The future of bioethanol

Yeasts have been domesticated by mankind before horses. After the mastering of alcoholic fermentation for centuries, yeasts have become the protagonist of one of the most important biotechnological industries worldwide: the production of bioethanol. This chapter will initially present some important challenges to be overcome in this industry, both in first and second generation biofuel production. Then, it will briefly revisit some advances obtained in recent years. Finally, it will present and discuss some opportunities, in the scope of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, that will likely be present in the future of bioethanol

Potential utilization of scallop viscera for solid waste management and as feedstuff for swine

Waste management has been identified as a major problem which will threaten the economic security of Florida's seafood industry within the next ten years (1). One of the primary concerns is treatment and disposal of solid wastes resulting from seafood processing. Utilization of scallop viscera as silage, much like that developed for waste fish and fish offal (3,4), could represent a practical solid waste treatment option which offers the additional benefit of a protein feed supplement for production of swine. (27pp.

Examining Students’ Perceptions of Globalization and Study Abroad Programs at HBCUs

The objective in this paper is to explore students’ perceptions of globalization and study abroad programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Recent statistics reveal that in spite of the current growth in the number of US students receiving academic credit for their overseas academic experience, less than one percent of undergraduate minority students participate in a study abroad program during their degree program. The analysis is based on survey questionnaires administered to 263 undergraduate minority students at Alabama A&M University. The questionnaire contained questions related to respondents’ demographic characteristics and likert-scale questions pertaining to students’ perceptions of globalization and studying abroad programs. The data are analyzed using factor analysis and binary logistic regression. The results of the regression model suggest that while a number of variables such as major and classification are found to have statistically significant relationships towards globalization, demographic variables and information source variables are not good indicators of student perceptions of globalization. One interesting findings is that with a global mindset, business students seem to be more favorably inclined toward globalization than non-business students.Globalization, Study Abroad Programs, Logistic Regression, Factor Analysis, Survey Data, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Development, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Made corrections: a prison-based street art intervention for young offenders

This paper describes a prison-based street art intervention that took place at a Lithuanian institution for young offenders. During the first stage of the project, existing historical graffiti and murals on the prison walls were uncovered and documented. The second stage of the project involved working with the young offenders to co-produce a series of collaborative large-scale works within the prison walls, some of which incorporated elements of these earlier murals as a form of living heritage. The final stage of the project reproduced a selection of this work outside on the walls of the local city. Future work will involve a more formal evaluation of the impact of the intervention on the young offenders, the prison staff, and the local community

Recycle-GAN: Unsupervised Video Retargeting

We introduce a data-driven approach for unsupervised video retargeting that translates content from one domain to another while preserving the style native to a domain, i.e., if contents of John Oliver's speech were to be transferred to Stephen Colbert, then the generated content/speech should be in Stephen Colbert's style. Our approach combines both spatial and temporal information along with adversarial losses for content translation and style preservation. In this work, we first study the advantages of using spatiotemporal constraints over spatial constraints for effective retargeting. We then demonstrate the proposed approach for the problems where information in both space and time matters such as face-to-face translation, flower-to-flower, wind and cloud synthesis, sunrise and sunset.Comment: ECCV 2018; Please refer to project webpage for videos - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aayushb/Recycle-GA

THE MARKET FOR CITRUS HARVESTING LABOR

Labor and Human Capital,

Pseudo-Codewords of Cycle Codes via Zeta Functions

Cycle codes are a special case of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and as such can be decoded using an iterative message-passing decoding algorithm on the associated Tanner graph. The existence of pseudo-codewords is known to cause the decoding algorithm to fail in certain instances. In this paper, we draw a connection between pseudo-codewords of cycle codes and the so-called edge zeta function of the associated normal graph and show how the Newton polyhedron of the zeta function equals the fundamental cone of the code, which plays a crucial role in characterizing the performance of iterative decoding algorithms.Comment: Presented at Information Theory Workshop (ITW), San Antonio, TX, 200

Characterizations of Pseudo-Codewords of LDPC Codes

An important property of high-performance, low complexity codes is the existence of highly efficient algorithms for their decoding. Many of the most efficient, recent graph-based algorithms, e.g. message passing algorithms and decoding based on linear programming, crucially depend on the efficient representation of a code in a graphical model. In order to understand the performance of these algorithms, we argue for the characterization of codes in terms of a so called fundamental cone in Euclidean space which is a function of a given parity check matrix of a code, rather than of the code itself. We give a number of properties of this fundamental cone derived from its connection to unramified covers of the graphical models on which the decoding algorithms operate. For the class of cycle codes, these developments naturally lead to a characterization of the fundamental polytope as the Newton polytope of the Hashimoto edge zeta function of the underlying graph.Comment: Submitted, August 200

Leveraging legacy codes to distributed problem solving environments: A web service approach

This paper describes techniques used to leverage high performance legacy codes as CORBA components to a distributed problem solving environment. It first briefly introduces the software architecture adopted by the environment. Then it presents a CORBA oriented wrapper generator (COWG) which can be used to automatically wrap high performance legacy codes as CORBA components. Two legacy codes have been wrapped with COWG. One is an MPI-based molecular dynamic simulation (MDS) code, the other is a finite element based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for simulating incompressible Navier-Stokes flows. Performance comparisons between runs of the MDS CORBA component and the original MDS legacy code on a cluster of workstations and on a parallel computer are also presented. Wrapped as CORBA components, these legacy codes can be reused in a distributed computing environment. The first case shows that high performance can be maintained with the wrapped MDS component. The second case shows that a Web user can submit a task to the wrapped CFD component through a Web page without knowing the exact implementation of the component. In this way, a user’s desktop computing environment can be extended to a high performance computing environment using a cluster of workstations or a parallel computer