Prepared for Bioterrorism Events? A Study of the Grain and Oilseed Sector

One of the most crucial problems facing the U.S. economy is the possibility of a terrorist attack on its food sector. The implications can be profound for its stakeholders, who are highly dependent on this sector for their economic livelihood as well as their food supplies. The U.S. Bioterrorism Act of 2002 was enacted to improve the ability of the United States to prevent, prepare for and respond to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies. One of the important features of the U.S. Bioterrorism Act of 2002 is its emphasis on prevention, a change from prior legislation that focused on punishments after an incidence had occurred. The U.S. Bioterrorism Act does not address food safety issues in general; its focus is to prevent intentional contamination. The objective of this study was to assess the preparedness to potential bioterrorism in the grain and oilseed sector based on facility security expenditures and history of security breaches. The study was conducted as a research activity under the multistate project NC-1016 “Economic Assessment of Changes in Trade Arrangements, Bio-terrorism Threats and Renewable Fuels Requirements on the U.S. Grain and Oilseed Sector.” In addition to assessing preparedness, the study investigated the relationship between adoption of security measures and breaches in facility security. Finally the study documents, for a small sample, the extent to which grain and oilseed facilities appear to be following regulations that implement the U.S. Bioterrorism Act.bioterrorism, grain and oilseed sector, Bioterrorism Act of 2002, NC-1016, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Marketing, Political Economy, I18, K23, Q13, Q18,

Attitudes of College Students towards Agriculture, Food and the Role of Government

In 2002 and 2007 we surveyed Agribusiness students’ attitudes about agriculture, farming, food and agricultural policies. Responses were analyzed by year and student characteristics including farm background, citizenship and gender. Citizenship was a significant variable explaining differences in agreement with statements. Year and interactions with year were not significant.agricultural policy, farming, logistic regression, student attitudes, Agricultural and Food Policy, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession, A13, A22, C42, Q18,

EXFI: a low cost Fault Injection System for embedded Microprocessor-based Boards

Evaluating the faulty behavior of low-cost embedded microprocessor-based boards is an increasingly important issue, due to their adoption in many safety critical systems. The architecture of a complete Fault Injection environment is proposed, integrating a module for generating a collapsed list of faults, and another for performing their injection and gathering the results. To address this issue, the paper describes a software-implemented Fault Injection approach based on the Trace Exception Mode available in most microprocessors. The authors describe EXFI, a prototypical system implementing the approach, and provide data about some sample benchmark applications. The main advantages of EXFI are the low cost, the good portability, and the high efficienc

Mathematical thinking: studying the notion of 'transfer'.

These analyses form part of a three-year project* looking at mathematical thinking as a socially organised activity. We revisit data from a University Calculus class using tools from two theoretical perspectives, used increasingly in mathematics education research: (1) semiotic mediation and (2) discursive practices. We highlight how different theory-driven analyses taking a sociocultural view of thinking and learning can offer insights into the conceptualisation of the 'transfer' of learning

Inverse Ising inference using all the data

We show that a method based on logistic regression, using all the data, solves the inverse Ising problem far better than mean-field calculations relying only on sample pairwise correlation functions, while still computationally feasible for hundreds of nodes. The largest improvement in reconstruction occurs for strong interactions. Using two examples, a diluted Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model and a two-dimensional lattice, we also show that interaction topologies can be recovered from few samples with good accuracy and that the use of $l_1$-regularization is beneficial in this process, pushing inference abilities further into low-temperature regimes.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Accepted versio

Body size in Drosophila: Genetic architecture, allometries and sexual dimorphism

Even though substantial progress has been made to elucidate the physiological and environmental factors underpinning differences in body size, little is known about its genetic architecture. Furthermore, all animal species bear a specific relationship between the size of each organ and overall body size, so different body size traits should be investigated as well as their sexual dimorphism that may have an important impact on the evolution of body size. We have surveyed 191 co-isogenic lines of Drosophila melanogaster, each one of them homozygous for a single P-element insertion, and assessed the effects of mutations on different body size traits compared to the P-element-free co-isogenic control. Nearly 60% of the lines showed significant differences with respect to the control for these traits in one or both sexes and almost 35% showed trait- and sex-specific effects. Candidate gene mutations frequently increased body size in males and decreased it in females. Among the 92 genes identified, most are involved in development and/or metabolic processes and their molecular functions principally include protein-binding and nucleic acid-binding activities. Although several genes showed pleiotropic effects in relation to body size, few of them were involved in the expression of all traits in one or both sexes. These genes seem to be important for different aspects related to the general functioning of the organism. In general, our results indicate that the genetic architecture of body size traits involves a large fraction of the genome and is largely sex and trait specific. © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserved.Fil:Carreira, V.P. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.Fil:Mensch, J. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.Fil:Fanara, J.J. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina

Economics of Transporting Poultry Litter from Northwest Arkansas to Eastern Arkansas Croplands

Applying baled litter from northwest Arkansas shipped by truck with backhauls, supplemented with chemical fertilizers provided the most cost-efficient method to supply nutrients to crops in eastern Arkansas, according to a GAMS optimization. Shipping raw litter by truck and barge is the optimal choice when backhauls or baling is unavailable.Public Economics,

Are visual cortex maps optimized for coverage?

The elegant regularity of maps of variables such as ocular dominance, orientation, and spatial frequency in primary visual cortex has prompted many people to suggest that their structure could be explained by an optimization principle. Up to now, the standard way to test this hypothesis has been to generate artificial maps by optimizing a hypothesized objective function and then to compare these artificial maps with real maps using a variety of quantitative criteria. If the artificial maps are similar to the real maps, this provides some evidence that the real cortex may be optimizing a similar function to the one hypothesized. Recently, a more direct method has been proposed for testing whether real maps represent local optima of an objective function (Swindale, Shoham, Grinvald, Bonhoeffer, & Hilbener, 2000). In this approach, the value of the hypothesized function is calculated for a real map, and then the real map is perturbed in certain ways and the function recalculated. If each of these perturbations leads to a worsening of the function, it is tempting to conclude that the real map is quite likely to represent a local optimum of that function. In this article, we argue that such perturbation results provide only weak evidence in favor of the optimization hypothesis