The Use of Precision Farming Technologies in Crop Decision Making

Precision Farming Technologies are being used by an increasing number of farmers in eastern Australia. The adoption of these technologies has resulted in a change in some agronomic practices. This project examines how the technologies are being used. Global Positioning Systems are being employed most readily with significant economic benefit particularly in setting up controlled traffic systems and the banding application of chemicals and fertilisers. Awareness of the benefits of controlled traffic has increased the use of GPS. A secondary reason for high accuracy GPS is to give the farmers greater labour options due to the shortage of experienced machine operators. Yield monitors and maps are mainly used for zoning fields with farmers being cautious about their value until better tools for analysing variance become available. Variable rate technology is not being used in a systematic manner at the present time.Farm Management,

Wal-Mart Imports From China, Exports Ohio Jobs

[Excerpt] This report tells the stories of four Ohio companies that sell to Wal-Mart. The loss of jobs at the Huffy Corp., Rubbermaid, Mr. Coffee and Thomson factories in Ohio demonstrates how Wal-Mart pressures suppliers to send Ohio jobs overseas. These jobs exported by Wal-Mart suppliers represent just a handful of the hundreds of thousands of good jobs Ohio has lost in the new Wal-Mart economy. Other such Wal-Mart suppliers as Hasbro, Ohio Art, Texas Instruments Inc., Hoover, World Kitchen Inc. and Philips also have closed plants in Ohio

An MDP decomposition approach for traffic control at isolated signalized intersections

This article presents a novel approach for the dynamic control of a signalized intersection. At the intersection, there is a number of arrival flows of cars, each having a single queue (lane). The set of all flows is partitioned into disjoint combinations of nonconflicting flows that will receive green together. The dynamic control of the traffic lights is based on the numbers of cars waiting in the queues. The problem concerning when to switch (and which combination to serve next) is modeled as a Markovian decision process in discrete time. For large intersections (i.e., intersections with a large number of flows), the number of states becomes tremendously large, prohibiting straightforward optimization using value iteration or policy iteration. Starting from an optimal (or nearly optimal) fixed-cycle strategy, a one-step policy improvement is proposed that is easy to compute and is shown to give a close to optimal strategy for the dynamic proble

Transient handover blocking probabilities in road covering cellular mobile networks

This paper investigates handover and fresh call blocking probabilities for subscribers moving along a road in a traffic jam passing through consecutive cells of a wireless network. It is observed and theoretically motivated that the handover blocking probabilities show a sharp peak in the initial part of a traffic jam roughly at the moment when the traffic jam starts covering a new cell. The theoretical motivation relates handover blocking probabilities to blocking probabilities in the M/D/C/C queue with time-varying arrival rates. We provide a numerically efficient recursion for these blocking probabilities. \u

Microscope and spectacle : on the complexities of using new visual technologies to communicate about wildlife conservation

Acknowledgments We thank our interviewees for granting us access to data and permission to use images; dot.rural Digital Economy Hub, the University of Aberdeen, and the James Hutton Institute for funding and support; Gina Maffey, Tony James, Katrina Myrvang Brown, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript; and JP Vargheese for technical assistance.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Co-evolution of firms, industries and networks in space

The cluster literature suffers from a number of shortcomings: (1) by and large, cluster studies do not take into account that firms in a cluster are heterogeneous in terms of capabilities; (2) cluster studies tend to overemphasize the importance of place and geographical proximity and underestimate the role of networks which are, by definition, a-spatial entities; (3) most, if not all cluster studies have a static nature, and do not address questions like the origins and evolution of clusters. Our aim is to overcome these shortcomings and propose a theoretical framework on the evolution of clusters. Bringing together bodies of literature on clusters, industrial dynamics, the evolutionary theory of the firm and network theory, we describe how clusters co-evolve with: (1) the industry they adhere to; (2) the (dynamic) capabilities of the firms they contain; and (3) the industry-wide knowledge network they are part of. Based on this framework, we believe the analysis of cluster evolution provides a promising research agenda in evolutionary economic geography for the years to come.cluster evolution, network dynamics, industrial dynamics, co-evolution, evolutionary economic geography

Towards a general solution to the linear Heisenberg problem

The construction of a complete set of stationary states of the linear Heisenberg system with periodic boundary conditions (rings) has been a topic of intensive research for many decades. Many eminent theoreticians have made their contribution to this joint eort, but we should mention in the rst place the epoch-making work of Bethe 1 and Hulthen. 5 Their work is the basis of many papers on this topic that have appeared during the past 70 years. We do no have the intention to give a complete survey of all this work but we will try to indicate that especially an asymptotic approach starting from the Hypothesis of Strings gives the prospect of a general and complete solution of the Heisenberg chain

New Technological Interventions in Conservation Conflicts : Countering Emotions and Contested Knowledge

RCUK Digital Economy programme Grant number EP/G066051/1 Open access via Springer Compact AgreementPeer reviewedPublisher PD