Consumer Purchases of Biotech Sweet Corn: Results from a Market Experiment

In the increasingly consumer-driven food system, consumer preferences toward agricultural biotechnology have the potential to influence decisions about development and adoption of biotech crop varieties. Current knowledge about consumer attitudes toward biotech foods is largely based on a number of consumer surveys and a growing body of experimental auctions. This paper reports results of a market experiment designed to isolate the effect of the use of biotechnology on consumer choices between two otherwise identical products. Two related varieties of fresh-market sweet corn were grown, labeled, and sold side-by-side in nine participating grocery stores in the Philadelphia area. Sales data indicate a market share of biotech corn of about 45 percent, with store-specific shares varying between 10 and 80 percent. Over 700 surveys were collected in stores. Surprisingly, only 65 percent of respondents noticed that there were two types of corn for sale despite the labeling and merchandising, and 87 percent of the sample spent one minute or less choosing their corn. About half of the respondents had heard of biotechnology before, and 16 percent volunteered the biotechnology trait as an influence on their purchase decision. Approximately 40 percent of the sample purchased some of the biotech variety, with several respondents purchasing some of each.Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Reducing Crop Production Cost

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INCOME, WEALTH, AND THE ECONOMIC WELL-BEING OF FARM HOUSEHOLDS

Agricultural policy is rooted in the 1930s notion that providing transfers of money to the farm sector translates into increased economic well-being of farm families. This report shows that changes in income for the farm sector or for any particular group of farm businesses do not necessarily reflect changes confronting farm households. Farm households draw income from various sources, including off-farm work, other businesses operated, and increasingly nonfarm investments. Likewise, focus on a single indicator of well-being, like income, overlooks other indicators such as the wealth held by the household and the level of consumption expenditures for health care, food, housing, and other items. Using an expanded definition of economic well-being, we show that farm households as a whole are relatively better off than the average U.S. household, but that about 6 percent remain economically disadvantaged relative to the rest of the population.Consumption, farm households, income, wealth, well-being, off-farm employment, Consumer/Household Economics,

Bogged Down Trying to Define Federal Wetlands

This article examines these cases as well as the history, policies, and rationales behind identifying and conserving wetlands. It proposes a unique analytical method for valuation of wetlands. Under the proposed analysis, government agencies and landowners would be required to prepare economic impact statements containing cost/benefit analyses measuring the effects of wetlands delineations upon land values. These analyses would provide the basis for determining the value of preserving wetlands ecosystems as well as the basis for determining fair compensation payable to landowners in the event they suffer land use or income loss as a result of wetlands delineations

Bc spectroscopy in a quantum-chromodynamic potential model

We have investigated $B_c$ spectroscopy with the use of a quantum-chromodynamic potential model which was recently used by us for the light-heavy quarkonia. We give our predictions for the energy levels and the $E$1 transition widths. We also find, rather surprisingly, that although $B_c$ is not a light-heavy system, the heavy quark effective theory with the inclusion of the $m_b^{-1}$ and $m_b^{-1}\ln m_b$ corrections is as successful for $B_c$ as it is for $B$ and $B_s$.Comment: 10 page ReVTeX pape

Discovering the True Chrysoperla carnea (Insecta: Neuroptera: Chrysopidae) Using Song Analysis, Morphology, and Ecology

