BACK TO THE BASICS: WHAT DOES THE MARKET TELL US ABOUT BASIS?

This study explores market forces that affect harvest grain basis for corn, soybeans, and wheat in a grain deficit market. The findings indicate that implied basis (cash forward bid less harvest futures), nearby HHO price, and log of open interest on the harvest futures contract can be used to predict 33 to 99 percent of the variation in harvest basis at selected South Carolina locations.Marketing,

Validation of newly developed tasks for the assessment of generic Critical Online Reasoning (COR) of university students and graduates

In recent decades, the acquisition of information has evolved substantially and fundamentally affects students’ use of information, so that the Internet has become one of the most important sources of information for learning. However, learning with freely accessible online resources also poses challenges, such as vast amounts of partially unstructured, untrustworthy, or biased information. To successfully learn by using the Internet, students therefore require specific skills for selecting, processing, and evaluating the online information, e.g., to distinguish trustworthy from distorted or biased information and for judging its relevance with regard to the topic and task at hand. Despite the central importance of these skills, their assessment in higher education is still an emerging field. In this paper, we present the newly defined theoretical-conceptual framework Critical Online Reasoning (COR). Based on this framework, a corresponding performance assessment, Critical Online Reasoning Assessment (CORA), was newly developed and underwent first steps of validation in accordance with the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. We first provide an overview of the previous validation results and then expand them by including further analyses of the validity aspects “internal test structure” and “relations with other variables”. To investigate the internal test structure, we conducted variance component analyses based on the generalizability theory with a sample of 125 students and investigated the relations with other variables by means of correlation analyses. The results show correlations with external criteria as expected and confirm that the CORA scores reflect the different test performances of the participants and are not significantly biased by modalities of the assessment. With these new analyses, this study substantially contributes to previous research by providing comprehensive evidence for the validity of this new performance assessment that validly assesses the complex multifaceted construct of critical online reasoning among university students and graduates. CORA results provide unique insights into the interplay between features of online information acquisition and processing, learning environments, and the cognitive and metacognitive requirements for critically reasoning from online information in university students and young professionals

Categorization of simulated diagnostic situations and the salience of diagnostic information

Simulated diagnostic situations function as learning environments and research tools to deepen the understanding of diagnostic processes. In this conceptual paper, we present a framework that fulfils two purposes. First, we categorize simulations of diagnostic situations using six descriptive components: physical environment, social embeddedness, diagnostic tasks, activities, information, and decisions. Second, we discriminate the salience of diagnostic information into four facets: access, prominence, simplicity, and clarity. These facets determine the likelihood that participants in a simulation will perceive and process relevant diagnostic information toward correct or accurate diagnostic decisions. We use one simulation to explain these components and facets in more detail. With this systematic conceptualization, we intend to deepen the understanding of how and why simulations work in creating authentic diagnostic situations, measuring diagnostic competencies, and providing learning environments for the facilitation of these competencies in higher education

Academic Librarians Examination of University Students’ and Faculty’s Perceptions of Open Educational Resources

A survey of 2,574 students and 1,157 faculty members across ten institutions of postsecondary education in the state of Utah was conducted by the Utah Academic Libraries Consortium. Survey items were created to understand the influence of textbook costs on student academic behavior and the viability of faculty adopting open educational resources (OER) as a solution to the cost of textbooks and the possible need for librarian support of OER. Two-year and four-year institutions were compared to identify differences that might exist between them. Most students felt that their academic success was negatively impacted by textbook cost, particularly at two-year institutions where students registered for fewer courses because of associated textbook costs. Faculty survey findings showed that adjunct professors were more likely to require a traditionally copyright-restricted textbook. Approximately 90% of participants indicated they would be willing to use suitable OER for their course, and almost half of survey participants expressed a desire for help finding these resources

