Economic Analysis of Using Soybean Meal as a Mushroom Growing Substrate

Mushrooms have been grown commercially on many different substrates for years, usually agricultural by-products such as straw or stover. Increased popularity for specialty mushrooms with consumers has led to increased production and great demand for economic substrates. Oyster mushrooms are easier to grow relative to other types of mushrooms and their production has increased dramatically in recent years. This study examines the economic feasibility of using soybean hulls as a primary substrate for oyster mushrooms, replacing traditional wheat straw. The study uses a cost-benefit analysis to determine an optimal substrate based on yield and the number of crops harvested per year. The study shows that soybean hulls, combined with corn gluten or soybean meal increases yield 4.5 times, which more than offsets for higher costs for soybean hulls. The use of soybean substrate also allows a producer to raise about four more crops per year, which in turn uses fixed resources more efficiently and increases profitability.Oyster, Mushrooms, Substrate, Soybean, Hulls, Meal, Economic, Feasibility, Crop Production/Industries,

Design, fabrication, and test of a composite material wind turbine rotor blade

The aerodynamic design, structural design, fabrication, and structural testing is described for a 60 foot long filament wound, fiberglass/epoxy resin matrix wind turbine rotor blade for a 125 foot diameter, 100 kW wind energy conversion system. One blade was fabricated which met all aerodynamic shape requirements and was structurally capable of operating under all specified design conditions. The feasibility of filament winding large rotor blades was demonstrated

USING CHOICE EXPERIMENTS TO ELICIT FARMERS PREFERENCES? FOR CROP AND HEALTH INSURANCE

A random utility discrete choice experiments is used to determine farmers' preferences for health insurance, crop insurance, and a product that switches some portion of crop insurance subsidy to health insurance premium subsidy with access to large-pool risk groups.Risk and Uncertainty,

Model of Thermal Wavefront Distortion in Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Detectors I: Thermal Focusing

We develop a steady-state analytical and numerical model of the optical response of power-recycled Fabry-Perot Michelson laser gravitational-wave detectors to thermal focusing in optical substrates. We assume that the thermal distortions are small enough that we can represent the unperturbed intracavity field anywhere in the detector as a linear combination of basis functions related to the eigenmodes of one of the Fabry-Perot arm cavities, and we take great care to preserve numerically the nearly ideal longitudinal phase resonance conditions that would otherwise be provided by an external servo-locking control system. We have included the effects of nonlinear thermal focusing due to power absorption in both the substrates and coatings of the mirrors and beamsplitter, the effects of a finite mismatch between the curvatures of the laser wavefront and the mirror surface, and the diffraction by the mirror aperture at each instance of reflection and transmission. We demonstrate a detailed numerical example of this model using the MATLAB program Melody for the initial LIGO detector in the Hermite-Gauss basis, and compare the resulting computations of intracavity fields in two special cases with those of a fast Fourier transform field propagation model. Additional systematic perturbations (e.g., mirror tilt, thermoelastic surface deformations, and other optical imperfections) can be included easily by incorporating the appropriate operators into the transfer matrices describing reflection and transmission for the mirrors and beamsplitter.Comment: 24 pages, 22 figures. Submitted to JOSA

Spatial and temporal filtering of a 10-W Nd:YAG laser with a Fabry-Perot ring-cavity premode cleaner

We report on the use of a fixed-spacer Fabry–Perot ring cavity to filter spatially and temporally a 10-W laser-diode-pumped Nd:YAG master-oscillator power amplifier. The spatial filtering leads to a 7.6-W TEMinfinity beam with 0.1% higher-order transverse mode content. The temporal filtering reduces the relative power fluctuations at 10 MHz to 2.8 x 10^-/sqrtHz, which is 1 dB above the shot-noise limit for 50 mA of detected photocurrent

North Dakota Crop Production Economics in 1991

Production Economics,

Predictive markers for humoral influenza vaccine response in patients with common variable immunodeficiency (CVID)

