criticism of public extension services has resulted in various countries seeking alternative approaches for provision of these services. in all these approaches, extension personnel are the key factors to the success of the implementation. today, agricultural extension services in turkey bear the responsibility of the ministry of food, agriculture and livestock. a number of non-public extension...

As torso flexion and repetitive lifting are known risk factors for low back pain and injury, it is important to investigate lifting techniques that might reduce injury during repetitive lifting. By normalizing lumbar posture to a subject's range of motion (ROM), as a function of torso flexion, this research examined when subjects approached their range of motion limits during dynamic lifting ta...

This article describes a procedure for deening a posterior distribution on the value of a normalizing constant or ratio of normalizing constants using output from Monte Carlo simulation experiments. The resulting posterior distribution provides a simple diagnostic for assessing the adequacy of a simulation experiment for estimating these quantities, and is particularly useful in cases for which...

We define a Heegaard-Scharlemann-Thompson (HST) splitting of a 3-manifold M to be a sequence of pairwise-disjoint, embedded surfaces, {Fi}, such that for each odd value of i, Fi is a Heegaard splitting of the submanifold of M cobounded by Fi−1 and Fi+1. Our main result is the following: Suppose M (6= B or S) is an irreducible submanifold of a triangulated 3-manifold, bounded by a normal or almo...

Deduction modulo is an extension of first-order predicate logic where axioms are replaced by rewrite rules and where many theories, such as arithmetic, simple type theory and some variants of set theory, can be expressed. An important question in deduction modulo is to find a condition of the theories that have the strong normalization property. Dowek and Werner have given a semantic sufficient...

difference in average throughput when different numbers of channels are normalized is minimal. As the number of users increases, it is clear that normalizing a higher percentage of the channels becomes more optimal. However, Fig. 3 also shows that the average throughput plateaus as the number of normalized channels increases: the marginal benefit of normalizing more channels drops off substanti...

The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference, focusing on mean-field or other simple structured approximations. This restriction has a significant impact on the quality of inferences made using variation...

We consider the problem of density estimation on Riemannian manifolds. Density estimation on manifolds has many applications in fluid-mechanics, optics and plasma physics and it appears often when dealing with angular variables (such as used in protein folding, robot limbs, gene-expression) and in general directional statistics. In spite of the multitude of algorithms available for density esti...

Normalizing constants of conditional distributions include Bayesian marginal likelihoods and likelihoods of mixture models, such as hierarchical models and state-space time-series models. A promising method for estimating such quantities was proposed by Chib and Jeliazkov (CJ) and improved by Mira and Nicholls using bridge sampling results. Here three additional improvements and one theoretical...

Huet and Lévy (1979) showed that needed reduction is a normalizing strategy for orthogonal (i.e., left-linear and non-overlapping) term rewriting systems. In order to obtain a decidable needed reduction strategy, they proposed the notion of strongly sequential approximation. Extending their seminal work, several better decidable approximations of left-linear term rewriting systems, for example,...