EFRC Cereal Variety and Mixture Trials 2001 – Preliminary Results

Of 7 winter wheats grown at 3 sites in southern England in 2001, the highest yielding was the soft wheat Claire; the breadmaking varieties Hereward, Shamrock and Spark did well. Of the feed wheats, Aardvark outyielded Deben. Of various variety mixtures tried, Aardvark/Claire/Deben was highest yielding. When seed was saved from the 2000 harvest of Hereward/Malacca/Shamrock and grown in 2001, it outyielded the first generation mixture, suggesting that some adaptation had occurred, relative composition changing in response to the local conditions. Winter oats and triticale were trialled at one site in Berkshire. The triticales Ego and Fidelio performed well, as did the winter oat Kingfisher. The oat mixture Ego/Fidelio/Taurus outyielded the mean of its component varieties. The triticale mixture Ego/Fidelio/Taurus showed adaptation from 2000 to 2001

Identification of Stochastic Wiener Systems using Indirect Inference

We study identification of stochastic Wiener dynamic systems using so-called indirect inference. The main idea is to first fit an auxiliary model to the observed data and then in a second step, often by simulation, fit a more structured model to the estimated auxiliary model. This two-step procedure can be used when the direct maximum-likelihood estimate is difficult or intractable to compute. One such example is the identification of stochastic Wiener systems, i.e.,~linear dynamic systems with process noise where the output is measured using a non-linear sensor with additive measurement noise. It is in principle possible to evaluate the log-likelihood cost function using numerical integration, but the corresponding optimization problem can be quite intricate. This motivates studying consistent, but sub-optimal, identification methods for stochastic Wiener systems. We will consider indirect inference using the best linear approximation as an auxiliary model. We show that the key to obtain a reliable estimate is to use uncertainty weighting when fitting the stochastic Wiener model to the auxiliary model estimate. The main technical contribution of this paper is the corresponding asymptotic variance analysis. A numerical evaluation is presented based on a first-order finite impulse response system with a cubic non-linearity, for which certain illustrative analytic properties are derived.Comment: The 17th IFAC Symposium on System Identification, SYSID 2015, Beijing, China, October 19-21, 201

What Lies Beneath: Treatment of Canvas-backed Pennsylvania Coal Mining Maps for Digitization

An ongoing program to preserve approximately seven hundred oversized, canvas-backed, coal mining maps from the CONSOL Energy Mining Map Collection was initiated by the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) in 2007, supported by funding from the United States Department of the Interior Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation (OSM) and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA-DEP). The main goal of this project is to stabilize and clean the mining maps for digitization at the OSM National Mine Map Repository (NMMR) located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The digitized data of the underground mines will be incorporated into Geographical Information Systems relative to mine safety, land reclamation, current mining operations, and new development

The long-term agronomic performance of organic stockless rotations

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. Two long-term experiments were established with the aim of evaluating the agronomic and economic performance of organic stockless rotations. In total, four different rotations were evaluated at two sites in the south (Elm Farm Research Centre) and east (ADAS Terrington) of England. All of the rotations included either a one or two-year red clover green manure crop to provide nitrogen for subsequent crops and it was found that this was sufficient to support three or four years of arable cropping. Over a period of eleven years at EFRC and five years at ADAS Terrington, there was no evidence of a decline in crop yield, although there were significant year-to-year variations. Crop yields were generally equivalent to or greater than average organic yields. Levels of soil available P and K was maintained at both sites at non-limiting levels. Pest and diseases were not problematic, but perennial weeds posed the most significant problem

Advocacy 20 years on from Hampel: is it time we revisited the postgraduate teaching of advocacy?

This paper seeks to discuss the teaching of advocacy as a discipline with specific reference to the way in which advocacy is taught on the Bar Professional Training Course in England and Wales. The Advocacy Training Council favours the Hampel Method of teaching advocacy first developed more than 20 years ago in Australia. The paper seeks to review the use of the Hampel Method by offering a critique of behaviourist learning theory from a constructivist standpoint and putting forward alternative teaching techniques which are in harmony with the principles of constructivism, experiential learning and productive failure. We conclude that the teaching of advocacy can be improved and that greater scholarship is needed in this important area to ensure students are taught using the best techniques

A planning study for palliative spine treatment using StatRT and megavoltage CT simulation.

Megavoltage CT (MVCT) simulation on the TomoTherapy Hi·Art system is an alternative to conventional CT for treatment planning in the presence of severe metal artifact. StatRT is a new feature that was implemented on the TomoTherapy operator station for performing online MVCT scanning, treatment planning and treatment delivery in one session. The clinical feasibility of using the StatRT technique and MVCT simulation to palliative treatment for a patient with substantial spinal metallic hardware is described. A patient with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer involving the thoracic spine underwent conventional kilovoltage CT simulation. The metal artifact due to stainless steel spine-stabilizing rods was too severe for treatment planning, despite attempts to correct using density override. The patient was then re-scanned using MVCT on a tomotherapy unit. Plans were generated using both StatRT and conventional tomotherapy planning (Tomo plan) with different settings for comparison. StatRT planning ran a total of five iterations in a short planning window (10-15 min). Two Tomo plans were generated using: (1) five iterations in the "full scatter" mode, and (2) 300 iterations in the "beamlet" mode. It was noted that the DVH of the StatRT plan was almost identical to the Tomo plan optimized by the "full scatter" mode and the same number of iterations. Dose distribution analysis reveals that these three planning methods yielded comparable doses to heart, lungs and targets. This work also demonstrated that undermodulation can result in a high degree of thread effects. The overall time for the treatment process (including 7 minutes for simulation, 15 minutes for contouring, 10 minutes for planning and 5 minutes for delivery) decreases from hours to around 40 minutes using the StatRT procedure. StatRT is a feasible treatment-planning tool for physicians to scan, contour and treat patients within one hour. This can be particularly beneficial in urgent palliative treatments