Termite Distribution in Michigan

Subterranean termites have been present in Michigan for a long time. They were reported as being destructive to buildings in 1920 (Anonymous, 1961), and apparently damage done at that time was increasing over what had occurred earlier. Notwithstanding this long time presence of termites in the state a majority of the population still looks upon the termite as a strange insect most likely to be encountered in the South. All too many home owners and building proprietors as well as others are unacquainted with presence of termites in their areas. At the same time monetary loss due to termite attack is considerable. As an example, control costs and losses to structures in Tennessee due to termites in 1971 were reported (Anonymous, 1972) as over $8 million. Expenditures are less than this in Michigan but still substantial. Because of these facts it was felt that a wide cross-section of the public would benefit from knowledge of locations in Michigan where termites are present and most likely to cause damage. Unfortunately the general public is not aware that there are effective control methods to prevent damage where termites are a hazard. Retieulitermes flavipes (Kollar) is the most commonly encountered termite in Michigan. Other species found in the State are Reticulitermes arenincola Goellner and R. tibialis Banks. Areninocola is reported from the very southwest corner of the State and R. tibialis is known from scattered localities

Searches with Boosted Objects

Boosted objects - particles whose transverse momentum is greater than twice their mass - are becoming increasingly important as the LHC continues to explore energies in the TeV range. The sensitivity of searches for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model depends critically on the efficient reconstruction and identification (tagging) of their unique detector signatures. This contribution provides a review of searches for new physics carried out by the ATLAS and CMS experiments that rely on the reconstruction and identification of boosted top quarks as well as boosted $W$, $Z$ and Higgs bosons. A particular emphasis is placed on the different substructure techniques and tagging algorithms for top quarks and bosons employed by the two experiments.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures. Proceedings of the XXXIV Physics in Collision Symposium, Bloomington, Indiana, September 16-20, 201

Rule Algebras for Adhesive Categories

We demonstrate that the most well-known approach to rewriting graphical structures, the Double-Pushout (DPO) approach, possesses a notion of sequential compositions of rules along an overlap that is associative in a natural sense. Notably, our results hold in the general setting of $\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories. This observation complements the classical Concurrency Theorem of DPO rewriting. We then proceed to define rule algebras in both settings, where the most general categories permissible are the finitary (or finitary restrictions of) $\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories with $\mathcal{M}$-effective unions. If in addition a given such category possess an $\mathcal{M}$-initial object, the resulting rule algebra is unital (in addition to being associative). We demonstrate that in this setting a canonical representation of the rule algebras is obtainable, which opens the possibility of applying the concept to define and compute the evolution of statistical moments of observables in stochastic DPO rewriting systems

Credit risk transfer, real sector productivity, and financial deepening

We derive the effects of credit risk transfer (CRT) markets on real sector productivity and on the volume of financial intermediation in a model where banks choose their optimal degree of CRT and monitoring. We find that CRT increases productivity in the up-market real sector but decreases it in the low-end segment. If optimal, CRT unambiguously fosters financial deepening, i.e., it reduces credit-rationing in the economy. These effects rely upon the ability of banks to commit to the optimal CRT at the funding stage. The optimal degree of CRT depends on the combination of moral hazard, general riskiness, and the cost of monitoring in non-monotonic ways

Identifiability for Blind Source Separation of Multiple Finite Alphabet Linear Mixtures

We give under weak assumptions a complete combinatorial characterization of identifiability for linear mixtures of finite alphabet sources, with unknown mixing weights and unknown source signals, but known alphabet. This is based on a detailed treatment of the case of a single linear mixture. Notably, our identifiability analysis applies also to the case of unknown number of sources. We provide sufficient and necessary conditions for identifiability and give a simple sufficient criterion together with an explicit construction to determine the weights and the source signals for deterministic data by taking advantage of the hierarchical structure within the possible mixture values. We show that the probability of identifiability is related to the distribution of a hitting time and converges exponentially fast to one when the underlying sources come from a discrete Markov process. Finally, we explore our theoretical results in a simulation study. Our work extends and clarifies the scope of scenarios for which blind source separation becomes meaningful

Does the stock market react to unsolicited ratings?

