A definition and the concepts of agricultural literacy: a national study

The purposes of this study were to refine a group definition of agricultural literacy, identify agricultural subject areas that fall within the framework of agricultural literacy, and identify those concepts about agriculture that every citizen should know. This investigation was conducted using the Delphi technique. Panelists were nominated by land grant university agricultural education faculty;Data were collected using three instruments. The first instrument requested every panelist to submit his/her definition of agricultural literacy. Quantitative content analysis was conducted on 78 definitions and yielded a consensus definition. The definition identified 11 broad areas of agricultural knowledge. The second instrument asked panelists to submit one concept for each of the 11 broad agricultural subject areas identified in the group definition. The third instrument asked panelists to submit demographic information and rank the 11 agricultural subject areas on their importance to agricultural literacy and the knowledge they possessed about each area;Data analysis consisted of frequency counts, percentages, the Wilcoxon Sum Rank test, the Mann-Whitney U-test, the Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance, the Dunn\u27s Multicomparison procedure, and Spearman-Rank correlation;The following conclusions were drawn from the analysis and interpretation of the data in this study. Agricultural literacy describes the understanding and possession of knowledge needed to synthesize, analyze, and communicate basic information about agriculture. Agricultural literacy encompasses 11 broad agricultural subject areas. Five hundred ninety concepts were generated by panelists, and 394 concepts remain after refinement. The agricultural concepts generated demonstrate the vast amount of knowledge from other disciplines agriculture applies to produce food and fiber. The concepts also indicated how much agriculture is affected by and affects the world in which we live. Analysis of panelists\u27 subject area rankings indicated that five area importance rankings were significantly related to subject knowledge rankings, and four subject area importance mean rankings were significantly different from the related subject area knowledge rankings

Spider (Arachnida: Araneae) distribution across the timberline in the Swiss Central Alps (Alp Flix, Grisons) and three morphologically remarkable species

We collected 6251 adult epigeic spiders from the dwarf-shrub heath to subalpine coniferous forest on Alp Flix (CH, canton Grisons, 1950 m) between May 2005 and May 2006 using pitfall traps. Total species richness and activity density of all species decreased from the open land to the forest, although this pattern varied according to family. The distribution of the 102 species found indicates that the small area around a single tree at the timberline provides habitats for both open land and forest spider species as well as some possible timberline specialists. Five species were new to the canton Grisons: Centromerita bicolor, Centromerita concinna, Hilaira excisa, Meioneta alpica and Tallusia experta. Three species showed remarkable morphological characteristics and were analysed in more detail. We found males of Pelecopsis radicicola without the characteristic longitudinal depression on the raised carapace. It is shown that the males of Meioneta alpica have a considerably variable lamella characteristica, which is nevertheless distinct from the sister species Meioneta ressli. Because we found intermediate forms of the head region described for Metopobactrus prominulus and M. schenkeli, respectively, M. schenkeli is considered a syn. nov. of M. prominulus. This study shows that the known distribution and taxonomic status of various spider taxa in the Central Alps are still incomplete and further work on arthropods in remote areas should be strongly encouraged

An experimental study on the parameters affecting the cyclic lateral response of monopiles for offshore wind turbines in sand

The design of monopile foundations for offshore wind turbine structures is dominated by requirements resulting from serviceability and fatigue limit state. To fulfil these criteria, the load deflection-behaviour and therefore long-term accumulations of permanent deflections and rotations of the monopile foundation due to cyclic occurring wind and wave loads have to be predicted. In this paper a brief overview on current design code practice as well as other proposed methods for the prediction of accumulated deflections or rotations is given. Further, the results of a systematic model test study dealing with the response of monopiles to lateral cyclic loading in medium dense sand at different cyclic load ratios, load eccentricities and pile embedment lengths are described and evaluated. The observations of the model test study are supplemented by results of a second test series involving the visualisation of displacement fields around laterally loaded piles by means of particle image velocimetry. Based on the findings and the results of previous experimental investigations, recommendations regarding the prediction of displacement accumulations for large diameter monopiles in sand are given. © 202

Autoencoder Neural Networks versus External Auditors: Detecting Unusual Journal Entries in Financial Statement Audits

