The Economic Evaluation of Input Use Prescription Maps: Are You Paying to Make Less Profit?

Variable Rate Prescriptions used by farmers to apply agricultural inputs are largely privatized and are normally seen only by the farmer that applies the prescription and the consultants whom create the prescription maps. Farmers need a way to evaluate the prescriptions that are being applied to fields. This paper explores modeling techniques which could be applied by farmers to determine the profitability of a particular consultant. Regression modeling is used on field trials which have been divided into site-specific management zones (SSMZ) based on a consultant’s variable rate prescriptions. Production functions are created for each management zone. The production functions are used to find the economically optimum rates or the rates which maximize profit. The consultant’s rates are also explored to determine how close this particular consultant is to the economically optimum rates. The consultant that is evaluated in this paper produces a profit that is $11 less than the economically optimum rates. Advisor: Taro Mien

Securing a future for responsible neuromodulation in children : The importance of maintaining a broad clinical gaze

This perspective paper provides an overview of several key tensions and challenges within the social context of neuromodulation, and it suggests a means of securing the future of paediatric neuromodulation in light of these. Tensions and challenges relate to: the considerable clinical and economic need for new therapies to manage neurological diseases; significant commercial involvement in the field; funding pressures; public perceptions (particularly unrealistic expectations); and the emerging Responsible Research and Innovation initiative. This paper will argue that managing these challenges and tensions requires that clinicians working within the field adopt what could be called a broad clinical gaze. This paper will define the broad clinical gaze, and it will propose several ways in which a broad clinical gaze can be – and indeed is being - operationalised in recent advances in neuromodulation in children. These include the use of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary clinical team structures, the adoption of clinical assessment tools that capture day-to-day functionality, and the use of patient registries. By adopting a broad clinical gaze, clinicians and investigators can ensure that the field as a whole can responsibly and ethically deliver on its significant clinical potential

Data not available? Survey applications to carbon sequestration and irrigation water quality

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Agricultural EconomicsGabriel S SampsonEssay 1: Cover crop and no-till adoption: What affects willingness to accept of cover crop and no-till contracts? Carbon markets offer supplemental income to producers for implementing no-till and cover crop practices that sequester carbon in the soil. Using choice experiments, we find that 37% and 43% of our sample would not accept a hypothetical contract to enroll cover crop and no-till respectively, indicating that producers are unwilling to enroll in carbon contract offerings current payment rates. We estimate the marginal willingness to accept (MWTA) of producers for current contract attributes including contract length and portion of cropland enrolled for both cover crop and no-till. Using random parameters logit models, we find that MWTA of a cover crop contract for enrolling 33% of cropland acreage for a 5- and 10-year contract is $54.44/acre and$75.85/acre, or two to three times current program payments. We find comparable results with lower prices for no-till contracts. In addition to indications that current payments are too low to incentivize widespread adoption, we find that MWTA of contracts increases with contract length because contractual agreements constrain producer decision making. We also find indications that arid regions may not receive enough precipitation for cover crop implementation which causes higher MWTA of cover crop contracts. Results indicate that conservation practices and payments under existing carbon contracts will limit enrollment in Kansas and other semi-arid regions of the High Plains. Essay 2: Producer response to groundwater quality concerns: Are concerned producers watering less? Increases in irrigation intensity across the High Plains Aquifer have led to declining water levels and deterioration of water quality due to runoff and salts accumulation. In this paper, we combine a survey of producer groundwater perceptions with data on groundwater use to determine how ground water quantity and quality concerns affect irrigation water use. We find that as well yield (i.e., water quantity) concern increases, producers typically irrigate a smaller number of acres at each well which results in less total water use. However, we find that major concern over water quality corresponds with an increase of water use which is driven by producers watering more acres on the extensive margin. Our results indicate that water quality concerns mitigate the declines in irrigation water use caused by well yield concerns. When major water quality concern is present, producers apply 11.45 more acre-feet of water per well. We do not find significant changes in water use on the intensive margin due to well yield or water quality concerns. In looking at the effects of water quality concern on crop choice, we find that the planting decisions of producers with water quality concerns are not statistically different from producers without concern, which indicates producers are not changing their crop choice on average due to concern over water quality

