Texas-Oklahoma Producer Cotton Market Summary: 2003/2004

The analysis of the West Texas and East Texas/Oklahoma spot market using the Daily Price Estimation System (DPES) indicated an overall increase in quality in the 2003/04 marketing year. The results also indicated an overall price increase compared to the last four years, averaging 63.68 cents a pound. The combined total bales and total sales between the two regions were lower in 2003/04, with most of the decrease due to lower sales in West Texas. Total sales in East Texas/Oklahoma did not change much and total bales were 15 percent higher than their 2002/03 level. For the 2003/04 marketing year, the results indicated lower premiums for low leaf grade and higher premiums for higher staple length, color grade, and higher level of strength. However, premium levels for better than base quality first digit color grade appear to be minimal. Price discounts in 2003/04 for staple length, first and second digit color grade, strength, and uniformity either remained unchanged or decreased, while discounts for leaf, micronaire, and bark increased compared to the 2002/03 levels.Crop Production/Industries,

The Impacts of U.S. Cotton Programs on the World Market: An Analysis of Brazilian and African WTO Petitions

Brazil, supported by Australia challenged U.S. cotton programs at the September 2003 meeting of the WTO settlement Body. Brazil complained that U.S. cotton subsidies such as marketing loans, export credits, commodity certificates, direct payments and counter cyclical payments are depressing world prices and are injurious to Brazilian farmers. In addition, the West and Central African Countries (WCA) countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad have filed a petition with the WTO claiming that they are losing export earnings of 1 billion dollar a year as a result of subsidies by the United States and the European Union (BBMC, 2003). For WCA countries, both production and export of cotton have increased in the last decade but export revenues have declined during the same period due to lower prices.Agricultural and Food Policy,

The Impacts of U.S. Cotton Programs on the World Market: An Analysis of Brazilian and African WTO Petitions

International Relations/Trade,

2006 Global Cotton Outlook

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Assessing the Impacts of the Chinese TRQ System and U.S. Subsidies on the World Cotton Market

This article compares how eliminating the U.S. cotton subsidy program and the Chinese cotton tariff-rate quota (TRQ) would affect the world cotton market. The results show China's TRQ has a greater negative impact on the world cotton market than do U.S. subsidies. Compared to a base-level estimate, the elimination of China's TRQ increases the world cotton price and increases the quantity of world cotton traded, whereas the elimination of U.S. cotton subsidies increases the cotton price (but less than under TRQ elimination) and decreases the world cotton trade. The combined effect of eliminating both programs is also shown.International Relations/Trade,

Structured mesh generation and numerical analysis of a scroll expander in an open-source environment

The spread of the organic rankine cycle applications has driven researchers and companies to focus on the improvement of their performance. In small to medium-sized plants, cyanthe expander is the component that has typically attracted the most attention. One of the most used types of machine in this scenario is the scroll. Among the other methods, numerical analyses have been increasingly exploited for the investigation of the machine's behaviour. Nonetheless, there are major challenges for the successful application of computational fluid dynamics cyan(CFD) to scrolls. Specifically, the dynamic mesh treatment required to capture the movement of working chambers and the nature of the expanding fluids require special care. In this work, a mesh generator for scroll machines is presented. Given few inputs, the software described provides the mesh and the nodal positions required for the evolution of the motion in a predefined mesh motion approach. The mesh generator is developed ad hoc for the coupling with the open-source CFD suite OpenFOAM. A full analysis is then carried out on a reverse-engineered commercial machine, including the refrigerant properties calculations via CoolProp. It is demonstrated that the proposed methodology allows for a fast simulation and achieves a good agreement with respect to former analyses

Understanding Acre for Cotton

The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 was passed into law on May 22, 2008 with veto override votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate (House 2008). A difference between the 2002 and the 2008 bills is the newly instituted revenue-based counter-cyclical program called the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program available beginning crop year 2009. The ACRE program is offered as an alternative to the counter-cyclical payment (CCP) program that was in place during the 2002-2008 period. Beginning with the 2009 crop year, producers will have the option to enroll their farm in either the CCP program or the ACRE program. If ACRE is elected, producers cannot change program participation for the duration of the 2008 farm bill (ERS 2008). This is a very complex decision due to the number of variables that must be considered and depends on the individual farm situation. It requires that farms, rather than crops or commodities, enter the program, so that the decision relies on the impacts of program choice on farm income. That aside, understanding commodity situations is a first step toward understanding and making decisions on individual farm situations. The purpose of this briefing paper is to provide assistance in understanding the differences between the ACRE and CCP programs for one crop, cotton, in one state, Texas. The briefing paper will also show the results of a comparison between CCP and ACRE payments using a sample of actual farm data.Agricultural and Food Policy,

CFD Simulations of Single- and Twin-Screw Machines with OpenFOAM

Over the last decade, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been increasingly applied for the design and analysis of positive displacement machines employed in vapor compression and power generation applications. Particularly, single-screw and twin-screw machines have received attention from the researchers, leading to the development and application of increasingly efficient techniques for their numerical simulation. Modeling the operation of such machines including the dynamics of the compression (or expansion) process and the deforming working chambers is particularly challenging. The relative motion of the rotors and the variation of the gaps during machine operation are a few of the major numerical challenges towards the implementation of reliable CFD models. Moreover, evaluating the thermophysical properties of real gases represents an additional challenge to be addressed. Special care must be given to defining equation of states or generating tables and computing the thermodynamic properties. Among several CFD suite available, the open-source OpenFOAM tool OpenFOAM, is regarded as a reliable and accurate software for carrying out CFD analyses. In this paper, the dynamic meshing techniques available within the software as well as new libraries implemented for expanding the functionalities of the software are presented. The simulation of both a single-screw and a twin-screw machine is described and results are discussed. Specifically, for the single-screw expander case, the geometry will be released as open-access for the entire community. Besides, the real gas modeling possibilities implemented in the software will be described and the CoolProp thermophysical library integration will be presented

Affordances in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Robotics: A Survey

The concept of affordances appeared in psychology during the late 60s as an alternative perspective on the visual perception of the environment. It was revolutionary in the intuition that the way living beings perceive the world is deeply influenced by the actions they are able to perform. Then, across the last 40 years, it has influenced many applied fields, e.g., design, human-computer interaction, computer vision, and robotics. In this paper, we offer a multidisciplinary perspective on the notion of affordances. We first discuss the main definitions and formalizations of the affordance theory, then we report the most significant evidence in psychology and neuroscience that support it, and finally we review the most relevant applications of this concept in robotics

Explicit action perception shares resources with music syntax: A controlled behavioral study

Given evidence that neural resources monitoring language syntax also underlie the perception of music syntax (Koelsch, 2005) and recently a proposed ‘syntax’ in sequential action (Fazio et al., 2009), a previous EEG study investigated whether neural resources may be shared between implicit perception of music and action (Sammler et al., 2010). Results yielded a syntactic-like ERP pattern elicited by the errors in sequential action, but no interaction of resources across the music and action domains. The present follow-up study sought behavioral signs of resource-overlap when perception is instead explicit. Five chords accompanied five reach-to-grasp images in a 2x2 factorial interference paradigm (target: regular/irregular cadence paired with correct/incorrect grasp). Results indeed revealed an interaction of resources which monitored the action and music sequences, manifested in task accuracy. A control experiment with accompanying pure tones instead of chords (standard/deviant final tone) did not, however, show the same interaction. Crucially, the null-result control study speaks to a neural resource involved in action perception that is shared only with syntactically organized sound, not a simple auditory distraction. This promising behavioral data warrants follow-up neuropsychological experimentation with explicit-task paradigms