Farm Broadcaster Knowledge and Beliefs of Biotechnology and Genetically Modified Organisms

Farm broadcasting members of the National Association of Farm Broadcasters (NAFB) were studied to determine their knowledge and beliefs about biotechnology and genetically modified organisms. This study used bimodal data collection techniques. Farm broadcasters in this study were described as typically male, over 35 years of age, married, and with at least some college education. Most farm broadcasters had an audience size of more than 50,000 listeners with typically a local distribution. In addition, most deliver a story about biotechnology and genetically modified organisms at least once a week. The majority of farm broadcasters believed that it was important to have a knowledge base of the subject they were reporting on, yet they did not demonstrate a high level of knowledge about food biotechnology, as measured by eight multiple choice questions. The average farm broadcaster only answered five of the eight questions correctly. Farm broadcasters believe that the U.S. food supply is safe and do not feel that GMOs are a risk for future generations. However, farm broadcasters believe that their audiences have a higher perception of GMOs as a potential risk to future generations. Recommendations for future research and evaluation of university agricultural communication curriculum are included

Using Forages to Conserve Water in Semi-Arid Irrigated Cropping Systems

The Texas High Plains are part of the largest, contiguously irrigated cropland in the USA, and draws water from the Ogallala aquifer. High crop prices, increased demand for maize for ethanol production, and severe drought have increased water depletion rates. Research has shown that integrating forages and grazing cattle into the cotton-dominant cropping system can reduce overall water use (Allen et al. 2012) while still offering farmers positive net returns (Johnson et al. 2013). Integrating forages with row crops also reduces needs for nitrogen (N) fertilizer, rebuilds soil organic matter (Acosta-Martinez et al. 2010), and reduces fossil energy use and associated carbon emissions (Zilverberg et al. 2012). Advances in irrigation delivery that minimize evaporation losses and the use of irrigation scheduling tools that factor in soil water availability and crop needs for evapotranspiration (ET) are keys to improving whole-system water use efficiency. The Texas Alliance for Water Conservation (TAWC) is a multi-disciplinary team of agricultural scientists, resource managers, and producers formed in 2004 to demonstrate tools and irrigation technologies for conserving water on commercial farms in the Southern High Plains of Texas. We report progress in demonstrating advances in water conservation in a region where production of forages and livestock can help alleviate the decline in ground water supplies used for crop irrigation

Mapping Deviation: A Technique to Adapt or to Guard Loop Transformation Intuitions for Legality

International audienceParallel architectures are now omnipresent in mainstream electronic devices and exploiting them efficiently is a challenge for all developers. Hence, they need the support of languages, libraries and tools to assist them in the optimization or parallelization task. Compilers can provide a major help by automating this work. However they are very fragile black-boxes. A compiler may take a bad optimization decision because of imprecise heuristics or may turn off an optimization because of imprecise analyses, without providing much control or feedback to the end user. To address this issue, we introduce mapping deviation, a new compiler technique that aims at providing a useful feedback on the semantics of a given program restructuring. Starting from a transformation intuition a user or a compiler wants to apply, our algorithm studies its cor-rectness and can suggest changes or conditions to make it possible rather than being limited to the classical go/no-go answer. This algorithm builds on state-of-the-art polyhedral representation of programs and provides a high flexibility. We present two example applications of this technique: improving semi-automatic optimization tools for programmers and automatically designing runtime tests to check the correctness of a transformation for compilers

Recombination Measurements at Low Energies with Au49+,50+,51+ at the TSR

Recombination of Au49+, Au50+, and Au51+ ions has been studied at the TSR. With Au50+ ions a storage lifetime of only 2 to 4 s was observed with the magnetically expanded electron beam of the cooler at a density of ne = 107 cm-3. This short storage time is a consequence of the highest recombination rate coefficient ever observed with an atomic ion (1.8·10-6 cm3 s-1 at zero relative energy Erel = 0 between electrons and ions). At about 30 meV a huge dielectronic recombination resonance is found with a record small width of only about 15 meV. Such resonances fortuitously occurring near Erel=0 are probably the main reason for the enhanced recombination rates observed with Au50+, with Pb53+ (in a recent experiment at LEAR) as well as with other complex ions. For Au49+ and Au51+ the recombination rates are smaller by an order of magnitude

Applicable and sound polyhedral optimization of low-level programs

Computers become increasingly complex. Current and future systems feature configurable hardware, multiple cores with different capabilities, as well as accelerators. In addition, the memory subsystem becomes diversified too. The cache hierarchy grows deeper, is augmented with scratchpads, low-latency memory, and high-bandwidth memory. The programmer alone cannot utilize this enormous potential. Compilers have to provide insight into the program behavior, or even arrange computations and data themselves. Either way, they need a more holistic view of the program. Local transformations, which treat the iteration order, computation unit, and data layout as fixed, will not be able to fully utilize a diverse system. The polyhedral model, a high-level program representation and transformation framework, has shown great success tackling various problems in the context of diverse systems. While it is widely acknowledged for its analytical powers and transformation capabilities, it is also widely assumed to be too restrictive and fragile for real-world programs. In this thesis we improve the applicability and profitability of polyhedral-model-based techniques. Our efforts guarantee a sound polyhedral representation and extend the applicability to a wider range of programs. In addition, we introduce new applications to utilize the information available in the polyhedral program representation, including standalone optimizations and techniques to derive high-level properties

Analysis of 3s, 3p, 3d and 4f configurations of Sc XIII and V XV

In spectra obtained from foil-excited and laser-produced plasmas, we have identified 70 new lines as belonging to the spectra of fluorine-like scandium and vanadium ions, Sc XIII and V XV The new lines in the wavelength region from 70 to 600 Angstrom represent 2p(4)3s-3p, 3p-3d and 3d-4f transition arrays. The spectra have been interpreted with the aid of theoretical calculations, and the consistency of our derived 3s, 3p, 3d and 4f energy levels has been checked by means of isoelectronic comparisons

Aufgaben, Ergebnisse und Probleme der Zwillingsforschung

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