SOME EFFECTS OF RICE QUALITY ON ROUGH RICE PRICES

Quality discounts and premiums for rough rice in Texas rice bid/acceptance markets are analyzed. The most important quality factors determining the value of rough rice are head yield and peck. A one percentage point reduction in peck damage raises the price received per hundredweight of rough rice by $.13 to$.68 across markets and years. Since peck damage can be reduced by controlling the rice stinkbug, evaluation of alternative methods for better control of this pest in Texas rice fields is needed.Demand and Price Analysis,

News Releases Delivered by Computer

An electronic information transfer system, called Michigan State University Information Services (MSUIFS), can store and deliver news and feature stories to mass media outlets and to Michigan county Extension offices

Pavement Evaluation of the Concrete Tie-bars and Dowel Baskets on Irvin Cobb Drive, US 60, McCracken County, KY

A 1500 Mhz. ground coupled, ground penetrating radar antenna was used to identify both the horizontal alignment and the vertical displacement of the concrete tie-bars and the transverse joint dowel bar assembles on a Portland-Cement-Concrete-Pavement (PCCP) on US 60 in McCracken County, KY. Approximately 5 lanes miles of PCCP were evaluated using the 1500 Mhz. ground coupled antenna. Results indicate that only one transverse dowel basket out of an approximate total of 1,760 were within 4.17 inches of the pavement surface. Seven transverse dowel baskets were misaligned four inches or greater from the location of the sawed joint. These areas represent 0.45 percent of the total transverse joints on the project. The ground penetrating radar results also indicated there were no areas along the longitudinal joint where the tie-bars were either too close to the pavement surface or missing

CORRELATIONS AMONG GRAIN CHARACTERISTICS USED TO DETERMINE THE EFFECTS OF ROUGH RICE STORAGE TIME AND TEMPERATURE ON AROMATIC RICE QUALITY

Summary statistics and corresponding Spearman correlation coefficients are illustrated for various subsets of aromatic rough rice storage time and temperature data from (a) the College Station texture sensory panel, (b) the New Orleans aroma and flavor sensory panel, and (c) the Beaumont USDA-ARS Rice Quality Laboratory. These correlations represent the inclinations of seemingly-related measures of several attributes to "move together," acting as an indicator of their associations with or impacts on one another.Crop Production/Industries,

CORRELATIONS AMONG GRAIN CHARACTERISTICS USED TO DETERMINE THE EFFECTS OF MILLED RICE STORAGE TIME AND TEMPERATURE ON AROMATIC RICE QUALITY

Summary statistics and corresponding Spearman correlation coefficients are illustrated for various subsets of aromatic milled rice storage time and temperature data from (a) the College Station texture sensory panel, (b) the New Orleans aroma and flavor sensory panel, and (c) the Beaumont USDA-ARS Rice Quality Laboratory. These correlations represent the inclinations of seemingly-related measures of several attributes to "move together," acting as an indicator of their associations with or impacts on one another.Crop Production/Industries,

Utilization of Light Detection and Ranging for Quality Control and Quality Assurance of Pavement Grades

Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) technology is a useful tool that can assist transportation agencies during the design, construction, and maintenance phases of transportation projects. To demonstrate the utility of Lidar, this report discusses how Lidar data can be used while performing quality control and quality assurance (QC/QA) of pavement grades along road segments where safety concerns have been identified (e.g., increased crash rates due to water ponding on the roadway). Researchers modeled surface runoff using Lidar data for several roadways that had experienced significant crash increases during wet-weather events. Based on this modeling, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) undertook corrective maintenance to eliminate the points of concerns. Applying Lidar on transportation projects holds much promise, but there are several challenges related to its accuracy that transportation agencies must be cognizant of before deploying it routinely or using it to replace conventional surveying techniques

Rice Quality Factors: Implications For Management Decisions.

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An Automated Paradigm for Drosophila Visual Psychophysics

Background: Mutations that cause learning and memory defects in Drosophila melanogaster have been found to also compromise visual responsiveness and attention. A better understanding of attention-like defects in such Drosophila mutants therefore requires a more detailed characterization of visual responsiveness across a range of visual parameters. Methodology/Principal Findings: We designed an automated behavioral paradigm for efficiently dissecting visual responsiveness in Drosophila. Populations of flies walk through multiplexed serial choice mazes while being exposed to moving visuals displayed on computer monitors, and infra-red fly counters at the end of each maze automatically score the responsiveness of a strain. To test our new design, we performed a detailed comparison between wild-type flies and a learning and memory mutant, dunce. We first confirmed that the learning mutant dunce displays increased responsiveness to a black/green moving grating compared to wild type in this new design. We then extended this result to explore responses to a wide range of psychophysical parameters for moving gratings (e.g., luminosity, contrast, spatial frequency, velocity) as well as to a different stimulus, moving dots. Finally, we combined these visuals (gratings versus dots) in competition to investigate how dunce and wild-type flies respond to more complex and conflicting motion effects. Conclusions/Significance: We found that dunce responds more strongly than wild type to high contrast and highly structured motion. This effect was found for simple gratings, dots, and combinations of both stimuli presented in competition

Columnar cells necessary for motion responses of wide-field visual interneurons in Drosophila

Wide-field motion-sensitive neurons in the lobula plate (lobula plate tangential cells, LPTCs) of the fly have been studied for decades. However, it has never been conclusively shown which cells constitute their major presynaptic elements. LPTCs are supposed to be rendered directionally selective by integrating excitatory as well as inhibitory input from many local motion detectors. Based on their stratification in the different layers of the lobula plate, the columnar cells T4 and T5 are likely candidates to provide some of this input. To study their role in motion detection, we performed whole-cell recordings from LPTCs in Drosophila with T4 and T5 cells blocked using two different genetically encoded tools. In these flies, motion responses were abolished, while flicker responses largely remained. We thus demonstrate that T4 and T5 cells indeed represent those columnar cells that provide directionally selective motion information to LPTCs. Contrary to previous assumptions, flicker responses seem to be largely mediated by a third, independent pathway. This work thus represents a further step towards elucidating the complete motion detection circuitry of the fly