Exploring Linkages Among Agriculture, Trade, and the Environment: Issues for the Next Century

Many trade and environment issues will confront agriculture over the next several years. This report provides an economic framework to better understand these issues and discusses prior empirical inquiries and findings. Four primary issues are addressed: (1) how will environmental policies affect agricultural trade?; (2) how will agricultural trade liberalization affect environmental quality?; (3) to what extent should there be international harmonization of environmental policies and product standards?; and (4) is there economic justification for using trade measures to protect the environment? This report demonstrates that basic economic paradigms can provide a basis for understanding how trade and the environment interact. The few empirical studies based on these concepts have found many of the linkages between trade and the environment to be weak or the effects small. Trade and environment issues remain important to monitor, however, because economic and environmental relationships and domestic and international policies are continually evolving, and decision-makers need good information to confirm or disprove the numerous hypotheses that have surfaced in international discussions.environmental policy, agricultural policy, trade policy, trade, environment, harmonization, Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, International Relations/Trade,

A mean-removed variation of weighted universal vector quantization for image coding

Weighted universal vector quantization uses traditional codeword design techniques to design locally optimal multi-codebook systems. Application of this technique to a sequence of medical images produces a 10.3 dB improvement over standard full search vector quantization followed by entropy coding at the cost of increased complexity. In this proposed variation each codebook in the system is given a mean or 'prediction' value which is subtracted from all supervectors that map to the given codebook. The chosen codebook's codewords are then used to encode the resulting residuals. Application of the mean-removed system to the medical data set achieves up to 0.5 dB improvement at no rate expense

Trafficking in persons monitoring report: January 2009–June 2011

Since 2008, the Australian Government has increased the tempo on investigating and understanding these crimes, and the Australian Institute of Criminology’s research and monitoring program is part of this effort.  The Government has introduced new legislation to crack down on trafficking slavery and servile marriages. Human trafficking is a serious but underreported problem as victims are unwilling to come forward. Since 2004 only 14 people have been convicted of people trafficking-related offences (nine of the 14 defendants were convicted of slavery offences, three of sexual servitude, one of people trafficking and one of labour exploitation). Between January 2009 and June 2011 there were 73 police investigations in Australia and 145 trafficked people entering the government’s victim support program—slightly more than in the previous period. Victims continue to be overwhelmingly from south-east Asia, one-third from Thailand alone. Authored by Jacqueline Joudo Larsen, Lauren Renshaw, Samantha Gray-Barry, Hannah Andrevski, and Toby Corsbie

Asynchronous Assistance: a Social Network Analysis of Influencing Peer Interactions in PeerWise

This mixed methods, investigative case study explored student patterns of use within the online PeerWise platform to identify the most influencing activities and to build a model capable of predicting performance based on these influencing activities. Peerwise is designed to facilitate student peer-to-peer engagement through creating, answering and ranking multiple choice questions; this study sought to understand the relationship between student engagement in Peerwise and learning performance. To address the research question, various usage metrics were explored, visualized and modelled, using social network analysis with Gephi, Tableau and Python. These findings were subsequently analyzed in light of the qualitative survey data gathered. The most significant activity metrics were evaluated leading to rich data visualisations and identified the activities that influenced academic performance in this study. The alignment of the key qualitative and quantitative findings converged on answering questions as having the greatest positive impact on learner performance. Furthermore, from a quantitative perspective the Average Comment Length and Average Explanation Length correlated positively with superior academic performance. Qualitatively, the motivating nature of PeerWise community also engaged learners. The key limitation of the size of the data set within the investigative case study suggests further research, with additional student cohorts as part of an action research paradigm, to broaden these findings

Resolving the Debate on RSV Prophylaxis in Late Preterm Infants

There is still active debate in the scientific literature about the importance of providing respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) prophylaxis to late preterm infants born at 33–35 weeks’ gestational age (wGA). The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Canadian Paediatric Society position statements only advocate for RSV prophylaxis for infants <30 wGA. Several publications prove the contrary, reporting substantial morbidity and even mortality in older GA infants, following RSV infection. Consequently, other Societies, such as from Spain and Italy, have different criteria, and include as candidates 30–32 wGA infants and 33–35 wGA infants with risk factors for severe RSV disease. This chapter will systematically examine the current evidence for RSV prophylaxis in both early and late preterm infants 29–35 wGA and the cost-effectiveness of this strategy with the use of risk scoring tools. The authors will attempt to reconcile the misconception that late preterm infants do not merit RSV prophylaxis and hopefully resolve the long-standing debate that currently exists in many countries worldwide

