Genetic and physiologic analyses of soybean grain yields in water limited environments

Increasing grain yield in soybean is an important breeding goal for plant breeders. While identification of yield QTL can result in identification of genomic regions for increasing yield, these regions are often not consistent across environments due to genetic and environment interactions. Water limitation for crop growth is one such environment in which yield QTL are not consistent. Water limitations during grain fill can be especially devastating to the final yield of a crop. The objective of this study was to identify and then map QTL in three families of recombinant inbred lines (RILs) developed from two plant introductions and one line originating from a commercial variety from the University of Missouri all crossed to IA3023. QTL mapping was done with yield data and ureide concentration. One set of data was obtained from a small field study in Nebraska created for the purpose of limiting water to the crop. The second set of data was opportunistic data from a larger study spanning many states in the Midwest over 3 years. For QTL mapping, the families included F5 lines developed using IA3023 as the common crossing parent and selected for similar maturity. The three families were created with PI 427.136, PI 404.188A, and LD00-3309. The three bi-parental populations were evaluated with 4,363 informative SNP markers for yield and ureides during 2 years in Lincoln, Nebraska and for yield and 3 years at 9 locations across the Midwest. Genotypic and phenotypic data were analyzed using rQTL to identify major QTL. Clustering environments was used in the larger dataset for separation of like environments. Two phenotypes focused on QTL mapping. Those were ureide levels and grain yield. For water limited and adequate water environments 23 QTL were identified through both studies for ureides and yield

Demystifying agritourism development in Fiji: inclusive growth for smallholders

Agritourism has gained traction with a variety of stakeholders within the Pacific to supplement farm revenue, create linkages to tourism and ultimately contribute to sustainable economic development. This paper, with a focus on smallholders, examines the key constraints of agriculture, current agritourism products, policy development initiatives, and proposes an open framework for agritourism in Fiji. Among the key considerations are a careful examination of tourist preferences, the promotion of agritourism on working farms without displacing the key activity of food production, and redefining agritourism as a value for money experience rather than a niche market in the Pacific region

A Model for Star Formation, Gas Flows and Chemical Evolution in Galaxies at High Redshifts

Motivated by the increasing use of the Kennicutt-Schmidt (K-S) star formation law to interpret observations of high redshift galaxies, the importance of gas accretion to galaxy formation, and the recent observations of chemical abundances in galaxies at z~2-3, I use simple analytical models to assess the consistency of these processes of galaxy evolution with observations and with each other. I derive the time dependence of star formation implied by the K-S law, and show that the sustained high star formation rates observed in galaxies at z~2-3 require the accretion of additional gas. A model in which the gas accretion rate is approximately equal to the combined star formation and outflow rates broadly reproduces the observed trends of star formation rate with galaxy age. Using an analytical description of chemical evolution, I also show that this model, further constrained to have an outflow rate roughly equal to the star formation rate, reproduces the observed mass-metallicity relation at z~2.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Student Satisfaction with Hotel Management Internship in the multi - cultural context of the University of the South Pacific

Many international hospitality organisations interact and effectively work with people from different cultural backgrounds. The issue of cultural awareness, sensitivity, and understanding of cultural differences has created unusual challenges for interns to work effectively in a multi-cultural workplace and deliver quality services to an international tourism market. This qualitative study of student reflections and staff facilitation of internships will determine the factors that contribute to student satisfaction with their working and learning experiences. The proposed research will be of value and have practical implications for both academics who wish to further study student internship satisfaction, sponsors and industry professionals as this research will serve as a framework for a successful internship experience for future hospitality practitioners

Lines by Someone Else: the Pragmatics of Apprompted Poems

Over the last sixty years, overtly intertextual poems with titles such as “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery” and “Poem Ending with a Line by George W. Bush” have been appearing at an increasing rate in magazines and collections. These poems wed themselves to other texts and authors in distinct ways, inviting readers to engage with poems which are, themselves, in conversation with lines from elsewhere. These poems, which I refer to as “apprompted” poems, explicitly challenge readers to investigate the intertextual conversation, and in doing so, they adopt inherent risks. My thesis will chart the various effects these poems can have for readers and the consequences they may hold for the texts from which they borrow. Literary critics such as Harold Bloom and J. H. Miller have described the act of borrowing as competitive and parasitic—“agon” is Bloom’s term for what he sees as the oedipal anxiety of poets and poets’ texts to their antecedents, but an investigation of this emerging genre in terms of linguistic pragmatics shows that apprompted poems are performing a wider range of acts in relation to their predecessors. Unlike Bloom’s theory, which interprets the impulse of poetic creation through psychoanalysis, I employ linguistic terms from Brown and Levinson’s linguistic Politeness theory to analyze apprompted poems as conversational speech events. Politeness theory provides a useful analysis of these poems by documenting the weight of threats to the positive and negative “faces” of the participants in each poetic conversation. I have documented these “face-threatening-acts” and used them to divide apprompted poems into five major speech events: satire, revision, promotion, pastiche, and ecclesiastic. Ultimately, this paper serves at the intersection of literary criticism and linguistics, as I suggest a theoretical approach to the interpretation and criticism of apprompted poems by way of linguistic pragmatics

Hardware/software co-design of fractal features based fall detection system

Falls are a leading cause of death in older adults and result in high levels of mortality, morbidity and immobility. Fall Detection Systems (FDS) are imperative for timely medical aid and have been known to reduce death rate by 80%. We propose a novel wearable sensor FDS which exploits fractal dynamics of fall accelerometer signals. Fractal dynamics can be used as an irregularity measure of signals and our work shows that it is a key discriminant for classification of falls from other activities of life. We design, implement and evaluate a hardware feature accelerator for computation of fractal features through multi-level wavelet transform on a reconfigurable embedded System on Chip, Zynq device for evaluating wearable accelerometer sensors. The proposed FDS utilises a hardware/software co-design approach with hardware accelerator for fractal features and software implementation of Linear Discriminant Analysis on an embedded ARM core for high accuracy and energy efficiency. The proposed system achieves 99.38% fall detection accuracy, 7.3× speed-up and 6.53× improvements in power consumption, compared to the software only execution with an overall performance per Watt advantage of 47.6×, while consuming low reconfigurable resources at 28.67%

Estimating Extent of Mortality Associated with the Douglas-Fir Beetle in the Central and Northern Rockies

Data collected from Douglas-fir stands infected by the Douglas-fir beetle in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah, were used to develop models to estimate amount of mortality in terms of basal area killed. Models were built using stepwise linear regression and regression tree approaches. Linear regression models using initial Douglas-fir basal area were built for all study sites but produce low precision estimates. Regression tree models using initial Douglas-fir basal area of stand density index or both were also build for all sites. Regression tree models provide a more realistic approach to estimate potential mortality by creating more homogenous mortality classes with reduced variance. The models developed provide land managers with a basis for determining the potential mortality should a Douglas-fir beetle outbreak develop