ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: THE LEGISLATIVE AND REGULATORY AGENDA

Environmental Economics and Policy,

Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Temporal CreditAssignment Through Reminding

Learning long-term dependencies in extended temporal sequences requires credit assignment to events far back in the past. The most common method for training recurrent neural networks, back-propagation through time (BPTT), requires credit information to be propagated backwards through every single step of the forward computation, potentially over thousands or millions of time steps. This becomes computationally expensive or even infeasible when used with long sequences. Importantly, biological brains are unlikely to perform such detailed reverse replay over very long sequences of internal states (consider days, months, or years.) However, humans are often reminded of past memories or mental states which are associated with the current mental state. We consider the hypothesis that such memory associations between past and present could be used for credit assignment through arbitrarily long sequences, propagating the credit assigned to the current state to the associated past state. Based on this principle, we study a novel algorithm which only back-propagates through a few of these temporal skip connections, realized by a learned attention mechanism that associates current states with relevant past states. We demonstrate in experiments that our method matches or outperforms regular BPTT and truncated BPTT in tasks involving particularly long-term dependencies, but without requiring the biologically implausible backward replay through the whole history of states. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed method transfers to longer sequences significantly better than LSTMs trained with BPTT and LSTMs trained with full self-attention.Comment: To appear as a Spotlight presentation at NIPS 201

Cash, Crops, Chemicals, and Cosmetics: A Mid-Green Eco-Labeling Approach

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) uses grade standards to uniformly characterize the quality and condition of agricultural commodities. The standards are promulgated by the USDA\u27s Agricultural Marketing Services (AMS) division in consultation with farming industry groups. Emphasizing produce attributes such as surface defects, shape, cleanliness, color, maturity, and decay, grade standards improve the marketability of agricultural commodities by establishing a common industry language for use in contracts. Use of such a language enables wholesale buyers to know the quality of commodities without first having to inspect them, thus facilitating trade by lowering transaction costs

Tabou

Program for the fifth annual RISD Cabaret held in the Waterman Building. Design and layout by Nonie Close.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/liberalarts_cabaret_programs/1004/thumbnail.jp

Planting the Legal Seed: The Benefit of Agricultural Law Education for Extension Professionals

Agriculture is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the United States. Government oversight, increased litigation, legal and policy issues that demand careful analysis, and a multitude of legal complexities have created a need for Extension professionals to better understand this complicated regulatory environment. To address this need, the University of Florida has implemented two curriculum adjustments in the last decade. Past studies discussing legal education and Extension have been included along with potential recommendations for the Cooperative Extension Service

Environmental Considerations for Agricultural Intermediation: Potential Impacts of Cercla and Sara

During the 1970s and 1980s the environmental agenda moved to prominent position among legal considerations in agriculture. One element of this agenda involves farmer and lender liability for cleanup cost under CERCLA as amended by SARA. This study examines the potential liability for lenders under this legislation. Next, the study investigates some potential actions and consequences for intermediaries from a theoretical finance perspective. Specifically, the paper addresses changes in credit risk resulting from the emerging agenda. In addition, the adverse selection problem in credit is examined for potential insights into the credit decision. Finally, the study concludes with practical advise for financial intermediaries in agriculture

Impact of the Regulatory Environment Facing Florida Dairy Farrmers

Government regulations have a significant impact on Florida dairy farmers. According to a sample of farmers, waste disposal activities on dairy operations are most negatively impacted by government regulations. Most of those farmers viewed milk and feed inspections as beneficial to their businesses. The average dairy farmer spent 22 percent of the work day complying with governmental regulations. Increased flexibility and more common sense in rule implementation were the main suggestions made by farmers to improve the current regulatory system