Policy Reform Impact on Food Manufacturing

The impact of agricultural policies and their reform is of major concern when addressing issues of growth, innovation and consolidation in the food manufacturing sector. Growth is one of the forces fueling the globalization of food manufacturing activities. Market- and policy-driven forces present a myriad of opportunities to influence growth and reorientation of patterns at the nexus where food manufacturing links the food system. The productivity and international competitiveness of the food manufacturing sector must be evaluated in the context of governmental incentives, international standards and the emerging supply- and value-chains.total factor productivity growth, intercountry impacts, dairy products, meat products, sugar, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Huber approximation for the non-linear ℓ1 problem

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The smooth Huber approximation to the non-linear ‘1 problem was proposed by Tishler and Zang (1982), and further developed in Yang (1995). In the present paper, we use the ideas of Gould (1989) to give a new algorithm with rate of convergence results for the smooth Huber approximation. Results of computational tests are reported. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Exploiting Cognitive Structure for Adaptive Learning

Adaptive learning, also known as adaptive teaching, relies on learning path recommendation, which sequentially recommends personalized learning items (e.g., lectures, exercises) to satisfy the unique needs of each learner. Although it is well known that modeling the cognitive structure including knowledge level of learners and knowledge structure (e.g., the prerequisite relations) of learning items is important for learning path recommendation, existing methods for adaptive learning often separately focus on either knowledge levels of learners or knowledge structure of learning items. To fully exploit the multifaceted cognitive structure for learning path recommendation, we propose a Cognitive Structure Enhanced framework for Adaptive Learning, named CSEAL. By viewing path recommendation as a Markov Decision Process and applying an actor-critic algorithm, CSEAL can sequentially identify the right learning items to different learners. Specifically, we first utilize a recurrent neural network to trace the evolving knowledge levels of learners at each learning step. Then, we design a navigation algorithm on the knowledge structure to ensure the logicality of learning paths, which reduces the search space in the decision process. Finally, the actor-critic algorithm is used to determine what to learn next and whose parameters are dynamically updated along the learning path. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CSEAL.Comment: Accepted by KDD 2019 Research Track. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD'19

Remembering, Reflecting, Returning: A Return to Professional Practice Journey Through Poetry, Music and Images:A Return to Professional Practice Journey Through Poetry, Music and Images

<p>Our composition brings together poetry, music, images and personal narratives based around the experiences of an occupational therapist, Karen, who following a family career break, returned to her profession. Our work demonstrates collaborative research practices and illuminates our experiences and journeying as practitioner-artists/researchers/teachers.</p> <p>This autoethnographic inquiry employs bricolage, drawing on theory and hybridized methods, inspired by the notion of ‘returning to practice’. The conversations of Karen and Katherine (mentee and mentor) as qualitative data, analyzed, interpreted and made accessible through poetry and images – along with Peter’s musical and autobiographical compositions – explore possibilities to re-examine and share alternative avenues of scholarship and theoretical understanding, not least in redefining what contribution to knowledge that artistic processes and ‘artwork’ makes methodologically, pedagogically, aesthetically, and therapeutically. Our intention is to engage the reader-viewer-listener to (re)think, take notice, disrupt, re-examine and extend personal meanings about return to practice journeys, enabling each of us to benefit and be (re)inspired.</p> <p>We recast aspects of ‘knowing and experience’ metaphorically, to consider and express our sense of being and becoming in the world. Importantly, we seek to explore how arts informed ways of knowing and learning about the self and other can serve to enhance our students/researchers/practitioners learning experiences.</p

Evaluation of a Semi-automatic Right Ventricle Segmentation Method on Short-Axis MR Images

