A SURVEY OF THE FOODSERVICE INDUSTRY

Agribusiness,

Financial Performance of Dairy Cooperatives

Combined balance sheets and operating statements were used to develop benchmark financial ratios for dairy marketing cooperatives. Data from 291 cooperatives were summarized for five types of dairy cooperatives, then by three types and three size combinations. Both type and size of cooperative made differences in most of the 16 financial ratios calculated as well as in the common size balance sheets and operating statements.Finance, Dairy, Cooperatives, Milk, Ratios, Agribusiness,

Characteristic Functions Describing the Power Absorption Response of Periodic Structures to Partially Coherent Fields

Many new types of sensing or imaging surfaces are based on periodic thin films. It is explained how the response of those surfaces to partially coherent fields can be fully characterized by a set of functions in the wavenumber spectrum domain. The theory is developed here for the case of 2D absorbers with TE illumination and arbitrary material properties in the plane of the problem, except for the resistivity which is assumed isotropic. Sum and difference coordinates in both spatial and spectral domains are conveniently used to represent the characteristic functions, which are specialized here to the case of periodic structures. Those functions can be either computed or obtained experimentally. Simulations rely on solvers based on periodic-boundary conditions, while experiments correspond to Energy Absorption Interferometry (EAI), already described in the literature. We derive rules for the convergence of the representation versus the number of characteristic functions used, as well as for the sampling to be considered in EAI experiments. Numerical examples are given for the case of absorbing strips printed on a semi-infinite substrate.Comment: Submitted to JOSA

Reviews, Reviewers, and Reviewing: The “Tragedy of the Commons” in the Scientific Publication Process

Everybody wants to get a good review but not everybody is willing to give a good review. In my experience, this fact has resulted in a modern-day instance of “the tragedy of the commons” in which everyone seeks a precious common resource (in this case, the scholarship of peer review in scientific publication) but everyone less widely provides it. Editors face an emerging review culture in which many qualified colleagues often seem too busy, too disinterested, or simply too inaccessible to engage with for peer review purposes, and which leads to issues that are, indeed, tragic in the practice of science

Measuring Consumer Motivations to Use Marketspace

Participation in electronic commerce requires the diffusion of new technologies and techniques among the intended new electronic customers. This paper utilizes the theoretical perspective of uses and gratifications to develop measures of consumer motivations for access and use of the Internet, which is an important diffusion issue that precedes the decision to engage in electronic commerce. Motivations for the use of new commercial technology are the underlying factors that ultimately lead to the acceptance and subsequent diffusion of new commercial practices in consumer markets. Produced with the cooperation of America Online and HotWired, this research reports the results of a measure development study for three key measures that assess consumer adoption and use of commercial Internet services: Internet process motivations, Internet content motivations and Internet social motivations

Rejoined and Regenerated: Response to Responses to “Reviews, Reviewers, and Reviewing: The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ in the Scientific Publication Process”

The joy of writing critiques about the editorial process is doubly enhanced when engaged in debates such as this one wherein I find the most fascinating views, points, and counterpoints in correspondence to my own. I am simply pleased to say that the sterling colleagues who have chosen to respond to and rejoin my initial essays are highly skilled and insightful editors in their own right, and we all benefit from the colloquy that ensues in such discussions about how to improve peer reviews in our field of science

Characterization of Power Absorption Response of Periodic 3D Structures to Partially Coherent Fields

In many applications of absorbing structures it is important to understand their spatial response to incident fields, for example in thermal solar panels, bolometric imaging and controlling radiative heat transfer. In practice, the illuminating field often originates from thermal sources and is only spatially partially coherent when reaching the absorbing device. In this paper, we present a method to fully characterize the way a structure can absorb such partially coherent fields. The method is presented for any 3D material and accounts for the partial coherence and partial polarization of the incident light. This characterization can be achieved numerically using simulation results or experimentally using the Energy Absorption Interferometry (EAI) that has been described previously in the literature. The absorbing structure is characterized through a set of absorbing functions, onto which any partially coherent field can be projected. This set is compact for any structure of finite extent and the absorbing function discrete for periodic structures

Stafford Letter to Astronaut Group - Prestige and Morale

On October 8th, 1969, then Chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA, Thomas P. Stafford, addressed the rest of the astronaut group in a letter about group prestige and morale