The gold standard endpoint in trials of locoregionally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is overall survival (OS). Using data from a phase III randomized trial, we evaluated whether progression-free survival (PFS), failure-free survival (FFS), distant failure-free survival (D-FFS) or locoregional failure-free survival (LR-FFS) could be reliable surrogate endpoints for OS. Between July 200...

Agriculture is the human enterprise that is most vulnerable to climate change. Tropical agriculture, particularly subsistence agriculture is particularly vulnerable, as smallholder farmers do not have adequate resources to adapt to climate change. While agroforestry may play a significant role in mitigating the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHG), it also has a role to play in he...

Agriculture is vulnerable to climate change and a source of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Farmers face pressures to adjust agricultural systems to make them more resilient in the face of increasingly variable weather (adaptation) and reduce GHG production (mitigation). This research examines relationships between Iowa farmers' trust in environmental or agricultural interest groups as sources of clim...

In this paper, we describe improvements to the function field sieve (FFS) for the discrete logarithm problem in Fpn , when p is small. Our main contribution is a new way to build the algebraic function fields needed in the algorithm. With this new construction, the heuristic complexity is as good as the complexity of the construction proposed by Adleman and Huang [2], i.e Lpn [1/3, c] = exp((c ...

What is the role, function, and intent of agricultural marketing? Most farmers would be ill-prepared to answer this question. They remain in awe of the entire process and express confusion, or even contempt, when the topic of marketing emerges. Earlier in our history, the role of marketing focused on the act of market clearing, the function revolved around the physical transfer of the product, ...

Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. By usin...

In 1993, Coppersmith introduced the “factorization factory” approach as a means to speed up the Number Field Sieve algorithm (NFS) when factoring batches of integers of similar size: at the expense of a large precomputation whose cost is amortized when considering sufficiently many integers to factor, the complexity of each individual factorization can then be lowered. We suggest here to extend...

This paper applied a non-parametric (Data Envelopment Analysis) method to analyze the efficiency of farmers, discriminate efficient farmers from inefficient ones and to identify wasteful uses of energy in order to optimize the energy inputs for greenhouse cucumber production in Lorestan province of Iran. Data were collected from 27 cucumber producers by using a face-to-face questionnaire.DEA cr...

Farmers’ decisions about how much crop insurance to buy are not generally consistent with either expected profit or utility maximization. They do not pick coverage levels that maximize expected subsidy nor do they demand full insurance coverage. In addition, the absolute size ...

This research paper suggests the ‘Paprika green house system’ (PGHS), which collects paprika growth information and greenhouse information to control the paprika growth at optimum condition. The temperature variation range of domestic paprika cultivation facilities are relatively quite big and the facility internal is kept at relatively dry condition. In addition, the concentration of CO2 is no...