from the Department of Defense Legacy Resource Management Program