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a semi-automatic right ventricle segmentation method on short-axis cardiac cine MR images which segment all right ventricle contours in a cardiac phase using one seed contour. Twenty-eight consecutive short-axis, four-chamber, and tricuspid valve view cardiac cine MRI examinations of healthy volunteers were used. Two independent observers performed the manual and automatic segmentations of the right ventricles. Analyses were based on the ventricular volume and ejection fraction of the right heart chamber. Reproducibility of the manual and semi-automatic segmentations was assessed using intra- and inter-observer variability. Validity of the semi-automatic segmentations was analyzed with reference to the manual segmentations. The inter- and intra-observer variability of manual segmentations were between 0.8 and 3.2%. The semi-automatic segmentations were highly correlated with the manual segmentations (R2 0.79–0.98), with median difference of 0.9–4.8% and of 3.3% for volume and ejection fraction parameters, respectively. In comparison to the manual segmentation, the semi-automatic segmentation produced contours with median dice metrics of 0.95 and 0.87 and median Hausdorff distance of 5.05 and 7.35 mm for contours at end-diastolic and end-systolic phases, respectively. The inter- and intra-observer variability of the semi-automatic segmentations were lower than observed in the manual segmentations. Both manual and semi-automatic segmentations performed better at the end-diastolic phase than at the end-systolic phase. The investigated semi-automatic segmentation method managed to produce a valid and reproducible alternative to manual right ventricle segmentation

What We Talk about When We Talk about Love: A Duoethnographic Exploration of the Dissertation Relationship

In the aftermath and mop-up following a successful dissertation defense, an unintended and unexpected data source remained unexplored and unanalyzed: 32 audio-recorded discussions and work sessions documenting the processes, approaches, and decisions made by a dissertation director and his doctoral candidate. What might those conversations reveal about the dissertation relationship? Taking a page from Raymond Carver’s short story, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love,” we wondered what we might have been talking about when we were talking about dissertation writing. Inspired and shaped by Norris, Sawyer, and Lund’s (2012. Duoethnography: Dialogic methods for social, health, and educational research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.) duoethnographic methods, this study provides opportunity for us to not just look back on the journey, but pushes us into the messiness of “recalling and reconceptualizing” (p. 10). As we each “become the foil for the Other, challenging the Other to reflect on their own life in a deeper, more relational, and authentic manner” (Norris et al., 2012, p. 10) we also interrogate and trouble our own simplistic categories of analysis

Feature cluster "advances in continuous optimization"

[No abstract available

Application of an Imaging-Based Sum Score for Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy to the General Population: Risk of Major Neurological Diseases and Mortality

Objective: To assess the relation between a sum score of imaging markers indicative of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and cognitive impairment, stroke, dementia, and mortality in a general population. Methods: One thousand six hundred twenty-two stroke-free and dementia-free participants of the population-based Rotterdam Study (mean age 73.1 years, 54.3% women) underwent brain MRI (1.5 tesla) in 2005–2011 and were followed for stroke, dementia and death until 2016–2017. Four MRI markers (strictly lobar cerebral microbleeds, cortical superficial siderosis, centrum semiovale perivascular spaces, and white matter hyperintensities) were combined to construct the CAA sum score, ranging from 0 to 4. Neuropsychological testing measured during the research visit closest to scan date were used to assess general cognitive function and cognitive domains. The associations of the CAA sum score with cognition cross-sectionally and with stroke, dementia, and mortality longitudinally were determined using linear regression and Cox proportional hazard modeling adjusted for age, sex, hypertension, cholesterol, lipid lowering medication, atrial fibrillation, antithrombotic medication and APOE-ε2/ε4 carriership. Additionally, we accounted for competing risks of death due to other causes for stroke and dementia, and calculated absolute risk estimates. Results: During a mean follow-up of 7.2 years, 62 participants suffered a stroke, 77 developed dementia and 298 died. Participants with a CAA score of 1 showed a lower Mini-Mental-State-Exam (fully-adjusted mean difference −0.21, 9

To dash or to dawdle: verb-associated speed of motion influences eye movements during spoken sentence comprehension

In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast (“dash”) or slow (“dawdle”) movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal and less on the path. These results reveal that event comprehension in the presence of a visual world involves establishing and dynamically updating the locations of entities in response to linguistic descriptions of events