3,699 research outputs found
Chinese Dairy Farm Performance and Policy Implications in the New Millennium
China has significantly expanded its dairy cow numbers and increased its dairy processing capacity over the last five year in an attempt to meet increased demand for dairy products. China’s net imports of dairy products, however, has expanded at a growth rate in excess of 30% during the same period. To consider why China is still struggling to meet rising dairy product demand in China in the new millennium, this paper employs a new set of farm-level survey data and stochastic input distance functions to empirically estimate Total factor Productivity (TFP) on China’s dairy farms. The results show that the TFP growth has been positive on and this rise in productivity has been mostly driven by technological change. However, the new results show that on average, the same farms have been behind the advancing technical frontier. We also find one of the drivers of the dairy farms’ productivity advances is the relatively robust rate of technological change. The results suggest that efforts to achieve increased adoption of new technologies and better advice on how to use the technologies and manage production and marketing within the dairy farm sector, will likely further increase TFP growth in China.Distance Function; Total Factor Productivity; Technical Inefficiency; Dairy Farms
Topological Dirac states beyond orbitals for silicene on SiC(0001) surface
The discovery of intriguing properties related to the Dirac states in
graphene has spurred huge interest in exploring its two-dimensional group-IV
counterparts, such as silicene, germanene, and stanene. However, these
materials have to be obtained via synthesizing on substrates with strong
interfacial interactions, which usually destroy their intrinsic
()-orbital Dirac states. Here we report a theoretical study on the
existence of Dirac states arising from the orbitals instead of
orbitals in silicene on 4H-SiC(0001), which survive in spite of the strong
interfacial interactions. We also show that the exchange field together with
the spin-orbital coupling give rise to a detectable band gap of 1.3 meV. Berry
curvature calculations demonstrate the nontrivial topological nature of such
Dirac states with a Chern number , presenting the potential of realizing
quantum anomalous Hall effect for silicene on SiC(0001). Finally, we construct
a minimal effective model to capture the low-energy physics of this system.
This finding is expected to be also applicable to germanene and stanene, and
imply great application potentials in nanoelectronics.Comment: 6 Figures , Accepted by Nano Letter
Reliable Generation of EHR Time Series via Diffusion Models
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are rich sources of patient-level data,
including laboratory tests, medications, and diagnoses, offering valuable
resources for medical data analysis. However, concerns about privacy often
restrict access to EHRs, hindering downstream analysis. Researchers have
explored various methods for generating privacy-preserving EHR data. In this
study, we introduce a new method for generating diverse and realistic synthetic
EHR time series data using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM). We
conducted experiments on six datasets, comparing our proposed method with eight
existing methods. Our results demonstrate that our approach significantly
outperforms all existing methods in terms of data utility while requiring less
training effort. Our approach also enhances downstream medical data analysis by
providing diverse and realistic synthetic EHR data
The Blessing of Randomness: SDE Beats ODE in General Diffusion-based Image Editing
We present a unified probabilistic formulation for diffusion-based image
editing, where a latent variable is edited in a task-specific manner and
generally deviates from the corresponding marginal distribution induced by the
original stochastic or ordinary differential equation (SDE or ODE). Instead, it
defines a corresponding SDE or ODE for editing. In the formulation, we prove
that the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the marginal distributions of the
two SDEs gradually decreases while that for the ODEs remains as the time
approaches zero, which shows the promise of SDE in image editing. Inspired by
it, we provide the SDE counterparts for widely used ODE baselines in various
tasks including inpainting and image-to-image translation, where SDE shows a
consistent and substantial improvement. Moreover, we propose SDE-Drag -- a
simple yet effective method built upon the SDE formulation for point-based
content dragging. We build a challenging benchmark (termed DragBench) with
open-set natural, art, and AI-generated images for evaluation. A user study on
DragBench indicates that SDE-Drag significantly outperforms our ODE baseline,
existing diffusion-based methods, and the renowned DragGAN. Our results
demonstrate the superiority and versatility of SDE in image editing and push
the boundary of diffusion-based editing methods
(1S,3R)-3-Ammoniocyclohexanecarboxylate
The title γ-aminobutyric acid, C7H13NO2, exists as a zwitterion. The crystal structure is stabilized by a network of intermolecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming a two-dimensional bilayer. An intermolecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bond is also observed
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