PROBABILISTIC COST EFFECTIVENESS IN AGRICULTURAL NONPOINT POLLUTION CONTROL

Conceptual weaknesses in the use of costs of average abatement as a measure of the cost effectiveness of agricultural nonpoint pollution control are examined. A probabilistic alternative is developed. The focus is on methods for evaluating whole-farm pollution control plans rather than individual practices. As a consequence, the analysis is presented in a chance-constrained activity analysis framework because activity procedures are a practical and well developed device for screening farm planes. Reliability of control is shown to be as important as reduction targets in designing farm plans for pollution control. Furthermore, broad-axe prescriptions of technology in the form of Best Management Practices may perform poorly with respect to cost effectiveness.Environmental Economics and Policy,

COST COMPARISONS OF ALTERNATIVE METHODS FOR PROCESSING RECYCLED WASTE NEWSPAPERS INTO FARM-ANIMAL BEDDING

The United States is facing a seemingly overwhelming problem of how to dispose of its solid waste. For disposal solutions to be viable, they must be environmentally sound and economically viable. Processing waste newspapers for farm-animal bedding offers a successful partial solution that meets both criteria. Centralized newspaper chopping is found to cost less than on-farm chopping. Both chopped and unchopped waste newspapers can be economically transported considerable distances. The use of waste newspapers for animal bedding is economically attractive at the farm level and can provide a partial solution to the solid-waste disposal problem.Environmental Economics and Policy, Livestock Production/Industries,

High Elevation Grasslands as a Crucial Resource to Ranchers of Northern New Mexico

High-elevation grasslands of northern New Mexico (NM), located at the southern tip of the Rocky Mountains in the western United States, are a crucial resource for small-scale, family-owned ranches. Due to evolution of land acquisition in northern New Mexico, many of these lands are in public ownership, and ranchers must now rely upon government-managed grazing allotments for pasturing their livestock. Regulations and management decisions governing these lands, along with competition for use (e.g. recreation), can significantly affect the viability and survival of ranching throughout the area (Raish & McSweeney, 2003)

Critical association of ncRNA with introns

It has been widely acknowledged that non-coding RNAs are master-regulators of genomic functions. However, the significance of the presence of ncRNA within introns has not received proper attention. ncRNA within introns are commonly produced through the post-splicing process and are specific signals of gene transcription events, impacting many other genes and modulating their expression. This study, along with the following discussion, details the association of thousands of ncRNAs—snoRNA, miRNA, siRNA, piRNA and long ncRNA—within human introns. We propose that such an association between human introns and ncRNAs has a pronounced synergistic effect with important implications for fine-tuning gene expression patterns across the entire genome

Speech and Prosody Characteristics of Adolescents and Adults With High-Functioning Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Speech and prosody-voice profiles for 15 male speakers with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) and 15 male speakers with Asperger syndrome (AS) were compared to one another and to profiles for 53 typically developing male speakers in the same 10- to 50-years age range. Compared to the typically developing speakers, significantly more participants in both the HFA and AS groups had residual articulation distortion errors, uncodable utterances due to discourse constraints, and utterances coded as inappropriate in the domains of phrasing, stress, and resonance. Speakers with AS were significantly more voluble than speakers with HFA, but otherwise there were few statistically significant differences between the two groups of speakers with pervasive developmental disorders. Discussion focuses on perceptual-motor and social sources of differences in the prosody-voice findings for individuals with Pervasive Developmental Disorders as compared with findings for typical speakers, including comment on the grammatical, pragmatic, and affective aspects of prosody

Exploiting mid-range DNA patterns for sequence classification: binary abstraction Markov models

Messenger RNA sequences possess specific nucleotide patterns distinguishing them from non-coding genomic sequences. In this study, we explore the utilization of modified Markov models to analyze sequences up to 44 bp, far beyond the 8-bp limit of conventional Markov models, for exon/intron discrimination. In order to analyze nucleotide sequences of this length, their information content is first reduced by conversion into shorter binary patterns via the application of numerous abstraction schemes. After the conversion of genomic sequences to binary strings, homogenous Markov models trained on the binary sequences are used to discriminate between exons and introns. We term this approach the Binary Abstraction Markov Model (BAMM). High-quality abstraction schemes for exon/intron discrimination are selected using optimization algorithms on supercomputers. The best MM classifiers are then combined using support vector machines into a single classifier. With this approach, over 95% classification accuracy is achieved without taking reading frame into account. With further development, the BAMM approach can be applied to sequences lacking the genetic code such as ncRNAs and 5′-untranslated regions

Added value of co-morbidity in predicting health-related quality of life in COPD patients

AbstractThe extent to which a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patient is impaired in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is only to a small extent reflected in clinical and demographical measures. As the influence of co-morbidity on HRQoL is less clear, we investigated the added value of 23 common diseases in predicting HRQoL in COPD patients with mild to severe airways obstruction.COPD patients from general practice who appeared to have an forced expiratory volume in 1 sec/inspiratory vital capacity (FEV1/IVC) < predicted −1·64 SD, FEV1<80% predicted, FEV1reversibility <12% and a smoking history, were included (n=163). HRQoL was assessed with the short-form-36 (SF-36) and the presence of co-morbidity was determined by a questionnaire, which asked for 23 common diseases.All domains of the SF-36 were best predicted by the presence of three or more co-morbid diseases. FEV1% predicted, dyspnoea and the presence of one or two diseases were second-best predictors. Co-morbidity explained an additional part of the variance in HRQoL, particularly for emotional functioning (ΔR2=0·11). When individual diseases were investigated, only insomnia appeared to be related to HRQoL.As HRQoL is still only partly explained, co-morbidity and other patient characteristics do not clearly distinguish between COPD patients with severe impairments in HRQoL and COPD patients with minor or no impairments in HRQoL. Therefore, it remains important to ask for problems in daily functioning and well-being, rather than to rely on patient characteristics alone