the first step in policy making is describing the objectives and choosing the policy instruments and management strategies and then, analyzing and assessing the impacts of them. in this study, farmers’ responses to selected policy instruments and management strategies were assessed using a semi-distributed planning model in qazvin irrigation and drainage network. the proposed model, simulates t...

energy management is one of the main ways of the efficient use of energy resources. the prediction of crop yields based on energy inputs can help farmers and policymakers to estimate the level of production. required data for study were randomly collected from 70 broiler farms in north west of iran. the input energies were included human labour, machinery, fuel, feed and electricity and the out...

Counterintuitively, biases in behavior or cognition can improve decision making. Under conditions of uncertainty and asymmetric costs of 'false-positive' and 'false-negative' errors, biases can lead to mistakes in one direction but - in so doing - steer us away from more costly mistakes in the other direction. For example, we sometimes think sticks are snakes (which is harmless), but rarely tha...

With continued scaling of NAND flash memory process technology and multiple bits programmed per cell, NAND flash reliability and endurance are degrading. In our research, we experimentally measure, characterize, analyze, and model error patterns in nanoscale flash memories. Based on the understanding developed using real flash memory chips, we design techniques for more efficient and effective ...

This article describes how the performance of a Dutch continuous speech recognizer was improved by modeling pronunciation variation. We propose a general procedure for modeling pronunciation variation. In short, it consists of adding pronunciation variants to the lexicon, retraining phone models and using language models to which the pronunciation variants have been added. First, within-word pr...

We consider the phenomenon of postlexical deletion in fast spontaneously spoken isiZulu speech and its implication for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Analysis of hand-crafted transcripts of fast spontaneous speech recorded from broadcast media indicates that postlexical deletion, especially of vowels, is common in isiZulu. We show that ASR performance can be increased by inclusion of pronu...

Human errors are regarded as one of the main causes for railway accidents these days. In spite of this fact, the consideration of human error probabilities in quantified risk analyses has been very rudimentary up to now. A lack of comprehensive data and analyses in literature lead to the use of estimations and values from other industries. This paper discusses the transferability of human error...