Distributed sensing devices for monitoring marine environment

The lack of affordable, self-sustaining platforms for monitoring marine water quality means that measurements are done primarily through grab sampling at a limited number of locations and time, followed by analysis back at a centralised facility. This has resulted in huge gaps in our knowledge of water quality. This project aims to develop platforms capable of remote sampling and analysis over extended periods of time. This would provide the building blocks for establishing an 'environmental nervous system' comprised of many distributed sensing devices that share their data in near real-time on the web. The envisaged 'environmental nervous system’ allows marine environment to be closely monitored, enabling the early detection of pollution events to minimise the danger to people and contamination of distribution systems

Impact of Direct Income Payments on Productive Efficiency of Korean Rice Farms

This paper examines the impact of direct income payments on productive efficiency of Korean rice farms, using farm-level cross sectional data in 2006. For representation of efficiency and its determinants, this paper uses a model that estimates the deviations of farms from a translog distance function and the determinants of these deviations. This paper especially estimates a stochastic frontier production function to explain deviations from best-practice productivity with a two-part error term including statistical noise from measurement error and technical inefficiency arising from farms not reaching the production frontier boundary. The empirical evidence finds that farms that get a higher share of direct payments in farm revenue are less efficient than others. This inefficiency is reduced by increases in farm size. Another result indicates that farms received greater direct payments on aggregate are more efficient than other farms since fixed payment, one part of rice direct payment, is tied to the amount of a farm's cropland that has been enrolled in programs, as well as yield histories.direct income payments, productive efficiency, stochastic frontier production function, Korea, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries,

Parity-violating πNN\pi NN coupling constant from the flavor-conserving effective weak chiral Lagrangian

We investigate the parity-violating pion-nucleon-nucleon coupling constant $h^1_{\pi NN}$, based on the chiral quark-soliton model. We employ an effective weak Hamiltonian that takes into account the next-to-leading order corrections from QCD to the weak interactions at the quark level. Using the gradient expansion, we derive the leading-order effective weak chiral Lagrangian with the low-energy constants determined. The effective weak chiral Lagrangian is incorporated in the chiral quark-soliton model to calculate the parity-violating $\pi NN$ constant $h^1_{\pi NN}$. We obtain a value of about $10^{-7}$ at the leading order. The corrections from the next-to-leading order reduce the leading order result by about 20~\%.Comment: 12 page

Lattice-coupled Antiferromagnet on Frustrated Lattices

Lattice-coupled antiferromagnetic spin model is analyzed for a number of frustrated lattices: triangular, Kagome, and pyrochlore. In triangular and Kagome lattices where ground state spins are locally ordered, the spin-lattice interaction does not lead to a static deformation of the lattice. In the pyrochlore structure, spin-lattice coupling supports a picture of the hexagon spin cluster proposed in the recent experiment[S. H. Lee et al. Nature, 418, 856 (2002)]. Through spin-lattice interaction a uniform contraction of the individual hexagons in the pyrochlore lattice can take place and reduce the exchange energy. Residual hexagon-hexagon interaction takes the form of a 3-states Potts model where the preferred directions of the spin-loop directors for nearby hexagons are mutually orthogonal

Development of optical sensing system for detection of Fe ions using conductive polymer actuator based microfluidic pump

In this paper, we present a novel microfluidic optical sensing system by combining a low-power conductive polymer -based microfluidic pump and a microfluidic chip integrated with an optical sensor. A self priming microfluidic pump is developed using a polypyrrole. A microfluidic chip- optical detector module that contained an optical cuvette with LED and photo-diode optical sensing module was fabricated. Integration of the micro pump and the microfluidic chips complete the sensing system. The pump performance and its application in chemical analysis have been demonstrated in the detection of Fe ions