The Role of International Trade in Extension Education

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Discussion: Exchange Rates, Energy Policy and Outcomes in Agricultural Markets

These three invited papers examine the role that exchange rates may have in influencing commodity prices, input prices and farm income. The papers arguably represent one of the most important recent attempts to quantify and explain these new linkages. As U.S. and world agriculture moves from a period of high output prices to a period of lower prices, understanding the impact of macroeconomic variables on farm input costs and farm income will become more important. Further, it will be equally important for policy makers to undertake appropriate market interventions in order to have maximum effectiveness should this period of cost-price-squeeze continue to intensify. Each of the papers has something significant to contribute to the understanding and debate of these new linkages between agriculture, the macroeconomic environment, and the energy sector.energy, exchange rates, macropolicy, markets, trade, Agribusiness, Farm Management, Financial Economics, Marketing, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, F42,

C. Parr Rosson, III: Lifetime Achievement Award

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Forces Shaping Trade: The WTO, Trade Agreements, and Market Integration

International Relations/Trade,

Personalization by Partial Evaluation.

The central contribution of this paper is to model personalization by the programmatic notion of partial evaluation.Partial evaluation is a technique used to automatically specialize programs, given incomplete information about their input.The methodology presented here models a collection of information resources as a program (which abstracts the underlying schema of organization and flow of information),partially evaluates the program with respect to user input,and recreates a personalized site from the specialized program.This enables a customizable methodology called PIPE that supports the automatic specialization of resources,without enumerating the interaction sequences beforehand .Issues relating to the scalability of PIPE,information integration,sessioniz-ling scenarios,and case studies are presented

Dynamics of Megaelectron Volt Electrons Observed in the Inner Belt by PROBA-V/EPT

Using the observations of the EPT (Energetic Particle Telescope) onboard the satellite PROBA-V we study the dynamics of inner and outer belt electrons from 500 keV to 8 MeV during quiet periods and geomagnetic storms. This high time-resolution (2 sec) spectrometer operating at the altitude of 820 km on a low polar orbit is providing continuously valuable electrons fluxes for already 5 years. We emphasize especially that some MeV electrons are observed in low quantities in the inner belt, even during periods when they are not observed by Van Allen Probe (VAP). We show that they are not due to proton contamination but to clear injections of particles from the outer belt during strong geomagnetic storms of March and June 2015, and September 2017. Electrons with lower energy are injected also during less strong storms and the L-shell of the electron flux peak in the outer belt shifts inward with a high dependence on the electron energy. With the new high resolution EPT instrument, we can study the dynamics of relativistic electrons, including MeV electrons in the inner radiation belt, revealing how and when such electrons are injected into the inner belt and how long they reside there before being scattered into the Earth's atmosphere or lost by other mechanisms

THE U.S.-MEXICO FREE TRADE AGREEMENT: THE MEXICAN PERSPECTIVE: DISCUSSION

International Relations/Trade,

Cultural Barriers and Agricultural Trade in the Western Hemisphere

This study analyzes the impacts of cultural distance on bilateral trade flows in the Western Hemisphere using a Fixed Effects Vector Decomposition (FEVD). Four cultural dimensions of Hofstede are used to capture cultural distance. The results found that the effects of each dimension vary considerably with three of four dimensions (UAI, PDI, and MFI) have a negative impact and one dimension (ICI) has a positive effect. The magnitude of ICI is large enough to offset the negative effects of the other three dimensions resulting in a net positive effect of cultural distance, suggesting that culturally-dissimilar countries trade more than less.agricultural trade, cultural distance, gravity model, International Relations/Trade,

Photon-induced Self Trapping and Entanglement of a Bosonic Josephson Junction Inside an Optical Resonator

We study the influence of photons on the dynamics and the ground state of the atoms in a Bosonic Josephson junction inside an optical resonator. The system is engineered in such a way that the atomic tunneling can be tuned by changing the number of photons in the cavity. In this setup the cavity photons are a new means of control, which can be utilized both in inducing self-trapping solutions and in driving the crossover of the ground state from an atomic coherent state to a Schr\"odinger's cat state. This is achieved, for suitable setup configurations, with interatomic interactions weaker than those required in the absence of cavity. This is corroborated by the study of the entanglement entropy. In the presence of a laser, this quantum indicator attains its maximum value (which marks the formation of the cat-like state and, at a semiclassical level, the onset of self-trapping) for attractions smaller than those of the bare junction.Comment: 5 page