Let\u27s Think About Hog Supplies and Prices!

It still looks as if we\u27re headed for hog price and production troubles in the next few years. If so, the time to think and plan is now-ahead of time. Here are some alternatives you may want to think about and discuss

Storage and Supports Have Worked, But...

Storage and supports have worked, but what would have happened without them in the 1952-58 period? Farm p rices and incomes would have dropped, say these authors. Withholding grain did have the effect of raising prices and incomes in this period. But is it possible we\u27ve only borrowed this increase from the future

Power Converters for Power-Ultrasonic Transducers

High-performance power-converters in the form of single-tone class-D amplifiers are required to drive power-ultrasonic transducers in industrial applications. These must produce low-distortion, variable-frequency, and variable-amplitude sinusoidal currents to efficiently drive the piezoelectric cell and horn of transducers, and thereby vibrate materialprocessing stages. A resonant-tracking control strategy is generally used to efficiently couple and regulate output power delivery at a high-Q probe-system resonant mode. This paper reviews a number of power-converter control options suitable for such probe drivers, including quasi-squarewave (QS), naturally sampling pulse width modulation (PWM) and programmed PWM (PPWM). Typical output-waveform quality and the PSPICE models of the power-converter and piezoelectric transducer developed to assess and compare methods are presented

Specters of Cape Town : heritage, memory, and restitution in contemporary South African art, architecture, and museum practice

Cape Town is home to a series of extreme disjunctive arrangements of wealth and poverty. Key to understanding the city is the deep inscription of historical injustice and its expression in contemporary forms of social injustice. In the paper that follows, we report on conversations with four indispensable commentators on the contemporary state of the city: artist Thania Petersen, architect and artist Ilze Wolff, museum practitioner Bonita Bennett, and heritage practitioner Calvyn Gilfellan. These conversations occur at a particular moment in South African life and being: in the aftermath of the Zuma presidency, in the aftermath of #RhodesMustFall, in the context of the perceived failure of the project of non-racialism, in the context of growing frustration over the intractability of historical inequality and the slow pace of change, and amid a heated national debate around the ANC government’s draft land expropriation bill. A common set of themes and preoccupations emerge: questions around race and religion; history, representation, and restitution; memory and forgetting; social justice and the abiding presence of historical injustice. Thinking inside and outside of the disciplines of art, architecture, and museum and heritage practice, these conversations present an accumulated body of wisdom and insight that might also be read as a transcript on the contemporary state of the city.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yhso202021-09-07hj2021Historical and Heritage Studie

Lessons Learned from Initial Piloting of Farmer-Orientated Value Chain Training in the Pacific

There have been numerous initiatives in the Pacific region over the past decade to mainstream the concept of value chains into the agricultural development arena. Since 2012, the ACP/EU Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) has been at the forefront of value chain development in the Pacific region, supporting a number of value chain studies and the publication of the ‘Agricultural Value Chain Guide for the Pacific Islands’. This CTA guide was intended to provide a simplified approach to value chain analysis and therefore make that approach useful to ‘farmers, traders and policy makers’. From 2014-2017, the Pacific Island Farmers Organisation Network (PIFON) implemented a programme to pilot farmer-orientated value chain training through its farmer organisation members. The CTA guide was used and the training sessions were supported through several externally funded projects, including the IFAD/SDC1 funded MTCP II project and the EU/SPC PAPP project. PIFON believes that farmer organisations have an important role to play in disseminating key information to their members and in helping to ‘extend the reach of government and aid agencies’. These VC training sessions targeted chain actors involved in the: 1. Value chain for spices in Vanuatu (through the Farm Support Association and Venui Vanilla) 2. Value chain for ginger in Fiji (through Fiji Crop and Livestock Council) 3. Value chain for papaya in Tonga (through Growers Federation of Tonga) 4. Value chain for Taro in Fiji (through Tei Tei Taveuni and the Tutu Rural Training Centre) 5. Value chain for papaya in Fiji (through Nature’s Way Cooperative) CTA is currently implementing a project entitled ‘Promoting Nutritious Food Systems in the Pacific Islands’ (2016-2020), in partnership with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Pacific Islands Private Sector Organisation (PIPSO). Under this project, CTA has commissioned PIFON to document the lessons learned about the value chain training, through production of a video and this publication. This report explores a range of impacts of the initial piloting of value chain training in the Pacific. These included: • The beginnings of a change in the mind-set of the actors in the value chain –particularly farmers • The incorporation of the value chain ‘way of thinking’ into normal extension activities of farmer organisations • Improvements in relationships and better collaboration • Increased supply of produce • Value chain training materials being translated/adapted/adopted into training programme

