The Pesticide Decision Tool: A Field-Level Approach to Integrating Envionmental Factors in Pesticide Decision Making

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) is working to reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture and improve water quality through the voluntary adoption of on-farm assessment and decision tools. The objective of the Pesticide Decision Tool (PDT) project is to facilitate the integration of environmental risk assessment in the selection and management of pesticides in arable crop production. It is designed for use by agricultural professional such as co-op and elevator agronomists, independent crop consultants, and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Soil and Water Conservation District, and university Extension specialists, as well as by farmers. We take a broad-based approach that considers both environmental criteria and agronomic factors (such as application rate, crop tolerance, carry over ratings, and resistance risk ratings.) The environmental focus is ground and surface water protection, but other environmental and human health risks are considered. We currently have materials for field com and soybeans, with an emphasis on production in the Midwestern states. Herbicides are the major pesticide inputs in these crops. The Pesticide Decision Tool consists of a set of documents and associated software. Both the documents and the software can be downloaded over the Internet. The tool features two approaches: 1) a screening tool for assessing the likelihood of water contamination and 2) Reference Tables for easy comparison of the environmental and agronomic characteristics of the products available for a certain type of application (e.g., preemergence herbicides, soybeans)

DDA Management With Predictive Modeling

Demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) programs have become an integral part of academic libraries’ collecting strategies. While DDA programs provide an effective way to build a just-in-time collection, it can be difficult to anticipate how many titles will be triggered for purchase and what the financial impact will be. This presentation will describe a project to build a predictive model to flag DDA titles that are likely to be triggered for purchase within the first year of being added to the catalog. By implementing a predictive model, collections and acquisitions departments can better plan the yearly DDA budget. In addition, titles with a high probability of being triggered for purchase can be purchased if they become ineligible for DDA. We will discuss how we combined text analytics and structured data as inputs to the model using a combination of Statistical Analysis System (SAS) and Python

An Intelligent Differencing Global Positioning System Utilizing Differential Doppler to Determine Position and Speed Accurately

It is not where in the world you are that matters. It is where you are with respect to a reference point whether on land or at sea. That is the basis behind Differencing GPS. Utilizing the carrier wave and Gold Code (GC) signal transmitted by GPS satellites, this project uses two GPS receivers and a system integration manager utilizing neural networks and expert systems to determine a user position and speed relative to a fixed point on earth. Two methods of determining the user position are employed: classic triangulation and measuring the difference in the Doppler shift of the carrier wave between the user and the reference receiver. The idea is for the user to know where they are in relationship to a designated fixed point and navigate with respect to that fixed point. The user could range from a farmer or an aircraft out at sea attempting to land on the deck of a carrier

Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service, and Google Scholar: Comparing Search Performance Using User Queries

When the NCSU Libraries initially subscribed to the Summon Discovery Service in 2009, there were few other competitors on the market and none offered an API interface that could be used to populate the “Articles” portion of our QuickSearch application (http://search.lib.ncsu.edu/). Since then, EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) has emerged as a viable competitor. Using a random sample of actual user searches and bootstrap randomization tests (also referred to as permutation tests), the NCSU Libraries’s Web‐Scale Discovery Product Team conducted a study to compare the search performance of Summon, EDS, and Google Scholar

Land Application of Manure: Minnesota Livestock Producers\u27 Practices and Educational Needs

A combination of farmer focus groups and a pre-discussion survey was employed to determine adoption of recommended manure management practices and preferred Extension education methods. Eight focus groups followed a 2-year education program that addressed revised Minnesota feedlot rules and manure application practices. Constraints for practice adoption included uniformity of nutrient application with solid manure, access to spreader calibration scales and record keeping forms, and adequate spreading area away from water bodies. Preferred education topics included manure application related to phosphorus, environmentally sensitive areas, and equipment. Publication was the most preferred information delivery method

Accidental Collection Assessment: The NCSU Libraries Collection Move

In January 2013, the NCSU Libraries will open a brand new library, the James B. Hunt Jr. Library. Approximately 1.4 million volumes will be transferred to the new library from existing campus locations for opening day, with the majority of those collections being housed in an automated retrieval system (bookBot) and not in open stacks. A collections move of this size requires strategic planning reinforced and guided by a lot of data, assessment, and clean-up of records, items, and processes. This system-wide effort has given us unique and unprecedented opportunities to assess our collections, their scope, access, composition, and trends in growth and use

The Chinese Exclusion Laws: A Selective Annotated Bibliography of Federal Public Documents

This annotated bibliography contains selected United States Federal public documents relating to the Chinese Exclusion laws. These laws which prohibited the immigration of Chinese into the United States were in force from 1882 until 1943. The initial exclusion law was the first immigration legislation to restrict a group based solely on race and significantly contributed to the racially based immigration policy of the United States in the twentieth century. Composed primarily of legislation, treaties, committee reports and documents from the House and Senate, this bibliography is intended to aid the research of this important period of United States immigration policy

Optoelectronic Design and Prototyping of Spectrum-Splitting Photovoltaics

Global energy production is dominated by the combustion of fossil fuels but in order to avoid the projected consequences of anthropogenic climate change it is necessary that humankind reduce the carbon intensity of its energy supply. Fortunately the sun supplies a ubiquitous flow of energy of with excellent thermodynamic quality to earth. Massive investment and manufacturing scale has driven the costs of photovoltaic systems to levels competitive with fossil fuel generation, and yet commercial photovoltaic systems convert power from the sun into electricity with less than 20% efficiency. In this thesis we consider the thermodynamic and practical limits to the power conversion efficiency of photovoltaic systems and seek to design systems that address the greatest sources of loss, namely the lack of sub-bandgap absorption and the thermalization of excited carriers. We present several designs of spectrum-splitting systems that utilize optical structures to allocate incident broadband solar radiation into narrower spectral bands which can be converted by multiple distinct photovoltaic cells at greater efficiency. Furthermore, we report on the design and fabrication of thin film III-V single-junction cells at bandgaps spanning the solar spectrum for incorporation within spectrum-splitting systems. These devices were fabricated by utilizing epitaxial lift-off processes from both GaAs and InP wafers as proof of scalability. We additionally report on the fabrication and characterization of series of a spectrum-splitting prototypes. This design featured seven distinct spectral bands with single-junction photovoltaic cells designed to convert them with highest possible efficiency, and the ultimate prototype exhibited an 84.5% spectrum splitting efficiency and 30.2% power conversion efficiency under a standard AM1.5D solar spectrum. We also report a technical pathway to raise the prototype efficiency to a record breaking 45.2%. Finally, we present an optical design of a spectrum-splitting module that is informed by a technoeconomic analysis which drastically reduces the complexity and cost relative to the fabricated prototype.</p

Data-informed Open Education Advocacy: A New Approach to Saving Students Money and Backaches

The North Carolina State University Libraries has long recognized the financial burden textbook costs place on students. By crosswalking information on use of our textbook collection with textbook cost and course enrollment data, we have begun to map the environment for textbook use at the university and identified opportunities for faculty outreach in promoting alternatives to traditional textbooks, including our Alt-Textbook program. This article describes our programs, our investigation of textbook use patterns, and how we are using these data to inform our practice