8,581 research outputs found
Interpretation of Long-term Trade Projections: China's Role in Forecast Discrepancies and its Impact on Expectations for World Agricultural Trade
Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade,
A Limnological Study of Ricks Pond and the Gulpha Creek Drainage in Garland County, Arkansas
A limnological investigation of Ricks Pond and the Gulpha Creek drainage of Garland County, Arkansas was conducted between 1 June 1978, and 21 August 1978. Water samples taken from ten stations on three different dates indicated that the stream and pond systems were typical in water quality characteristics of other small, high gradient streams and impoundments in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. In Ricks Pond, thermal stratification occurred along with the development of an oxygen deficient zone below a depth of one meter. Other water quality parameters indicated that Ricks Pond is a moderately productive ecosystem, with the productivity limited by the nitrogen species. The fecal coliform bacterial counts were very low, indicating no direct input of excessive amounts of fecal matter into the system during the present study. However, a Hot Springs city sewer line runs through the pond, and two manholes emerge from the pond\u27s surface. The possibility exists that this sewer line could discharge raw sewage into Ricks Pond during periods of high water. A biological investigation was also conducted in the study area, and lists of the phytoplankton, periphyton, higher aquatic vegetation, zooplankton, benthic macroinvertebrates, and fishes are presented. Twenty-seven species of fishes were collected from the Gulpha Creek drainage, and no rare or endangered forms were found. Ricks Pond is best-suited for the establishment of a put- and-take fishery for channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus. The following recommendations were made for the establishment of such a fishery: (1) Renovation of the pond by draining and deepening it; (2) Removal of the sewer line from the pond; (3) Stocking of catchable size channel catfish at the rate of approximately 300-400 pounds per acre; (4) Periodic monitoring of the water quality
Food of Cobia, Rachycentron canadum, from the Northcentral Gulf of Mexico
The stomach contents of 403 cobia, Rachycentron canadum, caught in the northcentral Gulf of Mexico recreational fishery from April through October of 1987-1990 were examined. Cobia ranged from 373-1,530 mm in fork length. Of the 403 stomachs, 287 (71.2%) contained at least one identifiable prey taxon. Crustaceans, consisting primarily of portunid crabs, were the predominant food. Crustaceans occurred in 79.1% of the stomachs and comprised 77.6% of the total number of identifiable prey. The second most important prey category was fish which was dominated by hardhead catfish, Arius felis, and eels. Fish occurred in 58.5% of the stomachs but only accounted for 20.3% of the total number of prey. The importance of fish as prey increased with increasing size (length) of cobia, with the largest size class of cobia (1,150-1,530 mm FL) showing the highest percent frequency occurrence of fish prey (84.4%). There were no significant differences between the diets of male and female cobia. Species composition of the diet indicated that cobia examined in this study were generalist carnivores in their feeding habits and fed primarily on benthic/epibenthic crustaceans and fishes. However, the occurrence of pelagic prey provided evidence of diversity in the foraging behavior of cobia. Feeding in cobia indicated their dependence upon prey availability rather than upon a few specific food organisms
Food of Cobia, Rachycentron canadum, from the Northcentral Gulf of Mexico
The stomach contents of 403 cobia, Rachycentron canadum, caught in the northcentral Gulf of Mexico recreational fishery from April through October of 1987-1990 were examined. Cobia ranged from 373-1,530 mm in fork length. Of the 403 stomachs, 287 (71.2%) contained at least one identifiable prey taxon. Crustaceans, consisting primarily of portunid crabs, were the predominant food. Crustaceans occurred in 79.1% of the stomachs and comprised 77.6% of the total number of identifiable prey. The second most important prey category was fish which was dominated by hardhead catfish, Arius felis, and eels. Fish occurred in 58.5% of the stomachs but only accounted for 20.3% of the total number of prey. The importance of fish as prey increased with increasing size (length) of cobia, with the largest size class of cobia (1,150-1,530 mm FL) showing the highest percent frequency occurrence of fish prey (84.4%). There were no significant differences between the diets of male and female cobia. Species composition of the diet indicated that cobia examined in this study were generalist carnivores in their feeding habits and fed primarily on benthic/epibenthic crustaceans and fishes. However, the occurrence of pelagic prey provided evidence of diversity in the foraging behavior of cobia. Feeding in cobia indicated their dependence upon prey availability rather than upon a few specific food organisms
Interpretation of Long-term Trade Projections: China's Role in Forecast Discrepancies and its Impact on Expectations for World Agricultural Trade
This report looks at the impact of China's grain projections on a global commodity baseline through a discussion of the 1998 FAPRI China corn outlook
Some High School Biology Electives
Cedar Falls High School, for many years, offered a science curriculum composed of traditional biology, chemistry, and physics courses. The percentage of students taking science courses began declining in the late 1960\u27s, reaching a low of 573 students (out of approximately 1,500 students) in the 1972-73 school year. Since all science courses offered at the school were elective.it was concluded that some adjustment in course offerings was in order if a greater percentage of the student body was to be reached. As a result of the efforts of the science staff, five new biology courses were developed and subsequently introduced into the curriculum from 1972-1974. In this article, brief course descriptions are given with respect to the new biology offerings. The course descriptions are followed by a discussion of the success of these courses in fulfilling the emerging needs and interests of the student body
CES-KD: Curriculum-based Expert Selection for Guided Knowledge Distillation
Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective tool for compressing deep
classification models for edge devices. However, the performance of KD is
affected by the large capacity gap between the teacher and student networks.
