Supporting Cellulosic Ethanol Biomass Production and its Impact on Land Use Conversion

One of the problems facing the cellulosic ethanol industry is the cellulose material supply. The U.S. forestlands have considerable potential to become one of the main sources of biomass to meet the 2022 renewable fuel target. Focusing on the land exiting the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the article finds that few landowners are willing to convert their land to forestland after the CRP contract is expired. Our econometric estimates show the choice decision is responsive to net returns of land use alternatives, especially cropland. Two policy initiatives are suggested to provide direct incentives for land use change. The nested logit estimates are used to simulate landowners‘ responses to policy mechanism. The results show that subsidies can substantially increase forestland, although a spillover effect exists.Cellulosic Ethanol, Biomass, Land Use, the CRP, Forestland, Environmental Economics and Policy,

ABSTRACTS, PAPERS PRESENTED, ANNUAL MEETING, SAEA, TULSA, OKLAHOMA, FEBRUARY 1993

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models for Predicting Concurrent Percept-driven Robot Behavior

This article develops Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models (PHAMs), a realistic causal model for predicting the behavior generated by modern percept-driven robot plans. PHAMs represent aspects of robot behavior that cannot be represented by most action models used in AI planning: the temporal structure of continuous control processes, their non-deterministic effects, several modes of their interferences, and the achievement of triggering conditions in closed-loop robot plans. The main contributions of this article are: (1) PHAMs, a model of concurrent percept-driven behavior, its formalization, and proofs that the model generates probably, qualitatively accurate predictions; and (2) a resource-efficient inference method for PHAMs based on sampling projections from probabilistic action models and state descriptions. We show how PHAMs can be applied to planning the course of action of an autonomous robot office courier based on analytical and experimental results

Superconducting Resonator-Rydberg Atom Hybrid in the Strong Coupling Regime

We propose a promising hybrid quantum system, where a highly-excited atom strongly interacts with a superconducting LC oscillator via the electric field of capacitor. An external electrostatic field is applied to tune the energy spectrum of atom. The atomic qubit is implemented by two eigenstates near an avoided-level crossing in the DC Stark map of Rydberg atom. Varying the electrostatic field brings the atomic-qubit transition on- or off-resonance to the microwave resonator, leading to a strong atom-resonator coupling with an extremely large cooperativity. Like the nonlinearity induced by Josephson junctions in superconducting circuits, the large atom-resonator interface disturbs the harmonic potential of resonator, resulting in an artificial two-level particle. Different universal two-qubit logic gates can also be performed on our hybrid system within the space where an atomic qubit couples to a single photon with an interaction strength much larger than any relaxation rates, opening the door to the cavity-mediated state transmission.Comment: 4 figure

An Empirical Investigation of the Linkages Between Government Payments and Leasing Arrangements

Replaced with revised version of poster 07/22/10.Agricultural and Food Policy, Industrial Organization, Land Economics/Use,

Why we need to quantise everything, including gravity

There is a long-standing debate about whether gravity should be quantised. A powerful line of argument in favour of quantum gravity considers models of hybrid systems consisting of coupled quantum-classical sectors. The conclusion is that such models are inconsistent: either the quantum sector's defining properties necessarily spread to the classical sector, or they are violated. These arguments have a long history, starting with the debates about the quantum nature of the electromagnetic fields in the early days of quantum theory. Yet, they have limited scope because they rely on particular dynamical models obeying restrictive conditions, such as unitarity. In this paper we propose a radically new, more general argument, relying on less restrictive assumptions. The key feature is an information-theoretic characterisation of both sectors, including their interaction, via constraints on copying operations. These operations are necessary for the existence of observables in any physical theory, because they constitute the most general representation of measurement interactions. Remarkably, our argument is formulated without resorting to particular dynamical models, thus being applicable to any hybrid system, even those ruled by "post-quantum" theories. Its conclusion is also compatible with partially quantum systems, such as those that exhibit features like complementarity, but may lack others, such as entanglement. As an example, we consider a hybrid system of qubits and rebits. Surprisingly, despite the rebit's lack of complex amplitudes, the signature quantum protocols such as teleportation are still possible

ArchiVISTA: A New Horizon in Providing Access to Visual Records of the National Archives of Canada

published or submitted for publicatio

PERSPECTIVES ON COMPETITIVE BIDDING: RETIREMENT OF ENVIRONMENTALLY SENSITIVE FARMLAND

The USDA has used bidding to enroll land into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and may use similar mechanisms to implement other policy instruments in which some or all agricultural land cropping rights are acquired to protect or increase environmental amenities. Experience with the CRP suggests that current enrollees are being compensated in excess of the lowest payment they would be willing to accept in exchange for loss of cropping rights. While it may be prohibitively expensive to estimate such reservation prices on all potential CRP parcels, it is likewise difficult to design a bidding mechanism that induces landowners to reveal these values. While the competitive bidding and contingent valuation literatures provide some guidance, the problem of designing a cost effective bidding mechanism for land retirement does not conform precisely to situations in which theoretical, experimental or case study results have been reported. Despite this, realistic incremental changes in the CRP's current bidding mechanism that induce competitive behavior among bidders appear to portend significant savings in government outlays.Land Economics/Use,

Rapid Recovery for Systems with Scarce Faults

Our goal is to achieve a high degree of fault tolerance through the control of a safety critical systems. This reduces to solving a game between a malicious environment that injects failures and a controller who tries to establish a correct behavior. We suggest a new control objective for such systems that offers a better balance between complexity and precision: we seek systems that are k-resilient. In order to be k-resilient, a system needs to be able to rapidly recover from a small number, up to k, of local faults infinitely many times, provided that blocks of up to k faults are separated by short recovery periods in which no fault occurs. k-resilience is a simple but powerful abstraction from the precise distribution of local faults, but much more refined than the traditional objective to maximize the number of local faults. We argue why we believe this to be the right level of abstraction for safety critical systems when local faults are few and far between. We show that the computational complexity of constructing optimal control with respect to resilience is low and demonstrate the feasibility through an implementation and experimental results.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2012, arXiv:1210.202