Economic evaluation of a weed-activated sprayer for herbicide application to patchy weed populations

Spatial distribution of weeds in a crop is patchy. Traditional boom sprayers waste herbicide by applying it to areas where weed density is already low. A new technology, Weed Activated Spray Process (WASP), uses sensors to detect the presence of weeds and control spray nozzles accordingly. The economic benefits of this technology to extensive crop farmers in Western Australia are investigated using a model based on the economics of information. Existing technology is likely to reduce profits because the weed density at which it switches off spraying is too high. Even if sensitivity to low densities could be improved, likely benefits of pre‐crop usage would still be very low or negative.Crop Production/Industries,

Computer program offers new method for constructing periodic orbits in nonlinear dynamical systems

Computer program uses an iterative method to construct precisely periodic orbits which dynamically approximate solutions that converge to precise dynamical solutions in the limit of the sequence. The method used is a modification of the generalized Newton-Raphson algorithm used in analyzing two point boundary problems

Method for constructing periodic orbits in nonlinear dynamic systems

Method is modification of generalized Newton-Ralphson algorithm for analyzing two-point boundary problems. It constructs sequence of solutions that converge to precise dynamic solution in the sequence limit. Program calculates periodic orbits in either circular or elliptical restricted three-body problems

The Impact of Line Misidentification on Cosmological Constraints from Euclid and other Spectroscopic Galaxy Surveys

We perform forecasts for how baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale and redshift-space distortion (RSD) measurements from future spectroscopic emission line galaxy (ELG) surveys such as Euclid are degraded in the presence of spectral line misidentification. Using analytic calculations verified with mock galaxy catalogs from log-normal simulations we find that constraints are degraded in two ways, even when the interloper power spectrum is modeled correctly in the likelihood. Firstly, there is a loss of signal-to-noise ratio for the power spectrum of the target galaxies, which propagates to all cosmological constraints and increases with contamination fraction, $f_c$. Secondly, degeneracies can open up between $f_c$ and cosmological parameters. In our calculations this typically increases BAO scale uncertainties at the 10-20% level when marginalizing over parameters determining the broadband power spectrum shape. External constraints on $f_c$, or parameters determining the shape of the power spectrum, for example from cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements, can remove this effect. There is a near-perfect degeneracy between $f_c$ and the power spectrum amplitude for low $f_c$ values, where $f_c$ is not well determined from the contaminated sample alone. This has the potential to strongly degrade RSD constraints. The degeneracy can be broken with an external constraint on $f_c$, for example from cross-correlation with a separate galaxy sample containing the misidentified line, or deeper sub-surveys.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, updated to match version accepted by ApJ (extra paragraph added at the end of Section 4.3, minor text edits