With the increasing complexity of business processes in today\u27s organizations and the ever-growing amount of structured accounting data, identifying erroneous or fraudulent business transactions and corresponding journal entries poses a major challenge for public accountants at annual audits. In current audit practice, mainly static rules are applied which check only a few attributes of a journal entry for suspicious values. Encouraged by numerous successful adoptions of deep learning in various domains we suggest an approach for applying autoencoder neural networks to detect unusual journal entries within individual financial accounts. The identified journal entries are compared to a list of entries that were manually tagged by two experienced auditors. The comparison shows high f-scores and high recall for all analyzed financial accounts. Additionally, the autoencoder identifies anomalous journal entries that have been overlooked by the auditors. The results underpin the applicability and usefulness of deep learning techniques in financial statement audits

A GA-based household scheduler

One way of making activity-based travel analysis operational for transport planning is multi-agent micro-simulation. Modelling activity and trip generation based on individual and social characteristics are central steps in this method. The model presented here generates complete daily activity schedules based on the structure of a household and its members' activity calendars. The model assumes that the household is another basic decision-making unit for travel demand aside from individual mobility needs. Results of the model are schedules containing complete information about activity type and sequence, locations, and means of transportation, as well as activity start times and durations. The generated schedules are the outcome of a probabilistic optimisation using genetic algorithms. This iterative method improves solutions found in a random search according to the specification of a fitness criterion, which equals utility here. It contains behavioural assumptions about individuals as well as the household level. Individual utility is derived from the number of activities and their respective durations. It is reduced by costs of travelling and penalties for late, respectively early arrival. The household level is represented directly by the utility of joint activities, and indirectly by allocation of activities and means of transportation to household members. The paper presents initial tests with a three-person household, detailing resulting schedules, and discussing run-time experiences. A sensitivity analysis of the joint utility parameter impact is also include

"Mein Herz hat mich nie im Stich gelassen!" Innere Bilder im Prozess der Inkorporation einestransplantierten Herzens

Harvey's modern insight into the archetypal idea of the heart as the centre of blood motion transforms the heart into a machine which becomes a spare part interchangeable from any chest to any other {[}Hillman]. As we try to show in the case of Elmar, a 41-year-old technician 2 years after his transplantation, the possibilities of cardiac surgery and its archetypal foundations do not exclude a personalized and symbolic vision of both the `old' heart and the `new' one. Intrapersonal and therapeutic issues of this `inter-cardiac conflict' are discussed

XAI in the Audit Domain - Explaining an Autoencoder Model for Anomaly Detection

Detecting erroneous or fraudulent business transactions andcorresponding journal entries imposes a significant challenge for auditors duringannual audits. One possible solution to cope with these problems is the use ofmachine learning methods, such as an autoencoder, to identify unusual journalentries within individual financial accounts. There are several methods for theinterpretation of such black-box models, summarized under the term eXplainableArtificial Intelligence (XAI), but these are not suitable for autoencoders. This paperproposes an approach for interpreting autoencoders, which consists of labelingthe journal entries first using the autoencoder and then training models suitablefor the application of XAI methods using these labels. The results obtained areevaluated with the help of human auditors, showing that an autoencoder model is not onlyable to capture relevant features of the domain but also provides additionalvaluable insights for identifying anomalous journal entries

Agricultural Literacy: A Framework For Communicating To The Public Sector

The purposes of this study were to refine a group definition of agricultural literacy, identify agricultural subject areas that fall within the framework of agricultural literacy, and identify those concepts about agriculture that every citizen should know

First-order query evaluation on structures of bounded degree

We consider the enumeration problem of first-order queries over structures of bounded degree. It was shown that this problem is in the Constant-Delaylin class. An enumeration problem belongs to Constant-Delaylin if for an input of size n it can be solved by: - an O(n) precomputation phase building an index structure, - followed by a phase enumerating the answers with no repetition and a constant delay between two consecutive outputs. In this article we give a different proof of this result based on Gaifman's locality theorem for first-order logic. Moreover, the constants we obtain yield a total evaluation time that is triply exponential in the size of the input formula, matching the complexity of the best known evaluation algorithms