Finite element methods for space-time reactor analysis

"MIT-39-3-5."Also issued as a Sc. D. thesis by Chang Mu Kang in the Dept. of Nuclear Engineering, 1971Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-150)AT(30-1) 390

RESULTS OF A FARM AND MARKET SURVEY FOR HMONG SPECIALTY CROP FARMERS IN THE MINNEAPOLIS, ST. PAUL METRO AREA

This report is part of a larger project, "Risk Management Education and Farm Management Development Program for Hmong Specialty Crop Farmers in the Minneapolis, St. Paul Metro Area," funded by the Risk Management Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture. The project was designed to assist Hmong farmers in the Twin Cities area in improving their production and management practices so they are able to increase their economic viability and reduce their exposure to risk. As part of the overall project, 62 Hmong farmers and 69 customers at farmers markets were surveyed to determine the local specialty crop production and market conditions. The findings of these 2 surveys are contained in the report. The median size of the 62 farms surveyed farms was 3 acres. Forty-two percent of those farmers responding reported total farm product sales between $3,000 and$8,999. Few farmers indicated they were familiar with crop insurance programs. Sixty-eight percent of the 19 farmers responding (or 21% of the 62 surveyed) said they were familiar with multi-peril crop insurance (MPCI). Only 12% of the 50 farmers responding had bought crop insurance in 2002. The most frequently indicated needs for future education programs were production oriented: weed control, insect control, fertilization, and pesticide safety. All of the 69 customers surveyed regularly bought some kind of vegetables or herbs. Over half of the customers bought potatoes, snap beans, peppers, sweet corn, carrots, cucumbers, basil, and winter squash. Eighty-eight percent of customers indicated they typically spend between $10 and$29 on vegetables and herbs during each visit to a farmers' market.Crop Production/Industries,

Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4

In this work, we carry out a data archaeology to infer books that are known to ChatGPT and GPT-4 using a name cloze membership inference query. We find that OpenAI models have memorized a wide collection of copyrighted materials, and that the degree of memorization is tied to the frequency with which passages of those books appear on the web. The ability of these models to memorize an unknown set of books complicates assessments of measurement validity for cultural analytics by contaminating test data; we show that models perform much better on memorized books than on non-memorized books for downstream tasks. We argue that this supports a case for open models whose training data is known.Comment: EMNLP 2023 camera-ready (16 pages, 4 figures

Accounting Ethics Education: A Comparison with Buddhist Ethics Education Framework

Accounting educators such as Mintz and Mele have argued about the importance of virtues in moral behavior. Mele presented a conceptual model of moral behavior that integrated professional rules of conduct, moral values, and moral virtues. Moral virtues are defined as “permanent attitudes and interior strength for moral behavior.” A major shortcoming of the Mele’s model is that the model does not provide any discussion on the methodologies facilitating the cultivation of virtues. This paper describes the framework and process of Buddhist ethics education and compares the similarities and differences of the Buddhist ethics education framework with the mainstream accounting ethics education framework. Compared with the mainstream ethics education model, the Buddhist ethics education framework appears to be comprehensive and systematic. In addition, to delineate the constituent factors that contribute to moral behavior, it renders several methodological discussions on how to cultivate moral sentiment, practical wisdom, and transitive and self-mastering virtues. Its systematic nature is exhibited by the line-up or formulation of necessary steps leading to the final achievement of moral behavior. Taken as a whole, the framework provides practitioners with practical guidance for what they need to work on sequentially or simultaneously in the moral development process. We sincerely hope that our discussion and comparison of the framework benefit accounting educators who are concerned with instilling long-term values and virtues into the lives of their students

Increased risk of endometriosis in patients with endometritis — a nationwide cohort study involving 84,150 individuals

Objectives: To evaluate the incidence of endometriosis among endometritis patients and its association with confoundingcomorbidities.Material and methods: A population-based, retrospective cohort study of women aged between 20 to 55 years, who werenewly diagnosed with endometritis between 2000 to 2013. A total of 16,830 endometritis patients and 67,230 non-endometritisindividuals were enrolled by accessing data from the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan.The comorbidities accessed were uterine leiomyoma, rheumatoid arthritis, ovarian cancer, infertility and allergic diseases.Results: The mean follow-up period was 9.15 years for the non-endometritis cohort and 9.13 years for the endometritiscohort. There were significantly higher percentages of uterine leiomyoma, rheumatoid arthritis, infertility, ovarian cancerand allergic diseases in the endometritis cohort than in the non-endometritis cohort. Patients with endometritis hada 1.5-fold increased risk of their condition advancing to endometriosis (HR 1.58, 95% CI 1.48–1.68).Conclusions: Our results suggest that patients with endometritis exhibited a positive correlation in developing endometriosis

Gender Differences in Effectiveness of the Complete Health Improvement Program (CHIP) Lifestyle Intervention: An Australasian Study

Issue addressed: Complete Health Improvement Program (CHIP) is a lifestyle modification program that promotes healthy diet, physical activity and stress management techniques. Among US CHIP participants, differences in gender responsiveness to improvements in chronic disease risk factors were demonstrated. This study examined gender differences in outcomes to the CHIP intervention in Australasia. Methods: Changes in body weight, blood pressure (BP), blood lipid profile and fasting plasma glucose (FPG) were assessed in 925 participants (34.3% men, mean age = 56.0 ± 12.5 years; 65.7% women, mean age = 54.4 ± 13.5 years) 30 days after program commencement. Results: Significant reductions (P \u3c 0.001) in all biometrics measured were found for men and women but were greater among men for total (TC) and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL), triglycerides (TG), FPG, body mass index (BMI) and TC/high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) ratio. Participants with highest baseline classifications of BMI, systolic BP, blood lipids and FPG showed greatest reductions in 30 days. Conclusions: CHIP more effectively reduced chronic disease risk factors among men than women. All participants, but particularly men, entering the program with the greatest risk achieved the largest reductions. Possible physiological or behavioural factors include food preferences, making commitments and differential support modes. So what?: Developers of lifestyle intervention programs should consider gender differences in physiological and behavioural factors when planning interventions. In particular, developers should manage expectations of people entering lifestyle interventions to increase awareness that men tend to respond better than women. In addition, this is a call for further research to identify the underlying mechanisms responsible for the disproportionate responsiveness of males

Evidence for substructure in lens galaxies?

We discuss whether one should expect that multiply imaged QSOs can be understood with `simple' lens models which contain a handful of parameters. Whereas for many lens systems such simple mass models yield a remarkably good description of the observed properties, there are some systems which are notoriously difficult to understand quantitatively. We argue that at least in one case (B 1422+231) these difficulties are not due to a `wrong' parametrization of the lens model, but that the discrepancy between observed and model-predicted flux ratios are due to substructure in the lens. Similar to microlensing for optical fluxes, such substructure can distort also the radio flux ratios predicted by `simple' mass models, in particular for highly magnified images, without appreciably changing image positions. Substructure also does not change the time delay significantly and therefore has little effect on the determination of the Hubble constant using time delays. We quantify these statements with several simple scenarios for substructure, and propose a strategy to model lens systems in which substructure is suspected.Comment: plain tex, 13 pages with four figure