3 reasons Midwest farmers hurt by the U.S.-China trade war still support Trump

America’s farmers have borne the brunt of China’s retaliation in the trade war that President Donald Trump launched in 2018

Midwest Crop Farmers’ Perceptions of the U.S.-China Trade War

The trade dispute between the United States and China that began in 2018 quickly reached an unprecedented level. As of June 2019, several rounds of talks failed to prevent the United States from imposing tariffs on more than $250 billion worth of Chinese products

Studies on Nonlinear Dispersive Water Waves

This study investigates the phenomena of evolution of two-dimensional, fully nonlinear, fully dispersive, incompressible and irrotational waves in water of uniform depth in single and in double layers. The study is based on an exact fully nonlinear and fully dispersive (FNFD) wave model developed by Wu (1997, 1999a). This FNFD wave model is first based on two exact equations involving three variables all pertaining to their values at the water surface. Closure of the system of model equations is accomplished either in differential form, by attaining a series expansion of the velocity potential, or in integral form by adopting a boundary integral equation for the velocity field. A reductive perturbation method for deriving asymptotic theory for higher-order solitary waves is developed using the differential closure equation of the FNFD wave theory. Using this method, we have found the leading 15th-order solitary wave solutions. The solution is found to be an asymptotic solution which starts to diverge from the 12th-order so that the 11th-order solution appears to provide the best approximation to the fully nonlinear solitary waves, with a great accuracy for waves of small to moderately large amplitudes. Two numerical methods for calculating unsteady fully nonlinear waves, namely, the FNFD method and the Point-vortex method, are developed and applied to compute evolutions of fully nonlinear solitary waves. The FNFD method, which is based on the integral closure equation of Wu's theory, can provide good performance on computation of solitary waves of very large amplitude. The Point-vortex method using the Lagrange markers is very efficient for computation of waves of small to moderate amplitudes, but has intrinsic difficulties in computing waves of large amplitudes. These two numerical methods are applied to carry out a comparative study of interactions between solitary waves. Capillary-gravity solitary waves are investigated both theoretically and numerically. The theoretical study based on the reductive perturbation method provides asymptotic theories for higher-order capillary-gravity solitary waves. A stable numerical method (FNFD) for computing exact solutions for unsteady capillary-gravity solitary waves is developed based on the FNFD wave theory. The results of the higher-order asymptotic theories compare extremely well with those given by the FNFD method for waves of small to moderate amplitudes. A numerical method for computing unsteady fully nonlinear interfacial waves in two-layer fluid systems is developed based on the FNFD model. The subcritical and supercritical cases can be clearly distinguished by this method, especially for waves of amplitudes approaching the maximum attainable for the fully nonlinear theory

3 reasons Midwest farmers hurt by the U.S.-China trade war still support Trump

America’s farmers have borne the brunt of China’s retaliation in the trade war that President Donald Trump launched in 2018.This article is published as Zhang, Wendong, Lulu Rodriguez and Shuyang Qu. "3 reasons Midwest farmers hurt by the U.S.-China trade war still support Trump." The Conversation, November 4, 2019. </p

Midwest Crop Farmers’ Perceptions of the U.S.-China Trade War

The trade dispute between the United States and China that began in 2018 quickly reached an unprecedented level. As of June 2019, several rounds of talks failed to prevent the United States from imposing tariffs on more than $250 billion worth of Chinese products.</p

Farmers' reactions to the US–China trade war: Perceptions versus behaviors

This study examines how the political alignments of Midwestern farmers, proxied by their consumption of partisan media, affect their perceptions of and responses to the US–China trade war. Our results indicate that farmers who consume conservative media perceive a lower income loss resulting from the trade war and view the Market Facilitation Program (MFP) as more helpful. Conversely, farmers who consume liberal media have the opposite perception biases. We found no evidence of any association between partisan media consumption and planting and risk management decisions. Overall, partisan bias exists despite financial interest at stake but does not affect behaviors.JEL Classification: D83, F68, F51, Q13, Q17This article is published as Li, Minghao, Xi He, Wendong Zhang, Shuyang Qu, Lulu Rodriguez, and James M. Gbeda. "Farmers' reactions to the US–China trade war: Perceptions versus behaviors." Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (2023). doi:10.1002/jaa2.68. Posted with permission.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Preparation of tin coating on the surface of copper-coated carbon fiber and its effect on the microstructures and properties of the composite coating

In order to prevent the copper coating on the carbon fiber surface from oxidizing and falling off, the tin coating is plated on the surface of copper-coated carbon fiber. In this paper, the copper-tin composite coating with different thicknesses of tin coatings were successfully prepared by electroless plating. The results show that with the increasing of electroless tin plating time, the thickness of the copper-tin composite coating increases. The test results of the bonding force between the composite coating and the carbon fiber show that the coating bonding force is the best when the thickness of composite coating is between 1.31 μ m and 1.55 μ m. This is due to the formation of copper-tin intermetallic compounds preventes direct contact between the copper coating and oxygen, which can effectively inhibit the oxidation of the copper plating layer, thereby making the plating layer less likely to fall off. However, the excessively thick tin coating would increase the internal stress of the coating, and promote the generation of cracks on the surface of the composite coating, which would cause the composite coating to fall off. This research will provide new ideas for the preparation of high-performance copper plating on the surface of carbon fiber, and provide an important theoretical and practical basis for the application of copper coatings

A confidence limit for the empirical mode decomposition and Hilbert spectral analysis

The confidence limit is a standard measure of the accuracy of the result in any statistical analysis. Most of the confidence limits are derived as follows. The data are first divided into subsections and then, under the ergodic assumption, the temporal mean is substituted for the ensemble mean. Next, the confidence limit is defined as a range of standard deviations from this mean. However, such a confidence limit is valid only for linear and stationary processes. Furthermore, in order for the ergodic assumption to be valid, the subsections have to be statistically independent. For non‐stationary and nonlinear processes, such an analysis is no longer valid. The confidence limit of the method here termed EMD/HSA (for empirical mode decomposition/Hilbert spectral analysis) is introduced by using various adjustable stopping criteria in the sifting processes of the EMD step to generate a sample set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). The EMD technique acts as a pre‐processor for HSA on the original data, producing a set of components (IMFs) from the original data that equal the original data when added back together. Each IMF represents a scale in the data, from smallest to largest. The ensemble mean and standard deviation of the IMF sample sets obtained with different stopping criteria are calculated, and these form a simple random sample set. The confidence limit for EMD/HSA is then defined as a range of standard deviations from the ensemble mean. Without evoking the ergodic assumption, subdivision of the data stream into short sections is unnecessary; hence, the results and the confidence limit retain the full‐frequency resolution of the full dataset. This new confidence limit can be applied to the analysis of nonlinear and non‐stationary processes by these new techniques. Data from length‐of‐day measurements and a particularly violent recent earthquake are used to demonstrate how the confidence limit is obtained and applied. By providing a confidence limit for this new approach, a stable range of stopping criteria for the decomposition or sifting phase (EMD) has been established, making the results of the final processing with HSA, and the entire EMD/HSA method, more definitive

Difference in Receptor Usage between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus and SARS-Like Coronavirus of Bat Origin▿

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is caused by the SARS-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV), which uses angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as its receptor for cell entry. A group of SARS-like CoVs (SL-CoVs) has been identified in horseshoe bats. SL-CoVs and SARS-CoVs share identical genome organizations and high sequence identities, with the main exception of the N terminus of the spike protein (S), known to be responsible for receptor binding in CoVs. In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat. In addition to full-length S of SL-CoV and SARS-CoV, a series of S chimeras was constructed by inserting different sequences of the SARS-CoV S into the SL-CoV S backbone. Several important observations were made from this study. First, the SL-CoV S was unable to use any of the three ACE2 molecules as its receptor. Second, the SARS-CoV S failed to enter cells expressing the bat ACE2. Third, the chimeric S covering the previously defined receptor-binding domain gained its ability to enter cells via human ACE2, albeit with different efficiencies for different constructs. Fourth, a minimal insert region (amino acids 310 to 518) was found to be sufficient to convert the SL-CoV S from non-ACE2 binding to human ACE2 binding, indicating that the SL-CoV S is largely compatible with SARS-CoV S protein both in structure and in function. The significance of these findings in relation to virus origin, virus recombination, and host switching is discussed