Parental perceptions and understanding of information provision, management options and factors influencing the decision-making process in the treatment of children with glue ear

Objectives Otitis media with effusion (OME) is a common cause of hearing loss and possible developmental delay in children, and there are a range of ‘preference sensitive’ treatment options. We aimed to evaluate the attitudes and beliefs of parents of affected children to treatment options including watchful-waiting, hearing aids, grommets, and, oral steroids with the intention of developing our understanding of decision-making and the factors influencing it, sources of parental information, and satisfaction with information provision. Design We recruited a convenience sample of twelve parents of eleven children with OME at a single ENT department of a teaching hospital into a qualitative research study. The children of the parents interviewed had already been recruited into the Oral Steroids for the Resolution of Otitis Media with effusion In Children (OSTRICH) study. Semi structured interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and then coded using an inductive, thematic approach. Results Parents were satisfied with the verbal provision of information during the treatment consultation, although many were keen to receive supplementary printed information. Discussion with family and friends helped the decision-making process, whereas insufficient information and a paternalistic approach were viewed as obstacles. Parents were particularly influenced by the following: the immediacy of the treatment option effect, perceived efficacy, perceived risks and adverse effects, social implications (especially with hearing aids) and past personal and informant experience. Conclusions Parents appreciate clinicians tailoring information provision to parents' information needs and preferred format. Clinicians should also elicit parental attitudes towards the different management options for OME and the factors influencing their decisions, in order to optimise shared-decision making and ultimately provide a better standard of clinical care

Power Converters for Power-Ultrasonic Transducers

High-performance power-converters in the form of single-tone class-D amplifiers are required to drive power-ultrasonic transducers in industrial applications. These must produce low-distortion, variable-frequency, and variable-amplitude sinusoidal currents to efficiently drive the piezoelectric cell and horn of transducers, and thereby vibrate materialprocessing stages. A resonant-tracking control strategy is generally used to efficiently couple and regulate output power delivery at a high-Q probe-system resonant mode. This paper reviews a number of power-converter control options suitable for such probe drivers, including quasi-squarewave (QS), naturally sampling pulse width modulation (PWM) and programmed PWM (PPWM). Typical output-waveform quality and the PSPICE models of the power-converter and piezoelectric transducer developed to assess and compare methods are presented

Training industrial end‐user programmers with interactive tutorials

Newly released robot programming tools have made it feasible for end‐users to program industrial robots by combining block‐based languages and lead‐through programming. To use these systems effectively, end‐users, who usually have limited or no programming experience, require training. To train users, tutoring systems are often used for block‐based programming—some even for lead‐through programming—but no tutorial system combines these two types of programming. We present CoBlox Interactive Tutorials (CITs), a novel tutoring approach that teaches how to use both the hardware and software components that comprise a typical end‐user robot programming environment. As users switch between the two programming styles, CITs provide them with extensive scaffolding, give users immediate feedback on missteps, and provide guidance on next steps. To evaluate CITs, we conducted a study with 79 industrial end‐users using a programming environment released by ABB Robotics that compares our approach to training with training videos, the most commonly used training in industry. This study, one of the largest to date on training professional end‐users, found that CIT‐trained users authored more correct programs in less time than video‐trained users. This shows that a tight integration of hardware and software concepts is crucial to training end‐users to program industrial robots

Do entrepreneurs always benefit from business failure experience?

Business failure and its effect on entrepreneurial engagement has attracted substantial scholarly attention in entrepreneurship research. We contend that knowledge is lacking on the entrepreneurial learning mechanism and entrepreneurial alertness condition under which business failure experience influences new venture performance. In an empirical examination of 240 entrepreneurs operating in multiple industries in a sub-Saharan African country, we use a longitudinal data set to show that business failure experience does not always influence new venture performance. Rather, business failure experience influences new venture performance when it is channelled through entrepreneurial learning under conditions of increasing levels of entrepreneurial learning and a greater degree of alertness to new business opportunities. We discuss these findings and provide avenues for extending this emerging area of scholarly research