THE TEXAS RICE INDUSTRY COALITION FOR THE ENVIRONMENT (R.I.C.E.): MAIN POINTS FROM SIX FOCUS GROUPS

The Texas Rice Industry Coalition for the Environment (R.I.C.E.) was formed in February, 1995. Their stated mission is to build a coalition of interests to foster and strengthen relationships between the rice industry and the natural resources of our rice-producing area in Texas. In June, 1995, a series of six focus groups was conducted. These round table discussions involved two groups of producers (from the East Side and West Side of Houston), two groups of environmentalists in the Houston area, and two groups of non-farming Houstonians (adults and children). These focus groups were structured to elicit opinions from various viewpoints concerning the opportunities, challenges, and priorities of Texas R.I.C.E. The goal of the two producers focus groups conducted on the East Side and the West Side of Houston was to determine whether Texas R.I.C.E.'s activities were widely known and to ascertain producers' viewpoints on the coalition's priorities. Producers were agreed on their key concerns regarding compliance with environmental policy - they face a cost-price squeeze and therefore one-size-fits-all regulations are particularly burdensome. Water quality and quantity were most often mentioned as key factors in the continued viability of the rice industry in Texas. Producers recognize the natural synergy between rice production and waterfowl habitat enhancement, yet they are concerned because waterfowl habitat places increased demands on scarce water. Rice producers are concerned about the public being largely ignorant and uninterested in the environmental benefits of rice production, and they endorsed two-way education between rice producers and environmentalists. No clear consensus emerged in the focus group discussions about the role for Texas R.I.C.E. in lobbying. Some rice producers see education and lobbying as conflicting activities and would prefer for Texas R.I.C.E. to focus on education. Others were positive about collaborative opportunities between rice producers' lobbyists and environmental interest groups' lobbyists. The two environmental focus groups were a mix of bird-watchers, hunters, hikers and conservationists. These environmentalists had a good idea of where rice is grown in Texas and knew that rice production is declining in the state. Their major concerns about the environmental effects from rice production were water usage and water quality, agri-chemical runoff, food and habitat for migratory birds, and trade-offs concerning wetlands. In sum, they appreciated that rice production makes a positive contribution to waterfowl habitat. They were concerned that lost Texas rice acreage will be replaced with urban land uses, thus reducing wildlife habitat benefits. They viewed rice production as being environmentally friendly compared with other types of agricultural production, such as cotton farming. They were favorably impressed that rice producers were taking the initiative to form a coalition. They were anxious to work collaboratively and offered several concrete suggestions about forums and issues for educational campaigns. They suggested that consumptive and non-consumptive users of wildlife habitat (such as hunters and bird-watchers, respectively) should compensate private landowners for allowing access. They acknowledged problems with adversarial attitudes going both ways between environmentalists and rice producers; they brainstormed about how Texas R.I.C.E. could help break down barriers. The general public adult focus group, comprised of non-farming Houstonians, established a general interest and awareness concerning rice production. However, the Houstonians participating in this focus group were uninformed about the waterfowl habitat benefits associated with rice production. They offered positive endorsement of the Texas R.I.C.E. effort and expressed sincere (and specific) interests in educational programming. The general public children focus group included several children from the Clear Lake area south of Houston. These children exhibited a natural inquisitiveness and concern regarding the environment and food safety. They were largely ignorant of commercial agriculture, excepting several recollections of "visits to relatives' farms." They expressed considerable interest in more agricultural-related curriculum being incorporated into their science and/or social studies curricula.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Functional Sequential Treatment Allocation

Consider a setting in which a policy maker assigns subjects to treatments, observing each outcome before the next subject arrives. Initially, it is unknown which treatment is best, but the sequential nature of the problem permits learning about the effectiveness of the treatments. While the multi-armed-bandit literature has shed much light on the situation when the policy maker compares the effectiveness of the treatments through their mean, much less is known about other targets. This is restrictive, because a cautious decision maker may prefer to target a robust location measure such as a quantile or a trimmed mean. Furthermore, socio-economic decision making often requires targeting purpose specific characteristics of the outcome distribution, such as its inherent degree of inequality, welfare or poverty. In the present paper we introduce and study sequential learning algorithms when the distributional characteristic of interest is a general functional of the outcome distribution. Minimax expected regret optimality results are obtained within the subclass of explore-then-commit policies, and for the unrestricted class of all policies

Amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex are inversely coupled during regulation of negative affect and predict the diurnal pattern of cortisol secretion among older adults

