312 research outputs found

    Use of Animal Wastes on Cropland

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    In recent months, environmental issues relating to land application of animal and industrial wastes have been widely debated in Kentucky. On several occasions, members of the University of Kentucky Agronomy Department have been asked to provide scientific information and technical interpretation related to these complex and controversial issues. To be certain that the public and policy makers are provided with consistent and scientifically sound information, the Agronomy Department has decided to release consensus statements on some of the major agronomic issues involved. These statements reflect our best scientifically based interpretations of these important subjects. Several of our faculty with long experience and outstanding expertise in soil chemistry, soil microbiology, soil fertility, water quality, forage production systems and animal waste management participated. They were assigned the task of preparing two statements: A discussion of phosphorus reactions in soil, particularly as related to the phosphorus content of animal manures. Accumulation of nutrients in soil as this affects the allowable frequency of application of animal wastes. The two statements, printed as follows, represent a collective analysis and interpretation of these issues by numerous expert faculty in the Agronomy Department

    More treatment but no less depression:The treatment-prevalence paradox

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    Treatments for depression have improved, and their availability has markedly increased since the 1980s. Mysteriously the general population prevalence of depression has not decreased. This "treatment-prevalence paradox" (TPP) raises fundamental questions about the diagnosis and treatment of depression. We propose and evaluate seven explanations for the TPP. First, two explanations assume that improved and more widely available treatments have reduced prevalence, but that the reduction has been offset by an increase in: 1) misdiagnosing distress as depression, yielding more "false positive" diagnoses; or 2) an actual increase in depression incidence. Second, the remaining five explanations assume prevalence has not decreased, but suggest that: 3) treatments are less efficacious and 4) less enduring than the literature suggests; 5) trial efficacy doesn't generalize to real-world settings; 6) population-level treatment impact differs for chronic-recurrent versus non-recurrent cases; and 7) treatments have some iatrogenic consequences. Any of these seven explanations could undermine treatment impact on prevalence, thereby helping to explain the TPP. Our analysis reveals that there is little evidence that incidence or prevalence have increased as a result of error or fact (Explanations 1 and 2), and strong evidence that (a) the published literature overestimates short- and long-term treatment efficacy, (b) treatments are considerably less effective as deployed in "real world" settings, and (c) treatment impact differs substantially for chronic-recurrent cases relative to non-recurrent cases. Collectively, these a-c explanations likely account for most of the TPP. Lastly, little research exists on iatrogenic effects of current treatments (Explanation 7), but further exploration is critical

    Dynamics of entanglement for coherent excitonic states in a system of two coupled quantum dots and cavity QED

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    The dynamics of the entanglement for coherent excitonic states in the system of two coupled large semiconductor quantum dots (R/aB1R/a_{B}\gg 1) mediated by a single-mode cavity field is investigated. Maximally entangled coherent excitonic states can be generated by cavity field initially prepared in odd coherent state. The entanglement of the excitonic coherent states between two dots reaches maximum when no photon is detected in the cavity. The effects of the zero-temperature environment on the entanglement of excitonic coherent state are also studied using the concurrence for two subsystems of the excitonsComment: 7 pages, 6 figure

    How academic librarians, IT staff and research administrators perceive and relate to research

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    Academic libraries are changing how they support research. For example, their involvement in Research Data Management (RDM) implies a much deeper relationship with researchers throughout the research lifecycle. Perhaps we are witnessing a shift from support to partnership. The study reported here examined how librarians, IT staff and research administrators see research and their own relation to it. Within an interpretative methodology, twenty semi-structured interviews with librarians, IT staff and research administrators were analysed thematically. Librarians often talked about research via the discourse of research-led teaching. They also conceived of it via notions of collection and to a lesser extent through reference work or copyright expertise. They saw some of their own continuing professional development or service development work as akin to the work of university researchers, but at the other end of a spectrum. Some saw a categorical difference and considered that research was only conducted by people who had a job title of researcher. IT managers tended to see research via infrastructure or specialist expertise. But at least one IT staff member saw himself as both partly a researcher and a bridge between research and support. Research administrators tended to see research through the roles of administrative support and policy influence. In summary, seven broad narratives about research were identified, namely: influencing researchers to align with policy; being a researcher; being a bridge with research; offering expertise; providing infrastructure; supporting a research/teaching nexus; relieving researchers of administrative burdens. As institutions develop research partnerships, e.g. around RDM, training and curricula will need to expand existing conceptions and build deeper empathetic relationships with research

    A Long Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiment Using J-PARC Neutrino Beam and Hyper-Kamiokande

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    Document submitted to 18th J-PARC PAC meeting in May 2014. 50 pages, 41 figuresDocument submitted to 18th J-PARC PAC meeting in May 2014. 50 pages, 41 figuresDocument submitted to 18th J-PARC PAC meeting in May 2014. 50 pages, 41 figuresHyper-Kamiokande will be a next generation underground water Cherenkov detector with a total (fiducial) mass of 0.99 (0.56) million metric tons, approximately 20 (25) times larger than that of Super-Kamiokande. One of the main goals of Hyper-Kamiokande is the study of CPCP asymmetry in the lepton sector using accelerator neutrino and anti-neutrino beams. In this document, the physics potential of a long baseline neutrino experiment using the Hyper-Kamiokande detector and a neutrino beam from the J-PARC proton synchrotron is presented. The analysis has been updated from the previous Letter of Intent [K. Abe et al., arXiv:1109.3262 [hep-ex]], based on the experience gained from the ongoing T2K experiment. With a total exposure of 7.5 MW ×\times 107^7 sec integrated proton beam power (corresponding to 1.56×10221.56\times10^{22} protons on target with a 30 GeV proton beam) to a 2.52.5-degree off-axis neutrino beam produced by the J-PARC proton synchrotron, it is expected that the CPCP phase δCP\delta_{CP} can be determined to better than 19 degrees for all possible values of δCP\delta_{CP}, and CPCP violation can be established with a statistical significance of more than 3σ3\,\sigma (5σ5\,\sigma) for 7676% (5858%) of the δCP\delta_{CP} parameter space

    Consistent Association of Type 2 Diabetes Risk Variants Found in Europeans in Diverse Racial and Ethnic Groups

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    It has been recently hypothesized that many of the signals detected in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to T2D and other diseases, despite being observed to common variants, might in fact result from causal mutations that are rare. One prediction of this hypothesis is that the allelic associations should be population-specific, as the causal mutations arose after the migrations that established different populations around the world. We selected 19 common variants found to be reproducibly associated to T2D risk in European populations and studied them in a large multiethnic case-control study (6,142 cases and 7,403 controls) among men and women from 5 racial/ethnic groups (European Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Japanese Americans, and Native Hawaiians). In analysis pooled across ethnic groups, the allelic associations were in the same direction as the original report for all 19 variants, and 14 of the 19 were significantly associated with risk. In summing the number of risk alleles for each individual, the per-allele associations were highly statistically significant (P<10−4) and similar in all populations (odds ratios 1.09–1.12) except in Japanese Americans the estimated effect per allele was larger than in the other populations (1.20; Phet = 3.8×10−4). We did not observe ethnic differences in the distribution of risk that would explain the increased prevalence of type 2 diabetes in these groups as compared to European Americans. The consistency of allelic associations in diverse racial/ethnic groups is not predicted under the hypothesis of Goldstein regarding “synthetic associations” of rare mutations in T2D
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