Teacher leadership: a survey analysis of KwaZulu-Natal teachers’ perceptions

The notion of teacher leadership is implicit in official documentation in the South African education system post 1994, which emphasises a move towards a more shared and participatory approach to the practice of leadership and management in schools. The concept of teacher leadership is embedded in a distributed leadership theoretical framing which emphasises that leadership need not be located only in the position of the principal but can be stretched over a range of people who work at different levels in a school. We report on a study in which the perceptions of teachers’ on their understanding and experiences of teacher leadership were explored. The study adopted a survey approach and utilised closed questionnaires to gather data from 1,055 post level-one teachers across a range of schools of diverse contexts in KwaZulu-Natal. We found that while teachers supported the notion of shared leadership and believed they were equipped to lead, their leadership was largely restricted to their classrooms. There was some evidence of teacher leadership amongst teacher colleagues in certain curricular and extra-curricular activities. However, teacher leadership in relation to school-wide and community issues was almost non-existent. We signal two problematics regarding the leadership of school teachers and consider the implication of these for the distribution of leadership, and therefore change, in schools.Keywords: distributed leadership; education leadership; power; schoolmanagement teams; teacher leadership; teacher

Light-Scattering, Intrinsic Viscosity, and Gold Number Relationships for Some Dextran Fractions

Author Institution: Departments of Bacteriology and Chemistry, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohi

Factors Affecting Production and Clarification of Dextran

Author Institution: Departments of Bacteriology and Chemistry, The Ohio State University, Columbus 10

The Dispositions of Things : the non-human dimension of power and ethics in patient-centred medicine

This paper explores power relations between clinicians, patients and families as clinicians engage in patient-centred ethical work. Specifically, we draw on Actor-Network Theory to interrogate the role of non-human elements in distributing power relations within clinical settings as clinicians attempt to manage the expectations of patients and families. Using the activities of a multidisciplinary team providing deep brain stimulation to children with severe movement disorders as an example, we illustrate how a patient-centred tool is implicated in establishing relations that constitute four modes of power: power over, power to, power storage, and power/discretion. We argue that understanding the role of non-human elements in structuring power relations can guide and inform bioethical discussions on the suitability of patient-centred approaches in clinical settings

The social management of biomedical novelty : Facilitating translation in regenerative medicine

Regenerative medicine (RM) is championed as a potential source of curative treatments for a variety of illnesses, and as a generator of economic wealth and prosperity. Alongside this optimism, however, is a sense of concern that the translation of basic science into useful RM therapies will be laboriously slow due to a range of challenges relating to live tissue handling and manufacturing, regulation, reimbursement and commissioning, and clinical adoption. This paper explores the attempts of stakeholders to overcome these innovation challenges and thus facilitate the emergence of useful RM therapies. The paper uses the notion of innovation niches as an analytical frame. Innovation niches are collectively constructed socio-technical spaces in which a novel technology can be tested and further developed, with the intention of enabling wider adoption. Drawing on primary and secondary data, we explore the motivation for, and the attempted construction of, niches in three domains which are central to the adoption of innovative technologies: the regulatory, the health economic, and the clinical. We illustrate that these niches are collectively constructed via both formal and informal initiatives, and we argue that they reflect wider socio-political trends in the social management of biomedical novelty

Sexual selection in complex communities : integrating interspecific reproductive interference in structured populations

Funding: European Research Council (771387) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/K009524/1) (AG).The social structure of populations plays a key role in shaping variation in sexual selection. In nature, sexual selection occurs in communities of interacting species; however, heterospecifics are rarely included in characterizations of social structure. Heterospecifics can influence the reproductive outcomes of intrasexual competition by interfering with intraspecific sexual interactions (interspecific reproductive interference [IRI]). We outline the need for studies of sexual selection to incorporate heterospecifics as part of the social environment. We use simulations to show that classic predictions for the effect of social structure on sexual selection are altered by an interaction between social structure and IRI. This interaction has wide‐ranging implications for patterns of sexual conflict and kin‐selected reproductive strategies in socially structured populations. Our work bridges the gap between sexual selection research on social structure and IRI, and highlights future directions to study sexual selection in interacting communities.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Aligning technology and institutional readiness: the adoption of innovation

This paper explores and develops the concept of ‘readiness’ as it relates to the adoption of innovation. In particular, the paper discusses readiness in regard to the notion of ‘technology readiness’ levels, widely used today by both producers and users to monitor and manage emergent innovation. The paper argues that, while useful, this notion needs to be informed by and subsumed within a broader concept of ‘institutional readiness’. The latter is especially important in conceptualising how new technologies are actually adopted in organisational settings. The paper develops a model of institutional readiness that recognises the saliency of technology readiness but which embeds it within a broader sociotechnical framework. This is illustrated with reference to the emerging field of regenerative medici