Among younger adults, the ability to willfully regulate negative affect, enabling effective responses to stressful experiences, engages regions of prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdala. Because regions of PFC and the amygdala are known to influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, here we test whether PFC and amygdala responses during emotion regulation predict the diurnal pattern of salivary cortisol secretion. We also test whether PFC and amygdala regions are engaged during emotion regulation in older (62- to 64-year-old) rather than younger individuals. We measured brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging as participants regulated (increased or decreased) their affective responses or attended to negative picture stimuli. We also collected saliva samples for 1 week at home for cortisol assay. Consistent with previous work in younger samples, increasing negative affect resulted in ventral lateral, dorsolateral, and dorsomedial regions of PFC and amygdala activation. In contrast to previous work, decreasing negative affect did not produce the predicted robust pattern of higher PFC and lower amygdala activation. Individuals demonstrating the predicted effect (decrease s attend in the amygdala), however, exhibited higher signal in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) for the same contrast. Furthermore, participants displaying higher VMPFC and lower amygdala signal when decreasing compared with the attention control condition evidenced steeper, more normative declines in cortisol over the course of the day. Individual differences yielded the predicted link between brain function while reducing negative affect in the laboratory and diurnal regulation of endocrine activity in the home environment

BMPix and PEAK tools: New methods for automated laminae recognition and counting — Application to glacial varves from Antarctic marine sediment

We present tools for rapid and quantitative detection of sediment lamination. The BMPix tool extracts color and gray-scale curves from images at pixel resolution. The PEAK tool uses the gray-scale curve and performs, for the first time, fully automated counting of laminae based on three methods. The maximum count algorithm counts every bright peak of a couplet of two laminae (annual resolution) in a smoothed curve. The zero-crossing algorithm counts every positive and negative halfway-passage of the curve through a wide moving average, separating the record into bright and dark intervals (seasonal resolution). The same is true for the frequency truncation method, which uses Fourier transformation to decompose the curve into its frequency components before counting positive and negative passages. We applied the new methods successfully to tree rings, to well-dated and already manually counted marine varves from Saanich Inlet, and to marine laminae from the Antarctic continental margin. In combination with AMS14C dating, we found convincing evidence that laminations in Weddell Sea sites represent varves, deposited continuously over several millennia during the last glacial maximum. The new tools offer several advantages over previous methods. The counting procedures are based on a moving average generated from gray-scale curves instead of manual counting. Hence, results are highly objective and rely on reproducible mathematical criteria. Also, the PEAK tool measures the thickness of each year or season. Since all information required is displayed graphically, interactive optimization of the counting algorithms can be achieved quickly and conveniently

Avaliação de caracteres de interesse agronômico em uma coleção de germoplasma de batata com resistência a insetos-praga.

O presente trabalho teve como objetvo avaliar esta coleção de trabalho quanto a incidência de danos no tubérculo causado por Diabrotica sp, a produção total e comercial de tubérculos, e o comprimento e a largura de tubérculos

Individual Differences in Amygdala and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Activity are Associated with Evaluation Speed and Psychological Well-being

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined whether individual differences in amygdala activation in response to negative relative to neutral information are related to differences in the speed with which such information is evaluated, the extent to which such differences are associated with medial prefrontal cortex function, and their relationship with measures of trait anxiety and psychological well-being (PWB). Results indicated that faster judgments of negative relative to neutral information were associated with increased left and right amygdala activation. In the prefrontal cortex, faster judgment time was associated with relative decreased activation in a cluster in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC, BA 24). Furthermore, people who were slower to evaluate negative versus neutral information reported higher PWB. Importantly, higher PWB was strongly associated with increased activation in the ventral ACC for negative relative to neutral information. Individual differences in trait anxiety did not predict variation in judgment time or in amygdala or ventral ACC activity. These findings suggest that people high in PWB effectively recruit the ventral ACC when confronted with potentially aversive stimuli, manifest reduced activity in subcortical regions such as the amygdala, and appraise such information as less salient as reflected in slower evaluative speed

Methodological issues in testing the marginal productivity theory

Previous tests of the marginal productivity theory have been criticized on several grounds reviewed by the authors. One important deficiency has been the small number of factor inputs entered in the production functions. In 1978 Gottschalk suggested a method to estimate production functions with many inputs by assuming that the production process can be split into subprocesses. This reduces the probability of multicollinearity. The authors show that the method depends on an additional assumption. Tinbergen has developed a method for avoiding this assumption. Its application to American cross-section (state) data did not alter the estimated coefficients greatly