What was once considered a single Holarctic species of green lacewing, Chrysoperla carnea (Stephens), has recently been shown to be a complex of many cryptic, sibling species, the carnea species group, whose members are reproductively isolated by their substrate-borne vibrational songs. Because species in the complex are diagnosed by their song phenotypes and not by morphology, the current systematic status of the type species has become a problem. Here, we attempt to determine which song species corresponds to Stephens' 1835 concept of C. carnea, originally based on a small series of specimens collected in or near London and currently housed in The Natural History Museum. With six European members of the complex from which to choose, we narrow the field to just three that have been collected in England: C. lucasina (Lacroix), Cc2 ‘slow-motorboat', and Cc4 ‘motorboat'. Ecophysiology eliminates C. lucasina, because that species remains green during adult winter diapause, while Cc2 and Cc4 share with Stephens' type a change to brownish or reddish color in winter. We then describe the songs, ecology, adult morphology, and larval morphology of Cc2 and Cc4, making statistical comparisons between the two species. Results strongly reinforce the conclusion that Cc2 and Cc4 deserve separate species status. In particular, adult morphology displays several subtle but useful differences between the species, including the shape of the basal dilation of the metatarsal claw and the genital ‘lip' and ‘chin' of the male abdomen, color and coarseness of the sternal setae at the tip of the abdomen and on the genital lip, and pigment distribution on the stipes of the maxilla. Furthermore, behavioral choice experiments involving playback of conspecific versus heterospecific songs to individuals of Cc2 and Cc4 demonstrate strong reproductive isolation between the two species. Comparison of the adult morphology of song-determined specimens to that of preserved specimens in the original type series and in other collections in The Natural History Museum, London, indicate that the ‘true' Chrysoperla carnea (Stephens) is Cc4. Cc2 cannot be confidently associated with any previously described species and is therefore assigned a new name, Chrysoperla pallida sp. nov., and formally describe

Cosmic No Hair for Braneworlds with a Bulk Dilaton Field

Braneworld cosmology supported by a bulk scalar field with an exponential potential is developed. A general class of separable backgrounds for both single and two-brane systems is derived, where the bulk metric components are given by products of world-volume and bulk coordinates and the world-volumes represent any anisotropic and inhomogeneous solution to an effective four-dimensional Brans-Dicke theory of gravity. We deduce a cosmic no hair theorem for all ever expanding, spatially homogeneous Bianchi world-volumes and find that the spatially flat and isotropic inflationary scaling solution represents a late-time attractor when the bulk potential is sufficiently flat. The dependence of this result on the separable nature of the bulk metric is investigated by applying the techniques of Hamilton-Jacobi theory to five-dimensional Einstein gravity. We employ the spatial gradient expansion method to determine the asymptotic form of the bulk metric up to third-order in spatial gradients. It is found that the condition for the separable form of the metric to represent the attractor of the system is precisely the same as that for the four-dimensional world-volume to isotropize. We also derive the fourth-order contribution to the Hamilton-Jacobi generating functional. Finally, we conclude by placing our results within the context of the holographic approach to braneworld cosmology.Comment: 13 pages, uses RevTeX

Statistically Motivated Second Order Pooling

Second-order pooling, a.k.a.~bilinear pooling, has proven effective for deep learning based visual recognition. However, the resulting second-order networks yield a final representation that is orders of magnitude larger than that of standard, first-order ones, making them memory-intensive and cumbersome to deploy. Here, we introduce a general, parametric compression strategy that can produce more compact representations than existing compression techniques, yet outperform both compressed and uncompressed second-order models. Our approach is motivated by a statistical analysis of the network's activations, relying on operations that lead to a Gaussian-distributed final representation, as inherently used by first-order deep networks. As evidenced by our experiments, this lets us outperform the state-of-the-art first-order and second-order models on several benchmark recognition datasets.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 2018. Camera ready version. 14 page, 5 figures, 3 table

Backlund Transformations, D-Branes, and Fluxes in Minimal Type 0 Strings

We study the Type 0A string theory in the (2,4k) superconformal minimal model backgrounds, focusing on the fully non-perturbative string equations which define the partition function of the model. The equations admit a parameter, Gamma, which in the spacetime interpretation controls the number of background D-branes, or R-R flux units, depending upon which weak coupling regime is taken. We study the properties of the string equations (often focusing on the (2,4) model in particular) and their physical solutions. The solutions are the potential for an associated Schrodinger problem whose wavefunction is that of an extended D-brane probe. We perform a numerical study of the spectrum of this system for varying Gamma and establish that when Gamma is a positive integer the equations' solutions have special properties consistent with the spacetime interpretation. We also show that a natural solution-generating transformation (that changes Gamma by an integer) is the Backlund transformation of the KdV hierarchy specialized to (scale invariant) solitons at zero velocity. Our results suggest that the localized D-branes of the minimal string theories are directly related to the solitons of the KdV hierarchy. Further, we observe an interesting transition when Gamma=-1.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figure