ZigMa: A DiT-style Zigzag Mamba Diffusion Model

The diffusion model has long been plagued by scalability and quadratic complexity issues, especially within transformer-based structures. In this study, we aim to leverage the long sequence modeling capability of a State-Space Model called Mamba to extend its applicability to visual data generation. Firstly, we identify a critical oversight in most current Mamba-based vision methods, namely the lack of consideration for spatial continuity in the scan scheme of Mamba. Secondly, building upon this insight, we introduce a simple, plug-and-play, zero-parameter method named Zigzag Mamba, which outperforms Mamba-based baselines and demonstrates improved speed and memory utilization compared to transformer-based baselines. Lastly, we integrate Zigzag Mamba with the Stochastic Interpolant framework to investigate the scalability of the model on large-resolution visual datasets, such as FacesHQ $1024\times 1024$ and UCF101, MultiModal-CelebA-HQ, and MS COCO $256\times 256$ . Code will be released at https://taohu.me/zigma/Comment: Project Page: https://taohu.me/zigma

Efecto del riego y de la fertilización sobre la incidencia del rajado

En un huerto de San Raimundo (Cundinamarca)fueron evaluadas tres láminas de riego: L1 (sinriego), L2 (80% de la evaporación, E.V.), L3 (100% E.V.)y L4 (120% E.V.) y cinco tratamientos de fertilización:T1 (testigo sin fertilización), T2 (fertilización técnica),T3 (fertilización técnica con bajo nivel de potasio), T4(fertilización técnica sin boro), T5 (fertilización técnicacon calcio adicional) y T6 (fertilización tradicional delagricultor), con el fin de determinar su influencia sobreel porcentaje de rajado que aqueja los frutos de uchuva( Physalis peruviana L.), en los estados de maduración delfruto (3, 4, 5 y 6 según la norma NTC 4580 del ICONTEC).Después de cinco meses de estudio (julio a noviembre de2002), los resultados indicaron que en los tres primerosmeses de evaluación, tanto el riego como la interacciónriego por fertilización no tuvieron efecto significativo sobreel porcentaje de rajado, pero sí lo obtuvo la fertilización,por cuanto la carencia de boro, el bajo nivel depotasio y la fertilización del agricultor, incrementaron elfenómeno significativamente. En el cuarto mes del estudio,el riego, la fertilización y la interacción riego porfertilización, causaron efectos significativos, así: (a) el menorporcentaje de rajado se presentó en el tratamientosin riego en comparación con los tratamientos con riego;(b) la fertilización del agricultor y la fertilización técnicasin boro presentaron el mayor porcentaje de rajado, conrespecto a los tratamientos sin fertilización, fertilizacióntécnica y fertilización técnica con calcio adicional; (c) lalámina de riego afectó los porcentajes de rajado en lostratamientos de agricultor y en el tratamiento técnicosin boro, incrementando de esta manera su respuesta.En el quinto mes de estudio los tratamientos de fertilizacióncorrespondientes al agricultor, técnico sin boro ytécnico con baja dosis de potasio, mostraron los mayores tempeporcentajesde rajado, comparados con los tratamientosde fertilización técnica, técnica con calcio adicional y sinfertilización. En este mismo muestreo, cuando aumentóla lámina de riego aplicada, tanto en la fertilización técnicacomo en la técnica con baja dosis de potasio, tambiénse incrementó el porcentaje de rajado en los frutosde uchuva. El porcentaje de rajado promedio para todoslos tratamientos se presentó en relación directa con elestado de maduración del fruto y el mayor porcentaje sepresentó en los estados 5 y 6 de maduración, con 39, 25y 35,81%, respectivamente, mientras que en los estados3 y 4 fue de 4,79 y 20,17%, respectivamente

Wavelet-Based Linear-Response Time-Dependent Density-Functional Theory

Linear-response time-dependent (TD) density-functional theory (DFT) has been implemented in the pseudopotential wavelet-based electronic structure program BigDFT and results are compared against those obtained with the all-electron Gaussian-type orbital program deMon2k for the calculation of electronic absorption spectra of N2 using the TD local density approximation (LDA). The two programs give comparable excitation energies and absorption spectra once suitably extensive basis sets are used. Convergence of LDA density orbitals and orbital energies to the basis-set limit is significantly faster for BigDFT than for deMon2k. However the number of virtual orbitals used in TD-DFT calculations is a parameter in BigDFT, while all virtual orbitals are included in TD-DFT calculations in deMon2k. As a reality check, we report the x-ray crystal structure and the measured and calculated absorption spectrum (excitation energies and oscillator strengths) of the small organic molecule N-cyclohexyl-2-(4-methoxyphenyl)imidazo[1,2-a]pyridin-3-amine