BACKGROUND: A subgroup of patients with common variable immunodeficiencies (CVID) responds to vaccination. The aim of the study was to try to identify predictive markers for those who developed a humoral immune response after influenza vaccination. METHODS: 48 patients with CVID (29 females, 19 males, mean age 59.4 years) were vaccinated with the A(H1N1) influenza vaccine Pandemrix® and boosted after one month. Blood samples were collected prior to each vaccination and two months later. Patients with a 4-fold titer increase of the hemagglutinin inhibition test (≥ 1:40) were considered responders and compared to non-responders for clinical, immunological and genetic markers. RESULTS: Eight (16.7%) patients responded to the vaccination. A significantly higher proportion of the responders, who showed a Euroclass SmB-Trnorm21norm profile (p=0.03) with a post-germinal center B cell pattern (p=0.04) in blood, suffered from enteropathies (p=0.04) as compared to non-responders. Bronchiectasis on the other hand, was exclusively found among non-responders (n=7), as was autoimmune cytopenia (n=5). Non-responders with a Euroclass SmB-21lowTrnorm profile (p=0.02), had a significantly higher prevalence of progressive antibody deficiency (p=0.048) and, at diagnosis, a higher mean serum IgM level (p=0.03), a lower mean serum IgG1 level (p=0.007), an expansion of absolute counts of cytotoxic CD8+ T-cells (p=0.033) and an increased proportion of memory CD8+ T-cells (p=0.044) in blood. CVID associated HLA markers were not detected in non-responders (p=0.03). CONCLUSION: About one-fifth of the CVID patients achieved protective antibody levels after A(H1N1) vaccination and selected clinical and immunological markers were identified that may predict a positive outcome of influenza vaccination

Search for antiproton decay at the Fermilab Antiproton Accumulator

A search for antiproton decay has been made at the Fermilab Antiproton Accumulator. Limits are placed on thirteen antiproton decay modes. The results include the first explicit experimental limits on the muonic decay modes of the antiproton, and the first limits on the decay modes e- gamma gamma, and e- omega. The most stringent limit is for the decay mode pbar-> e- gamma. At 90% C.L. we find that tau/B(pbar-> e- gamma) > 7 x 10^5 yr. The most stringent limit for decay modes with a muon in the final state is for the decay pbar-> mu- gamma. At 90% C.L. we find that tau/B(pbar-> mu- gamma) > 5 x 10^4 yr.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. D. Final results on 13 channels (was 15) are presente

Energies and wave functions for a soft-core Coulomb potential

For the family of model soft Coulomb potentials represented by V(r) = -\frac{Z}{(r^q+\beta^q)^{\frac{1}{q}}}, with the parameters Z>0, \beta>0, q \ge 1, it is shown analytically that the potentials and eigenvalues, E_{\nu\ell}, are monotonic in each parameter. The potential envelope method is applied to obtain approximate analytic estimates in terms of the known exact spectra for pure power potentials. For the case q =1, the Asymptotic Iteration Method is used to find exact analytic results for the eigenvalues E_{\nu\ell} and corresponding wave functions, expressed in terms of Z and \beta. A proof is presented establishing the general concavity of the scaled electron density near the nucleus resulting from the truncated potentials for all q. Based on an analysis of extensive numerical calculations, it is conjectured that the crossing between the pair of states [(\nu,\ell),(\nu',\ell')], is given by the condition \nu'\geq (\nu+1) and \ell' \geq (\ell+3). The significance of these results for the interaction of an intense laser field with an atom is pointed out. Differences in the observed level-crossing effects between the soft potentials and the hydrogen atom confined inside an impenetrable sphere are discussed.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, title change, minor revision

The influence of lexical selection disruptions on articulation

Interactive models of language production predict that it should be possible to observe long-distance interactions; effects that arise at one level of processing influence multiple subsequent stages of representation and processing. We examine the hypothesis that disruptions arising in nonform-based levels of planning—specifically, lexical selection—should modulate articulatory processing. A novel automatic phonetic analysis method was used to examine productions in a paradigm yielding both general disruptions to formulation processes and, more specifically, overt errors during lexical selection. This analysis method allowed us to examine articulatory disruptions at multiple levels of analysis, from whole words to individual segments. Baseline performance by young adults was contrasted with young speakers’ performance under time pressure (which previous work has argued increases interaction between planning and articulation) and performance by older adults (who may have difficulties inhibiting nontarget representations, leading to heightened interactive effects). The results revealed the presence of interactive effects. Our new analysis techniques revealed these effects were strongest in initial portions of responses, suggesting that speech is initiated as soon as the first segment has been planned. Interactive effects did not increase under response pressure, suggesting interaction between planning and articulation is relatively fixed. Unexpectedly, lexical selection disruptions appeared to yield some degree of facilitation in articulatory processing (possibly reflecting semantic facilitation of target retrieval) and older adults showed weaker, not stronger interactive effects (possibly reflecting weakened connections between lexical and form-level representations)