Space, Government Payments, and Off-Farm Labor Response of Principal Farm Operators: A County-Level Analysis

We examine the effects of space and government payments on off-farm employment among principal farm operators for the entire US as well as for ERS/USDA farm resource regions. Spatial dependency in off-farm employment of principal farm operators in the U.S. overall is evident; however, this is not the case for all farm resource regions. While the effects of government payments overall are significant for the U.S., important variations exist by farm program type and across ERS/USDA regions.government payments, off-farm employment, off-farm labor supply, spatial dependence, ERS regions, Farm Management,

Maternal Human Capital and Childhood Stunting In Nepal: A Multi-Level Modeling Approach

Childhood stunting among preschool-age children stands as a serious public health problem to be addressed in Nepal. Applying the multi-level modeling approach to nationally representative data, in the overall, we provide evidence that the negative influence of maternal own education to childhood stunting occurs especially for mother's higher level of education, but there exists substantial residential variations. Most interestingly, we provide new evidence of a strong negative community externality of maternal education on childhood stunting, even if mothers of children are uneducated. We also find mother's height is negatively related to childhood stunting, regardless of mother's educational attainment and place of residence, providing evidence of intergenerational transmission of maternal health.Health Economics and Policy, Labor and Human Capital,

Climate change amplifies plant invasion hotspots in Nepal

Aim Climate change has increased the risk of biological invasions, particularly by increasing the climatically suitable regions for invasive alien species. The distribution of many native and invasive species has been predicted to change under future climate. We performed species distribution modelling of invasive alien plants (IAPs) to identify hotspots under current and future climate scenarios in Nepal, a country ranked among the most vulnerable countries to biological invasions and climate change in the world. Location Nepal. Methods We predicted climatically suitable niches of 24 out of the total 26 reported IAPs in Nepal under current and future climate (2050 for RCP 6.0) using an ensemble of species distribution models. We also conducted hotspot analysis to highlight the geographic hotspots for IAPs in different climatic zones, land cover, ecoregions, physiography and federal states. Results Under future climate, climatically suitable regions for 75% of IAPs will expand in contrast to a contraction of the climatically suitable regions for the remaining 25% of the IAPs. A high proportion of the modelled suitable niches of IAPs occurred on agricultural lands followed by forests. In aggregation, both extent and intensity (invasion hotspots) of the climatically suitable regions for IAPs will increase in Nepal under future climate scenarios. The invasion hotspots will expand towards the high‐elevation mountainous regions. In these regions, land use is rapidly transforming due to the development of infrastructure and expansion of tourism and trade. Main conclusions Negative impacts on livelihood, biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as economic loss caused by IAPs in the future, may be amplified if preventive and control measures are not immediately initiated. Therefore, the management of IAPs in Nepal should account for the vulnerability of climate change‐induced biological invasions into new areas, primarily in the mountains

Correlated bosons in a one-dimensional optical lattice: Effects of the trapping potential and of quasiperiodic disorder

We investigate the effect of the trapping potential on the quantum phases of strongly correlated ultracold bosons in one-dimensional periodic and quasiperiodic optical lattices. By means of a decoupling meanfield approach, we characterize the ground state of the system and its behavior under variation of the harmonic trapping, as a function of the total number of atoms. For a small atom number the system shows an incompressible Mott-insulating phase, as the size of the cloud remains unaffected when the trapping potential is varied. When the quasiperiodic potential is added the system develops a metastable-disordered phase which is neither compressible nor Mott insulating. This state is characteristic of quasidisorder in the presence of a strong trapping potential.Comment: Accepted for publication in PR

Implementation of a process-based catchment model in a poorly gauged, highly glacierized Himalayan headwater

The paper presents a catchment modeling approach for remote glacierized Himalayan catchments. The distributed catchment model TAC^D, which is widely based on the HBV model, was further developed for the application in highly glacierized catchments on a daily timestep and applied to the Nepalese Himalayan headwater Langtang Khola (360 km²). Low laying reference stations are taken for temperature extrapolation applying a second order polynomial function. Probability based statistical methods enable bridging data gaps in daily precipitation time series and the redistribution of cumulated precipitation sums over the previous days. Snow and ice melt was calculated in a distributed way based on the temperature-index method employing calculated daily potential sunshine durations. Different melting conditions of snow and ice and melting of ice under debris layers were considered. The spatial delineation of hydrological response units was achieved by taking topographic and physiographic information from maps and satellite images into account, and enabled to incorporate process knowledge into the model. Simulation results demonstrated that the model is able to simulate daily discharge for a period of 10 years and point glacier mass balances observed in the research area with an adequate reliability. The simple but robust data pre-processing and modeling approach enables the determination of the components of the water balance of a remote, data scarce catchment with a minimum of input data

