Introduction Measures of farm diversification Data and model specification Econometric results Discussion Summary and conclusions Acknowledgements References Appendix Abstract. Farm planning often focuses on optimal diversification with respect to risk, where the riskmanagement strategies combine production, marketing, financial and environmental aspects of the farmfirm. In this study an empiri...

Incomplete Nature is about an important and difficult subject: how life and mind evolved from a world of inanimate matter. It is also about what are the right concepts to use in understanding the nature and workings of life and mind. We need to be able to conceive them in such a way that it becomes intelligible that they could have arisen naturally from the kinds of inanimate processes describe...

A novel method is proposed to retrieve image sequences with the goal of forecasting complex and timevarying natural patterns. To that end, we introduce a framework called Memory-Based Forecasting; it provides forecast information based on the temporal development of past retrieved sequences. This paper targets the radar echo patterns in weather radar images, and aims to realize an image retriev...

Artificially produced chemical elements heavier than uranium have been known for more than seventy years and the number of superheavy elements continues to grow. Presently 26 transuranic elements are known. This paper examines the earliest scientific interest in the very heavy elements and the related question of an upper limit of the periodic system. In the period from the 1880s to the early 1...

Motivations for drawing hierarchical structures are probably as diverse as datasets to visualize. This ubiquity of tree structures has lead to a manifold of tree layout algorithms and tree visualization systems. While many tree layouts exist, increasingly massive data sets, expanding computational power, and still relatively limited display space make tree layout algorithms a topic of ongoing i...

A novel method and a framework called Memory-Based Forecasting are proposed to forecast complex and timevarying natural patterns with the goal of supporting experts’ decision making. This paper targets the local precipitation phenomena captured as echo patterns in weather radar images, and aims to realize a tool that supports weather forecasters. In our framework, past image patterns similar to...

It has been suggested that language learners prefer phonologically natural patterns overunnaturalones(McCarthy&Prince,1995;Tesar&Smolensky,1993,2000).Various researchers have cited evidence for this assertion based on production (Demuth, 1995; Gnanadesikan, 1995) and perception (Jusczyk, Smolensky, & Allocco, 2002). Two experiments presented in this article test whether 9-month-old infants lear...

This paper seeks to uncover dominant configurations of inter-organizational relationships across the USA and Japan in the automotive industry. We integrate relevant theoretical concepts from transaction cost economics, organization theory and political economy to develop a conceptual model of inter-organizational relationships based on the fit between information processing needs and informatio...

We present a novel synthesis algorithm for procedurally generating complex curves. Our approach takes a simple example input curve specified by a user and automatically generates complex curves that resemble the input. The algorithm preserves many of the input shape features such as tangent directions, curvature, branch nodes, and closed loops. The overall approach is simple and can be used to ...

*Correspondence: Antonio F. Miguel, Department of Physics, School of Sciences and Technology, University of Évora, Rua Romao Ramalho 59, 7000-671 Évora, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] The occurrence of configuration (design, shape, structure, rhythm) is a universal phenomenon that occurs in every flow system. Dendritic configuration (or tree-shaped configurations) is ubiquitous in nature and li...