Developing an Indicator for Environment Improvement Potential in the Agricultural Sector

Agriculture and forestry produce various environmental benefits such as CO2 absorption and water storage as well as food and energy crops. Environmental benefits contribute to improving the environment. This means agriculture has the potential to improve the environment. By measuring such potential, we can understand agriculture's affect on the environment. However, both environmental loads and benefits should be taken into account because agriculture produces not only environmental benefits but also environmental loads, and both affect the agricultural potential for improving the environment. Furthermore, as potential cannot be calculated by a single environmental factor, it is necessary to consider various environmental factors in the measurements. Therefore, a new comprehensive indicator is required for understanding the potential to improve the environment. To develop the indicator, the National Accounting Matrix including Environmental Accounts (NAMEA) is applied to manage information concerning economies and environments, and the Ecological Footprint (EF) can also be adapted to integrate individual environmental factors. In this paper, a new indicator is introduced that measures the agricultural sector's potential for improving the environment. A trial estimation of the indicator is done by using a case study from Hokkaido, Japan.Environmental Economics and Policy, Q56, Q57,

Extracting Troubles from Daily Reports based on Syntactic Pieces

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

Reduced-stress GaN epitaxial layers grown on Si(1 1 1) by using a porous GaN interlayer converted from GaAs

This paper reports the reduced-stress GaN epitaxial growth on Si (1 1 1) using a porous GaN interlayer which is formed from GaAs layer by a novel nitridation process. Initially a 2 μm thick GaAs layer is grown on a Si(1 1 1) substrate by MBE. Then, a GaN buffer layer of 20 nm thick is grown on the GaAs layer at 550°C in a MOVPE reactor. The GaAs layer capped with the GaN buffer layer is annealed in NH3 to 1000°C. Through this process, a porous GaN layer is formed beneath the GaN cap layer. An epitaxial GaN layer is grown on the GaN buffer layer at 1000°C in the MOVPE reactor. The epitaxial layer grown on the porous-GaN/Si(1 1 1) structure is found to have no cracks on the surface. In contrast, an epitaxial layer grown on the GaAs layer nitrated without a cap layer many cracks are found in the epilayer and the layer is sometimes peeled off from the substrate. It is found that the surface morphology of the GaN/porous-GaN/Si(1 1 1) sample is markedly improved by employing a 40 nm-thick interlayer grown at 800°C in addition to the above processes. A PL spectrum with a high intensity ratio between the excitonic emission and the deep yellow emission is obtained for the GaN/porous-GaN/Si(1 1 1) sample. E2 peak position in Raman scattering spectrum also shows a reduced stress for the GaN epilayers grown on the porous-GaN/Si(1 1 1)

A new nail-plate for treatment of fracture of the neck of the femur

Operative treatment of fractures of the neck and trochanter of the femur does not always produce a satisfactory result. This is usually due to biomechanical problems with the available internal fixation methods. We studied the anatomy of the neck of the femur by roentgenograms and sectional specimens from 70 cadavers. In addition, various nail-plates were subjected to buckling tests and, by simultaneously attaching a strain-gauge, stress distribution was calculated. The results of these preliminary studies were then used to design a new nail-plate better than those available at present. Testing of this new nail-plate confirmed that it had a strength equal to that of the Holt nail-plate (the strongest of the available nail-plates).</p

Shape-dependent local strain in gold nanorods: data-driven atomic-resolution electron microscopy analysis

The local variation in inter-atomic distances, or local lattice strain often influences significantly material properties of nanoparticles. Strain measurement with ~1% precision is provided by recent atomic-resolution electron microscopy. However, the precision has been limited by noises in the experimental data. Here, we have applied one of the data-driven analyses, Gaussian process regression to predict true form of strain. The precision has been improved to be sub-percent of 0.2 % and more for detection of local strain. Rod-shaped nanoparticles have been revealed to contain characteristic lattice expansion ~+0.6 % around the subsurface cap tip area. The experimental results are reproduced by molecular dynamics simulations of the corresponding shaped atomic models. The strain peculiar to nanorods are explained in terms of curvature-dependent non-uniform surface stress due to shape anisotropy. The present results bring a hint to nanoscale engineering to optimize the strain in nanoparticles by shape control