Carol and Barry Beaman

Carol Beaman, Class of 1966, majored in Mathematics and minored in Accounting, and Barry Beaman, Class of 1965, majored in Physics. This was recorded during the weekend of Homecoming 2010 at the Ames library

Chromospheric activity as age indicator

Chromospheric activity has been calibrated and widely used as an age indicator. However, it has been suggested that the viability of this age indicator is, in the best case, limited to stars younger than about 1.5 Gyr. I aim to define the age range for which chromospheric activity is a robust astrophysical clock. I collected literature measurements of the S-index in field stars, which is a measure of the strength of the H and K lines of the Ca II and a proxy for chromospheric activity, and exploited the homogeneous database of temperature and age determinations for field stars provided by the Geneva-Copenhagen survey of the solar neighbourhood. Field data, inclusive data previously used to calibrate chromospheric ages, confirm the result found using open cluster data, i.e. there is no decay of chromospheric activity after about 2 Gyr. The only existing indication supporting the viability of chromospheric ages older than 2 Gyr is the similarity of chromospheric activity levels in the components of 35 dwarf binaries. However, even in the most optimistic scenario, uncertainty in age determination for field stars and lack of sufficient data in open clusters make any attempt of calibrating an age activity relationship for old stars premature. The hypothesis that chromospheric activity follows the Skumanich law, i.e. that it is proportional to the inverse square root of the age, should be relaxed.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, A&A letters, accepte

Development of FuGO: An ontology for functional genomics investigations

The development of the Functional Genomics Investigation Ontology (FuGO) is a collaborative, international effort that will provide a resource for annotating functional genomics investigations, including the study design, protocols and instrumentation used, the data generated and the types of analysis performed on the data. FuGO will contain both terms that are universal to all functional genomics investigations and those that are domain specific. In this way, the ontology will serve as the “semantic glue” to provide a common understanding of data from across these disparate data sources. In addition, FuGO will reference out to existing mature ontologies to avoid the need to duplicate these resources, and will do so in such a way as to enable their ease of use in annotation. This project is in the early stages of development; the paper will describe efforts to initiate the project, the scope and organization of the project, the work accomplished to date, and the challenges encountered, as well as future plans

Impact experiments into multiple-mesh targets: Concept development of a lightweight collisional bumper

The utility of multiple-mesh targets as potential lightweight shields to protect spacecraft in low-Earth orbit against collisional damage is explored. Earlier studies revealed that single meshes comminute hypervelocity impactors with efficiencies comparable to contiguous targets. Multiple interaction of projectile fragments with any number of meshes should lead to increased comminution, deceleration, and dispersion of the projectile, such that all debris exiting the mesh stack possesses low specific energies (ergs/sq cm) that would readily be tolerated by many flight systems. The study is conceptually exploring the sensitivity of major variables such as impact velocity, the specific areal mass (g/sq cm) of the total mesh stack (SM), and the separation distance (S) between individual meshes. Most experiments employed five or ten meshes with total SM typically less than 0.5 the specific mass of the impactor, and silicate glass impactors rather than metal projectiles. While projectile comminution increases with increasing impact velocity due to progressively higher shock stresses, encounters with multiple-meshes at low velocity (1-2 km/s) already lead to significant disruption of the glass impactors, with the resulting fragments being additionally decelerated and dispersed by subsequent meshes, and, unlike most contiguous single-plate bumpers, leading to respectable performance at low velocity. Total specific bumper mass must be the subject of careful trade-off studies; relatively massive bumpers will generate too much debris being dislodged from the bumper itself, while exceptionally lightweight designs will not cause sufficient comminution, deceleration, or dispersion of the impactor. Separation distance was found to be a crucial design parameter, as it controls the dispersion of the fragment cloud. Substantial mass savings could result if maximum separation distances were employed. The total mass of debris dislodged by multiple-mesh stacks is modestly smaller than that of single, contiguous-membrane shields. The cumulative surface area of all penetration holes in multiple mesh stacks is an order of magnitude smaller than that in analog multiple-foil shields, suggesting good long-term performance of the mesh designs. Due to different experimental conditions, direct and quantitative comparison with other lightweight shields is not possible at present