An eight-neighbor filter for LARSYS

An eight-neighbor filter was developed for the LARSYS program. It is used in cleaning zones and sharpening boundaries during the digitization of hand-painted zone maps, in making computer-based vegetation zones more homogeneous, and in classification of natural images, such as LANDSAT or other multispectral imagery

Soil water content and evaporation determined by thermal parameters obtained from ground-based and remote measurements

A procedure is presented for calculating 24-hour totals of evaporation from wet and drying soils. Its application requires a knowledge of the daily solar radiation, the maximum and minimum, air temperatures, moist surface albedo, and maximum and minimum surface temperatures. Tests of the technique on a bare field of Avondale loam at Phoenix, Arizona showed it to be independent of season

A trigonometric approach to quaternary code designs with application to one-eighth and one-sixteenth fractions

The study of good nonregular fractional factorial designs has received significant attention over the last two decades. Recent research indicates that designs constructed from quaternary codes (QC) are very promising in this regard. The present paper shows how a trigonometric approach can facilitate a systematic understanding of such QC designs and lead to new theoretical results covering hitherto unexplored situations. We focus attention on one-eighth and one-sixteenth fractions of two-level factorials and show that optimal QC designs often have larger generalized resolution and projectivity than comparable regular designs. Moreover, some of these designs are found to have maximum projectivity among all designs.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOS815 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Clusters of Attributes and Well-Being in the US.

Using ARIMA models and entropy, the dynamic evolution of several functions of aggregate income and other attributes of well-being is analyzed for statistical "similarity" in order to determine potentially distinct dimensions in multidimensional analysis of welfare and quality of life in the US. The entropy metric compares entire distributions and is more general than principal components and other correlation-based techniques for clustering. To help macroeconomic policy makers, we compare the distribution of several composite measures of well-being, including income, with the distribution of some common measures of aggregate income over the period 1915-1995.Time Series, Information Measures, Aggregate Well-being,Entropy

A partial molar volume for B 2 O 3 in haplogranitic melt

The densitiesa nd thermal expansivitieso f boron-bearingh aplogranitic glassesa nd Iiquids have been determined using a combination of scanning .florimetry and dilatomelry. B2O3 reduces the density of haplogranitic liquids (at 750'C) from 2.295 t 0.006 g cm-r to 2.237 + 0.005 g cm-3 wirh the addition of 8.92 wt. Vo 82o,. These densities have been converted into molar volumes in the binary system haplogranite - BrO3. The partial molar volume of 8203, calculated from a linear fit to the data at 750oC, is ,10.30 + 0.77 cmr mole-r in these melts. This value compares with a molar volume of pure B2O3 at this temperature of M.36 x. 0.22 cm3 mole-l (Napolitano et ol. 1965), indicating a negative excess volume of mixing along the haplogranite - B2O3 join. In comparison, at l3moc, the addition ot Na2O to B2O3 reduces the panial molar volume of B2O3 from 46.6 to 32.3 cm3 mole-r ar 45 molego Na2O (Riebling 1966).T he densityr esultsr eported here, along with the viscosity-reducinge ffect of B2O3o n granitic melts (Dingwell et al, 1992),s hould both significantlya cceleratep rocesseso f crystal-melt fractionation and facilitate the evolution of extremely fractionated igneous systems

Protein folding on the ribosome studied using NMR spectroscopy

NMR spectroscopy is a powerful tool for the investigation of protein folding and misfolding, providing a characterization of molecular structure, dynamics and exchange processes, across a very wide range of timescales and with near atomic resolution. In recent years NMR methods have also been developed to study protein folding as it might occur within the cell, in a de novo manner, by observing the folding of nascent polypeptides in the process of emerging from the ribosome during synthesis. Despite the 2.3 MDa molecular weight of the bacterial 70S ribosome, many nascent polypeptides, and some ribosomal proteins, have sufficient local flexibility that sharp resonances may be observed in solution-state NMR spectra. In providing information on dynamic regions of the structure, NMR spectroscopy is therefore highly complementary to alternative methods such as X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, which have successfully characterized the rigid core of the ribosome particle. However, the low working concentrations and limited sample stability associated with ribosome-nascent chain complexes means that such studies still present significant technical challenges to the NMR spectroscopist. This review will discuss the progress that has been made in this area, surveying all NMR studies that have been published to date, and with a particular focus on strategies for improving experimental sensitivity

The Spite Dilemma Revisited: Comparison between Chinese and Japanese

This paper studies Chinese choice behavior in the provision of public goods via the voluntary contribution mechanism. The laboratory experiment conducted in China adopts the same design as the one used in Saijo and Nakamura (1995), i.e. either cooperating (full contribution) or free riding (no contribution) is predicted as the unique Nash equilibrium with a high (larger than one) or low (smaller than one) marginal return of contribution. Comparing the results of Chinese subjects with their Japanese counterparts, we find significant differences between these two countries in terms of their choice behavior, despite the similarities in their cultures and the proximity in geographical positions. Japanese subjects are more likely to act spitefully, and, in contrast, Chinese subjects are more likely to perform cooperatively. In addition, concerning the deviations from the Nash equilibria with different marginal returns, the statistical results indicate that Chinese subjects behave more consistent with the theoretical prediction in the high marginal return case, while Japanese choice behavior seems less different from the theoretical expectation in the low marginal return case.Voluntary contribution mechanism, Spite dilemma, Chinese, Japanese