Farm Enterprise Analysis: Has It Lost Its Usefulness?

Farm enterprise analysis is a term that has traditionally been used to describe the process of determining costs associated with farm business enterprises and enterprise profitability. A key challenge to those who would know their costs has been the lack of guidance on cost accounting principles and the application of those principles to agriculture. However, that recently changed with the publication of the Farm Financial Standards Council’s Management Accounting Principles for Agricultural Producers, which has led to questions about the usefulness of enterprise analysis. The differences between the two approaches to determining costs for farm business enterprises are discussed as they relate to the usefulness of the output to managers for decision making.Productivity Analysis,

Climate Change Adaptation in Mediterranean Cities: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Given the highly developed nature of Mediterranean regions and their importance in global trade and migration, it is crucial to develop comprehensive solutions for climate change. The widespread societal impacts of climate change add urgency towards transdisciplinary and transnational solutions for climate change adaptation. We represent the Mediterranean Climate Change Consortium (MC-4), an international network of scholars, policy makers, and practitioners working towards climate change adaptation in cities with Mediterranean climates. Our proposition is that areas with similar, Mediterranean, climates will have more climate adaptation lessons to share with each other than areas with distinctly different climates. As a step towards this, we present this special issue, which is a collection of articles and practitioner notes focused on climate change adaptation in Mediterranean climate cities. While this issue has a special focus on southern California, we hope these articles serve as a springboard for the discussion of adaptation lessons from other Mediterranean areas. We look forward to highlighting these regions in subsequent issues. We would like to invite other Mediterranean climate change adaptation scholars and professionals to join us in sharing their research and case studies to be collected in this volume

Cosmogenic-neutron activation of TeO2 and implications for neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments

Flux-averaged cross sections for cosmogenic-neutron activation of natural tellurium were measured using a neutron beam containing neutrons of kinetic energies up to $\sim$800 MeV, and having an energy spectrum similar to that of cosmic-ray neutrons at sea-level. Analysis of the radioisotopes produced reveals that 110mAg will be a dominant contributor to the cosmogenic-activation background in experiments searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay of 130Te, such as CUORE and SNO+. An estimate of the cosmogenic-activation background in the CUORE experiment has been obtained using the results of this measurement and cross-section measurements of proton activation of tellurium. Additionally, the measured cross sections in this work are also compared with results from semi-empirical cross-section calculations.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

A Comparison of Spanish Second Language Acquisition in Two Different Learning Contexts: Study Abroad and the Domestic Classroom

In this paper, we report the results of a study that compared differences in the linguistic gains made by native English-speaking students from the United States who were studying Spanish in one of two different contexts of learning. One was a regular university classroom situation in Colorado; the other was a study abroad program in Alicante, Spain. We examined the gains students made on a number of linguistic dimensions: oral proficiency, oral fluency, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and communication strategies. In addition, we investigated the relationships between these variables and a variety of background factors, including aspects of language learning readiness. As far as we know, this is the first study to examine such a comprehensive array of variables associated with linguistic performance as a function of context of learning. Each of the individual studies that contributed to the full report of this project can be found in a special issue of the journal Studies in Second Language Acquisition edited by Collentine and Freed (2004). When those studies are looked at as a whole, they lead to general interpretations that were not immediately apparent when considering each of the reports separately. In this paper, we review these results, discuss the larger picture that emerges, and speculate on future questions about the effects of the study abroad experience on second language acquisition (see also Freed, Segalowitz & Dewey, 2004, for a related study)

Comparing Credibility: A Website versus Publicity

Websites and publicity in mass media are two commonly used marketing elements. However, it is unclear whether exposure to a website or publicity is most effective at influencing behavior. This research compares the effectiveness of a magazine publicity article and a tourism destination website on the choice of a spring break destination. Based on this analysis, a website is no more credible than a publicity article; nor does an Internet site create a more favorable attitude or greater purchase intent than does magazine-based publicity. Magazine articles emerged as equally effective as websites for most variables. This study shows that traditional magazine articles can still influence Millennials. Even with a study population of college students who use web resources more than most other populations, the web was not superior. This study reveals that both publicity and a website are important parts of the tourism marketing mix and suggests specific applications

Negotiating risk and responsibility through law, policy and planning

The 2011 National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (COAG 2011) sets the context for natural disaster management as a 'shared responsibility' of all sectors of government and society, as part of building a more comprehensive approach to emergency management. However, it remains difficult to change relationships and practices to share responsibility, either between emergency management agencies and other government sectors, or between governments and at-risk communities. This paper reports on the research of three independent but complementary projects established through the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre to identify the legal, policy and planning structures and processes that could enhance integration of emergency management imperatives across public policy sectors, agencies and portfolios. This article distils and summarises some key conclusions regarding a central, yet seriously under-acknowledged facet, of developing public policy for natural hazard risk in Australia: the political and social negotiation of risk and responsibility. This is an overview paper and many of the issues raised require further exploration

GANeRF: Leveraging Discriminators to Optimize Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown impressive novel view synthesis results; nonetheless, even thorough recordings yield imperfections in reconstructions, for instance due to poorly observed areas or minor lighting changes. Our goal is to mitigate these imperfections from various sources with a joint solution: we take advantage of the ability of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to produce realistic images and use them to enhance realism in 3D scene reconstruction with NeRFs. To this end, we learn the patch distribution of a scene using an adversarial discriminator, which provides feedback to the radiance field reconstruction, thus improving realism in a 3D-consistent fashion. Thereby, rendering artifacts are repaired directly in the underlying 3D representation by imposing multi-view path rendering constraints. In addition, we condition a generator with multi-resolution NeRF renderings which is adversarially trained to further improve rendering quality. We demonstrate that our approach significantly improves rendering quality, e.g., nearly halving LPIPS scores compared to Nerfacto while at the same time improving PSNR by 1.4dB on the advanced indoor scenes of Tanks and Temples.Comment: Video: https://youtu.be/EUWW8nUxpl