This paper investigates whether the stock market reacts to unsolicited ratings for a sample of S&P rated firms from January 1996 to December 2005. We first analyze the stock market reaction associated with the assignment of an initial unsolicited rating. We find evidence that this reaction is negative and particularly accentuated for Japanese firms. A comparison between S&P’s initial unsolicited ratings with previously published ratings of two Japanese rating agencies for a Japanese subsample shows that ratings assigned by S&P are systematically worse. Further, we find that the stock market does not react to the transition from an unsolicited to a solicited rating. Comparison of the upgrades in the sample with a matched-sample of upgrades of solicited ratings reveals that the price reactions are no different. In addition, abnormal returns are worse for firms whose rating remained unchanged after the solicitation compared to those for upgraded firms. Finally, we find that Japanese firms are less likely to receive an upgrade. Our findings suggest that unsolicited ratings are biased downwards, that the capital market therefore expects upgrades of formerly unsolicited ratings and punishes firms whose ratings remain unchanged. All these effects seem to be more pronounced for Japanese firms

Holography as a highly efficient RG flow II: An explicit construction

We complete the reformulation of the holographic correspondence as a \emph{highly efficient RG flow} that can also determine the UV data in the field theory in the strong coupling and large $N$ limit. We introduce a special way to define operators at any given scale in terms of appropriate coarse-grained collective variables, without requiring the use of the elementary fields. The Wilsonian construction is generalised by promoting the cut-off to a functional of these collective variables. We impose three criteria to determine the coarse-graining. The first criterion is that the effective Ward identities for local conservation of energy, momentum, etc. should preserve their standard forms, but in new scale-dependent background metric and sources which are functionals of the effective single trace operators. The second criterion is that the scale-evolution equations of the operators in the actual background metric should be state-independent, implying that the collective variables should not explicitly appear in them. The final criterion is that the endpoint of the scale-evolution of the RG flow can be transformed to a fixed point corresponding to familiar non-relativistic equations with a finite number of parameters, such as incompressible non-relativistic Navier-Stokes, under a certain universal rescaling of the scale and of the time coordinate. Using previous work, we explicitly show that in the hydrodynamic limit each such highly efficient RG flow reproduces a unique classical gravity theory with precise UV data that satisfy our IR criterion. We obtain the explicit coarse-graining which reproduces Einstein's equations. In a simple example, we are also able to compute the beta function. Finally, we show how our construction can be interpolated with the traditional Wilsonian RG flow at a suitable scale, and can be used to develop new non-perturbative frameworks for QCD-like theories.Comment: 1+59 pages; Introduction slightly expanded, Section V on beta function in highly efficient RG flow added, version accepted in PR

Search for vertical stratification of metals in atmospheres of blue horizontal-branch stars

The observed abundance peculiarities of many chemical species relative to the expected cluster metallicity in blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars presumably appear as a result of atomic diffusion in the photosphere. The slow rotation (typically $v\sin{i}<$ 10 km s$^{-1}$) of BHB stars with effective temperatures $T_{\rm eff}>$ 11,500 K supports this idea since the diffusion mechanism is only effective in a stable stellar atmosphere. In this work we search for observational evidence of vertical chemical stratification in the atmospheres of six hot BHB stars: B84, B267 and B279 in M15 and WF2-2541, WF4-3085 and WF4-3485 in M13. We undertake an abundance stratification analysis of the stellar atmospheres of the aforementioned stars, based on acquired Keck HIRES spectra. We have found from our numerical simulations that three stars (B267, B279 and WF2-2541) show clear signatures of the vertical stratification of iron whose abundance increases toward the lower atmosphere, while the other two stars (B84 and WF4-3485) do not. For WF4-3085 the iron stratification results are inconclusive. B267 also shows a signature of titanium stratification. Our estimates for radial velocity, $v\sin{i}$ and overall iron, titanium and phosphorus abundances agree with previously published data for these stars after taking the measurement errors into account. The results support the hypothesis regarding the efficiency of atomic diffusion in the stellar atmospheres of BHB stars with $T_{\rm eff}>$ 11,500 K.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic