A Visual Approach to Community Bank Assessment of Agricultural Portfolio Risk Exposure

Financial Economics, Risk and Uncertainty,

Community Bank Assessment of Agricultural Portfolio Risk Exposure: The Literature and the Methods in Use

Agricultural Finance,

Ad Watch 3.0: Developing Audiovisual and Narrative Techniques for Engaging the Audiovisual Content of Political Advertising

Analysis of the evolution and practice of ad watch journalism during the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential campaigns suggests a robust level of ad watch activity, fostered in part by advances in communications technology and the proliferation of actors with means and motive. The efforts of ad watch practitioners to police egregious distortions and deceptions continue to provide an important baseline in the broader discourse surrounding the veracity of campaign claims. Efforts to place the transgressions of campaign spots in a proper context, however, have been met with at best, mixed success. Among the principal challenges to building a better ad watch for the 21st century are engaging the way audiovisual elements of ads advance their case by evoking readily accessible narrative frames grounded in popular culture; developing the multiple metrics by which candidates’ fidelity to the truth over time can be effectively evaluated; and addressing arguments about the character of candidates, arguments often ostensibly framed in overtly policy terms

A high resolution millimetre and submillimetre study of W3

The continuum bolometer receiver on the James Clerk Maxwell telescope has been used to map the dense core of the star formation region W3 with a spatial resolution of 15-20 arcsec. At 350 and 800 μm, the region appears as two principal peaks around the known IR sources IRS4 and IRS5, while at 1100 μm, a further peak is noted which is interpreted as being due to free-free emission around IRS2. Taking into account the free-free contribution to the intensity, the continuum dust emission from the region is found to be consistent with optically thin emission at all of the three wavelengths considered. Values for the dust optical depth, hydrogen column density, mass, and central density have been obtained for each of the main peaks

Millimetre and submillimetre molecular line observations of the reflection nebula NGC 2023

Observations in the CO J = 2 - 1, CO J = 3 - 2 and HCO+ J = 4 - 3 transitions of the molecular cloud associated with NGC 2023 are presented. The observations reveal the complex structure of the gas in the surrounding cloud, and show the presence of several hot-spots which may represent separate bodies of gas. A search has been made for the source of excitation of two nearby groups of Herbig-Haro objects recently discovered by Malin et al. (1987). No such objects can be clearly identified from the data. CO J = 3 - 2 spectra taken at positions lying on the CO J = 1 - 0 shell observed by Gatley et al. (1987) show marked enhancements in peak line strength relative to coincident CO J = 2 - 1 data. By contrast, no such enhancements are observed away from the shell. Observations of the submillimeter wavelength HCO+ J = 4 - 3 transition show that the line strength is greatest in the vicinity of the shell structure. Simple large velocity gradient modeling of the excitation conditions of the shell material suggests that the gas may be hot (Tkin ~ 140 K), dense, and optically thin

A submillimetre wavelength spectral line search of the Orion molecular cloud core

A submillimetre wavelength molecular line search of the Orion molecular cloud has been made covering a total of about 5 percent of the frequency range 342.8 - 358.6 GHz. This search, coupled with the authors' previous observations of submillimetre transitions in this cloud, has led to the detection of 22 transitions of 14 molecular species, of which 16 are reported here for the first time. No unidentified lines have been detected in the present search. Mapping observations have been obtained for several of the lines and, in the case of H2CO the authors have been able to compare the present data with that obtained from other telescopes, to estimate the density and abundance in the emitting region

The ‘diplomatic masculinity’ of Henry VIII

This article examines the place of royal masculinity in the conduct of Henry VIII’s international relations with his two principal rivals, Francis I of France and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. It argues that while strategic considerations evidently drove the conduct of his warfare and diplomacy with Continental rulers, those strategic considerations were themselves often informed by his wish to enhance his reputation as a man before other male rulers. While historians now routinely link gender and diplomacy in their accounts of female rulers, the significance of masculinity as a force in the diplomacy of early modern kings awaits fuller articulation. Henry was a monarch whose masculinity directly informed his interactions with his fellow European kings

A forecasting Tool for Predicting Australia\u27s Domestic Airline Passenger Demand Using a Genetic Algorithm

This study has proposed and empirically tested for the first time genetic algorithm optimization models for modelling Australia’s domestic airline passenger demand, as measured by enplaned passengers (GAPAXDE model) and revenue passenger kilometres performed (GARPKSDE model). Data was divided into training and testing datasets; 74 training datasets were used to estimate the weighting factors of the genetic algorithm models and 13 out-of-sample datasets were used for testing the robustness of the genetic algorithm models. The genetic algorithm parameters used in this study comprised population size (n): 200; the generation number: 1,000; and mutation rate: 0.01. The modelling results have shown that both the quadratic GAPAXDE and GARPKSDE models are more accurate, reliable, and have greater predictive capability as compared to the linear models. The mean absolute percentage error in the out of sample testing dataset for the GAPAXDE and GARPKSDE quadratic models are 2.55 and 2.23%, respectively