IMPACTS OF INCREASED CLIMATE VARIABILITY ON THE PROFITABILITY OF MIDWEST AGRICULTURE

Approximate profit functions are estimated using time-series, cross-sectional, county level data for 12 midwest states. Measures of climate variability are included in the profit functions. Simulated impacts of climate changes on profits are derived. Results show that inclusion of measures of climate variation are important for measuring the impact of changes in mean temperature and precipitation levels. Failure to account for the impact of differences in variability leads to an overestimate of damages. If global warming increases diurnal variation, such increases would have negative impacts on the profitability of midwest agriculture.climate change, climate variability, Midwest, profit function, Farm Management,

Review of \u3ci\u3ePrairie Silence: A Memoir\u3c/i\u3e By Melanie Hoffert.

Melanie Hoffert’s memoir on growing up gay in rural North Dakota is refreshingly devoid of the clichéd finger-wagging that marks much discourse on the subject. The denizens of Dakota are not depicted as abject bigots or people in need of diversity training. Hoffert’s reluctance to “come out” to family, friends, and former neighbors of her small town is something she ultimately pins on herself, or on something she calls “prairie silence.” At times this phenomenon seems salutary, part of the “natural” relation of people to profoundly open spaces; at times “prairie silence” seems to be an affliction depriving people of entry into their “deepest feelings.” Anyone who has lived here for any length of time will recognize this emotional remoteness. Anyone who has been gay here has had to make some kind of peace with it. Or leave

Parenting agendas:an empirical study of intensive mothering and infant cognitive development

Intensive parenting debates reflect the critical importance of a child’s early years, and parents’ roles in determining later developmental outcomes. Mothers are usually assigned primary responsibility for facilitating their infants’ cognitive development through adequate and appropriate sensory stimulation. Drawing on Foucault’s technologies of the self we explore how new mothers shape their mothering practices in order to provide appropriately stimulating interactions. Using findings from 64 interviews (31 women were interviewed twice, 2 women were interviewed only once) we identify three main positions whereby mothers function in relation to their infants’ development; mother as committed facilitator, creative provider and careful/caring monitor. We consider the perceived normative nature of these positions and the impact they can have on middle-class women’s subjectivities as new mothers. Our study of parental agendas and infant cognitive development suggests that a continued focus on the mother’s role within early infant development reflects and upholds ideologies of child-centred, intensive mothering, which risks precluding ‘alternative’ maternal subjectivities and promotes conservative feminine identities

The application of Schneider's critical discourse analysis framework for a study of spirituality in nursing

Using a critical discourse analysis approach in analyzing data is useful in exploring meanings and the wider social, political, and historical context of the meanings. However, analyzing data using a critical discourse analysis approach can be difficult and complex. Hence there is a need for well-defined explicit approaches for discourse analysts to follow. The aim of this paper was to explore a clearly explained framework as a method for data analysis in a study investigating spirituality in nursing. Schneider’s method provided the researcher with such a clearly structured framework underpinned by critical discourse analysis that was used in the analysis of a series of interviews conducted with Australian registered nurses involved in the development of practice standards and those applying them in clinical practice. Schneider’s work steps provided a means of applying Fairclough’s and Chilton’s approaches to critical discourse analysis in a systematic and efficient manner to the analysis of the interview texts. The application of this method enabled the generation of findings that revealed the participants’ discursive constructions of spirituality

Detecting Hallucination and Coverage Errors in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Controversial Topics

We explore a strategy to handle controversial topics in LLM-based chatbots based on Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View (NPOV) principle: acknowledge the absence of a single true answer and surface multiple perspectives. We frame this as retrieval augmented generation, where perspectives are retrieved from a knowledge base and the LLM is tasked with generating a fluent and faithful response from the given perspectives. As a starting point, we use a deterministic retrieval system and then focus on common LLM failure modes that arise during this approach to text generation, namely hallucination and coverage errors. We propose and evaluate three methods to detect such errors based on (1) word-overlap, (2) salience, and (3) LLM-based classifiers. Our results demonstrate that LLM-based classifiers, even when trained only on synthetic errors, achieve high error detection performance, with ROC AUC scores of 95.3% for hallucination and 90.5% for coverage error detection on unambiguous error cases. We show that when no training data is available, our other methods still yield good results on hallucination (84.0%) and coverage error (85.2%) detection.Comment: Accepted at LREC-COLING 202

Inhibition of Prostaglandin E2 Production by Anti-inflammatory Hypericum perforatum Extracts and Constituents in RAW264.7 Mouse Macrophage Cells

Hypericum perforatum (Hp) is commonly known for its antiviral, antidepressant, and cytotoxic properties, but traditionally Hp was also used to treat inflammation. In this study, the anti-inflammatory activity and cytotoxicity of different Hp extractions and accessions and constituents present within Hp extracts were characterized. In contrast to the antiviral activity of Hp, the anti-inflammatory activity observed with all Hp extracts was light-independent. When pure constituents were tested, the flavonoids, amentoflavone, hyperforin, and light-activated pseudohypericin, displayed anti-inflammatory activity, albeit at concentrations generally higher than the amount present in the Hp extracts. Constituents that were present in the Hp extracts at concentrations that inhibited the production of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) were pseudohypericin and hyperforin, suggesting that they are the primary anti-inflammatory constituents along with the flavonoids, and perhaps the interactions of these constituents and other unidentified compounds are important for the anti-inflammatory activity of the Hp extracts