2,026 research outputs found
The Cost of Biotechnology Regulation in the Philippines
This paper identifies direct costs and opportunity costs of bio-safety regulation for four transgenic products in the Philippines: Bt eggplant, Bt rice, ringspot-virus resistant papaya, and virus resistant tomatoes. It finds that direct regulatory costs while significant, are generally smaller than the research costs for technology development. However, both research and regulatory costs are overshadowed by even a relatively brief delay in product release, which may occur due to unexpected regulatory delays.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,
The 1975 Iowa Corn Yield Test Report, District 4 Upland
Results of the Iowa Corn Yield Test are published to aid Iowa farmers in selecting corn varieties. This is the fifty-sixth consecutive year for the test
Near real-time GPS applications for tsunami early warning systems
GPS (Global Positioning System) technology is widely used for positioning applications. Many of them have high requirements with respect to precision, reliability or fast product delivery, but usually not all at the same time as it is the case for early warning applications. The tasks for the GPS-based components within the GITEWS project (German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System, Rudloff et al., 2009) are to support the determination of sea levels (measured onshore and offshore) and to detect co-seismic land mass displacements with the lowest possible latency (design goal: first reliable results after 5 min). The completed system was designed to fulfil these tasks in near real-time, rather than for scientific research requirements. The obtained data products (movements of GPS antennas) are supporting the warning process in different ways. The measurements from GPS instruments on buoys allow the earliest possible detection or confirmation of tsunami waves on the ocean. Onshore GPS measurements are made collocated with tide gauges or seismological stations and give information about co-seismic land mass movements as recorded, e.g., during the great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of 2004 (Subarya et al., 2006). This information is important to separate tsunami-caused sea height movements from apparent sea height changes at tide gauge locations (sensor station movement) and also as additional information about earthquakes' mechanisms, as this is an essential information to predict a tsunami (Sobolev et al., 2007). <br><br> This article gives an end-to-end overview of the GITEWS GPS-component system, from the GPS sensors (GPS receiver with GPS antenna and auxiliary systems, either onshore or offshore) to the early warning centre displays. We describe how the GPS sensors have been installed, how they are operated and the methods used to collect, transfer and process the GPS data in near real-time. This includes the sensor system design, the communication system layout with real-time data streaming, the data processing strategy and the final products of the GPS-based early warning system components
Quantifying distortions of the Lagrangian dark-matter mesh in cosmology
We examine the Lagrangian divergence of the displacement field, arguably a
more natural object than the density in a Lagrangian description of
cosmological large-scale structure. This quantity, which we denote \psi,
quantifies the stretching and distortion of the initially homogeneous lattice
of dark-matter particles in the universe. \psi\ encodes similar information as
the density, but the correspondence has subtleties. It corresponds better to
the log-density A than the overdensity \delta. A Gaussian distribution in \psi\
produces a distribution in A with slight skewness; in \delta, we find that in
many cases the skewness is further increased by 3.
A local spherical-collapse-based (SC) fit found by Bernardeau gives a formula
for \psi's particle-by-particle behavior that works quite well, better than
applying Lagrangian perturbation theory (LPT) at first or second (2LPT) order.
In 2LPT, there is a roughly parabolic relation between initial and final \psi\
that can give overdensities in deep voids, so low-redshift, high-resolution
2LPT realizations should be used with caution. The SC fit excels at predicting
\psi\ until streams cross; then, for particles forming haloes, \psi\ plummets
as in a waterfall to -3. This gives a new method for producing N-particle
realizations. Compared to LPT realizations, such SC realizations give reduced
stream-crossing, and better visual and 1-point-PDF correspondence to the
results of full gravity. LPT, on the other hand, predicts large-scale flows and
the large-scale power-spectrum amplitude better, unless an empirical correction
is added to the SC formula.Comment: Changes in presentation to match MNRAS-accepted version, 14 pages, 15
figure
Non-universal soft scalar masses in supersymmetric theories
The existence of non--universal soft masses is the most general situation in
supersymmetric theories. We study the consecuences that this situation has for
the low--energy sparticle spectrum. In particular, we analize in detail the
contribution to the scalar mass renormalization group equations of the
D--term. We obtain analytic expressions for the evolution of masses of the
three generations and these allow us to show that such a contribution can
produce important modifications on the spectrum. The necessity to avoid flavour
changing neutral currents does not constrain this result. Finally, we discuss a
realistic example in the context of string theory where the departure from
universality is large.Comment: Latex, 13 pages + 3 figs.(avalaible upon request
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