"Half the improvement we make over the next 10 to 15 years will come from improving the feedstocks," said Gerald A. Tuskan, a biofuel expert in the department, referring to the crops fed into the ethanol factories.
That was less than half the improvement in the two previous quarters and, indeed, one of the poorer quarterly performances in the last two years.
It concluded "more than one half of the improvement in working days lost" in the ABCC era was undone in the first year of FWBC replacing it.
"Obviously a huge part of this was the remarkable generosity of the Starr Foundation with its record single gift of $1 million," he said, "but that accounts for only about half of the improvement".
Stephen Marks, French Connection's chairman and chief executive, said: "Overall the performance for the year has been disappointing due to the very poor first half but the improvement we have seen during the second half and into the new financial year shows that we are definitely moving in the right direction".
Mr. Obama made only a modest gain in the forecast over the weekend, to a 63.3 percent chance of winning the Electoral College as of Sunday's update from 61.1 percent on Friday, clawing back less than half of the improvement that Mr. Romney had realized on Friday alone.
A case study in which these methods are applied to a large contemporary well dataset from the Williston Basin in North Dakota reveals that only about half of the improvement in well productivity is associated with technology changes, but the simpler regression models substantially overestimate the impact of technology by attributing location-driven improvement to design changes.
"The reduction in trans fat consumption contributed more than half of the improvement in the overall AHEI [Alternative Healthy Eating Index] 2010," the study authors wrote.
A reduction in trans-fat intake over the course of the study accounted for about half of the improvement in people's dietary scores, the researchers said.
One study found over six months after initial surgery, there was a 2.5 point between patient improvement in total IES, less than half of the improvement in this study [ 60].