PND29 - a retrospective analysis of the economic burden among patients diagnosed with chronic migraine using the veterans health administration medical data

Onur Başer (MEF Author)OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the health care resource utilization and costsamong patients diagnosed with chronic migraine (CM) in the Veterans HealthAdministration (VHA) medical dataset. METHODS: Patients diagnosed with CMwere identified (International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, ClinicalModification diagnosis code 346.XX) using the VHA dataset from October 1, 2008through September 30, 2010. The initial diagnosis date was designated as the indexdate. Patients without CM with the same age, gender and region (comparison cohort)were matched using a randomly chosen index date to minimize selection bias.Patients in both cohorts were at least age 18 years and had continuous medicaland pharmacy benefits for 1 year before and after the index date. One-to-one propensity score matching (PSM) was used to compare health care costs and utilizations between the CM and the comparison cohorts, and was adjusted for baselinedemographic and clinical characteristics. Pain scores were also included to investigate wellness after CM diagnosis. RESULTS: After risk-adjustment by PSM, 123,241patients in each cohort were matched. Significantly more CM patients had inpatientadmissions (6.44% vs. 1.75%, p<0.0001) and emergency room (ER; 14.42% vs. 5.50%,p<0.0001), outpatient office (68.80% vs. 42.15%, p<0.0001), outpatient (69.30% vs.42.91%, p<0.0001) and pharmacy visits (70.84% vs. 41.43%, p<0.0001) compared tothose without CM. Accordingly, CM patients also incurred higher costs for inpatient admissions and ER, office, outpatient and pharmacy visits compared to thosewithout CM. Total costs incurred by CM patients were $4,776, almost triple that of patients without CM ($1,756). There were more CM patients with accompanying painat all levels (mild: 19.53% vs. 0.16%; moderate: 13.10% vs. 0.10%; severe: 16.20% vs.0.12%; all p<0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: CM patients in the VHA population had substantial health care resource utilization, incurred higher costs and suffered worsepain compared to those without the disease.WOS:000354498504317Science Citation Index Expanded - Social Sciences Citation IndexQ1Meeting AbstractUluslararası işbirliği ile yapılan - EVETMayıs2015YÖK - 2014-1

Development of an EMG-controlled mobile robot

This paper presents the development of a Robot Operating System (ROS)-based mobile robot control using electromyography (EMG) signals. The proposed robot’s structure is specifically designed to provide modularity and is controlled by a Raspberry Pi 3 running on top of an ROS application and a Teensy microcontroller. The EMG muscle commands are sent to the robot with hand gestures that are captured using a Thalmic Myo Armband and recognized using a k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN) classifier. The robot’s performance is evaluated by navigating it through specific paths while solely controlling it through the EMG signals and using the collision avoidance approach. Thus, this paper aims to expand the research on the topic, introducing a more accurate classification system with a wider set of gestures, hoping to come closer to a usable real-life applicatio

Barriers and facilitators to pharmacist prescriptive authority for naloxone.

Presented at: American Public Health Association 2016 Annual Meeting & Expo; October 29-November 2, 2016; Denver, CO.https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/prc-posters-presentations/1018/thumbnail.jp

An economic assessment of ecological practices in Scotland

An early adoption of ecological management practices by farmers is a potential route to achieve sustainable and greener goals for agriculture. This briefing note outlines an economic assessment of four different ecological practices on Scottish livestock farms. The ecological practices used are; ecological area, reducing farm inputs, organic adoption and agro-forestry. The results suggest that ecological area and reduced farm inputs have potential financial benefits on farms and can be easily adopted by farmers. The organic and agro-forestry systems, however, require capital investment to establish and hence provide a challenging prospect of adoption without a provision of financial support<br/