Recent methods have resorted to a multiple teacher assistant (TA) setting for
KD, which sequentially decreases the size of the teacher model to relatively
bridge the size gap between these models. This paper proposes a new technique
called Curriculum Expert Selection for Knowledge Distillation (CES-KD) to
efficiently enhance the learning of a compact student under the capacity gap
problem. This technique is built upon the hypothesis that a student network
should be guided gradually using stratified teaching curriculum as it learns
easy (hard) data samples better and faster from a lower (higher) capacity
teacher network. Specifically, our method is a gradual TA-based KD technique
that selects a single teacher per input image based on a curriculum driven by
the difficulty in classifying the image. In this work, we empirically verify
our hypothesis and rigorously experiment with CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CINIC-10,
and ImageNet datasets and show improved accuracy on VGG-like models, ResNets,
and WideResNets architectures.Comment: ICPR202
Dissipation in Quasi One-Dimensional Superconducting Single-Crystal Sn Nanowires
Electrical transport measurements were made on single-crystal Sn nanowires to
understand the intrinsic dissipation mechanisms of a one-dimensional
superconductor. While the resistance of wires of diameter larger than 70 nm
drops precipitately to zero at Tc near 3.7 K, a residual resistive tail
extending down to low temperature is found for wires with diameters of 20 and
40 nm. As a function of temperature, the logarithm of the residual resistance
appears as two linear sections, one within a few tenths of a degree below Tc
and the other extending down to at least 0.47 K, the minimum temperature of the
measurements. The residual resistance is found to be ohmic at all temperatures
below Tc of Sn. These findings are suggestive of a thermally activated phase
slip process near Tc and quantum fluctuation-induced phase slip process in the
low temperature regime. When the excitation current exceeds a critical value,
the voltage-current (V-I) curves show a series of discrete steps in approaching
the normal state. These steps cannot be fully understood with the classical
Skocpol-Beasley-Tinkham phase slip center model (PSC), but can be qualitatively
accounted for partly by the PSC model modified by Michotte et al.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. To be appeared on Physical Review B 71, 200
BD-KD: Balancing the Divergences for Online Knowledge Distillation
Knowledge distillation (KD) has gained a lot of attention in the field of
model compression for edge devices thanks to its effectiveness in compressing
large powerful networks into smaller lower-capacity models. Online
distillation, in which both the teacher and the student are learning
collaboratively, has also gained much interest due to its ability to improve on
the performance of the networks involved. The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence
ensures the proper knowledge transfer between the teacher and student. However,
most online KD techniques present some bottlenecks under the network capacity
gap. By cooperatively and simultaneously training, the models the KL distance
becomes incapable of properly minimizing the teacher's and student's
distributions. Alongside accuracy, critical edge device applications are in
need of well-calibrated compact networks. Confidence calibration provides a
sensible way of getting trustworthy predictions. We propose BD-KD: Balancing of
Divergences for online Knowledge Distillation. We show that adaptively
balancing between the reverse and forward divergences shifts the focus of the
training strategy to the compact student network without limiting the teacher
network's learning process. We demonstrate that, by performing this balancing
design at the level of the student distillation loss, we improve upon both
performance accuracy and calibration of the compact student network. We
conducted extensive experiments using a variety of network architectures and
show improvements on multiple datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100,
Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach
through comprehensive comparisons and ablations with current state-of-the-art
online and offline KD techniques
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