A Web Site to Help Farm Families Communicate About Farm Transfer

A Web site was developed to help farm families learn about communication strategies that can be used when there are sensitive issues relating to farm transfer. The site, Who Will Get Grandpa\u27s Farm? Communicating about Farm Transfer, features six scenes filmed on a farm near Delphi, Indiana. The family members in the scenes include a farmer and his spouse, father, son, and a brother. Each conversation between family members shows examples of direct control, indirect control, and no control. An interactive quiz helps users distinguish between the three communication strategies

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WHO WILL GET GRANDPA'S FARM? COMMUNICATING ABOUT FARM TRANSFER

Farm Management,

Programming a hillslope water movement model on the MPP

A physically based numerical model was developed of heat and moisture flow within a hillslope on a parallel architecture computer, as a precursor to a model of a complete catchment. Moisture flow within a catchment includes evaporation, overland flow, flow in unsaturated soil, and flow in saturated soil. Because of the empirical evidence that moisture flow in unsaturated soil is mainly in the vertical direction, flow in the unsaturated zone can be modeled as a series of one dimensional columns. This initial version of the hillslope model includes evaporation and a single column of one dimensional unsaturated zone flow. This case has already been solved on an IBM 3081 computer and is now being applied to the massively parallel processor architecture so as to make the extension to the one dimensional case easier and to check the problems and benefits of using a parallel architecture machine

How to cluster in parallel with neural networks

Partitioning a set of N patterns in a d-dimensional metric space into K clusters - in a way that those in a given cluster are more similar to each other than the rest - is a problem of interest in astrophysics, image analysis and other fields. As there are approximately K(N)/K (factorial) possible ways of partitioning the patterns among K clusters, finding the best solution is beyond exhaustive search when N is large. Researchers show that this problem can be formulated as an optimization problem for which very good, but not necessarily optimal solutions can be found by using a neural network. To do this the network must start from many randomly selected initial states. The network is simulated on the MPP (a 128 x 128 SIMD array machine), where researchers use the massive parallelism not only in solving the differential equations that govern the evolution of the network, but also by starting the network from many initial states at once, thus obtaining many solutions in one run. Researchers obtain speedups of two to three orders of magnitude over serial implementations and the promise through Analog VLSI implementations of speedups comensurate with human perceptual abilities

Dynamical Phase Transitions In Driven Integrate-And-Fire Neurons

We explore the dynamics of an integrate-and-fire neuron with an oscillatory stimulus. The frustration due to the competition between the neuron's natural firing period and that of the oscillatory rhythm, leads to a rich structure of asymptotic phase locking patterns and ordering dynamics. The phase transitions between these states can be classified as either tangent or discontinuous bifurcations, each with its own characteristic scaling laws. The discontinuous bifurcations exhibit a new kind of phase transition that may be viewed as intermediate between continuous and first order, while tangent bifurcations behave like continuous transitions with a diverging coherence scale.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Reversible skew laurent polynomial rings and deformations of poisson automorphisms

A skew Laurent polynomial ring S = R[x(+/- 1); alpha] is reversible if it has a reversing automorphism, that is, an automorphism theta of period 2 that transposes x and x(-1) and restricts to an automorphism gamma of R with gamma = gamma(-1). We study invariants for reversing automorphisms and apply our methods to determine the rings of invariants of reversing automorphisms of the two most familiar examples of simple skew Laurent polynomial rings, namely a localization of the enveloping algebra of the two-dimensional non-abelian solvable Lie algebra and the coordinate ring of the quantum torus, both of which are deformations of Poisson algebras over the base field F. Their reversing automorphisms are deformations of Poisson automorphisms of those Poisson algebras. In each case, the ring of invariants of the Poisson automorphism is the coordinate ring B of a surface in F-3 and the ring of invariants S-theta of the reversing automorphism is a deformation of B and is a factor of a deformation of F[x(1), x(2), x(3)] for a Poisson bracket determined by the appropriate surface

Capture zones of the family of functions lambda z^m exp(z)

We consider the family of entire transcendental maps given by $F_{\lambda,m}= \lambda z^m exp(z)$ where m>=2. All functions $F_{\lambda,m}$ have a superattracting fixed point at z=0, and a critical point at z=-m. In the dynamical plane we study the topology of the basin of attraction of z=0. In the parameter plane we focus on the capture behaviour, i.e., \lambda values such that the critical point belongs to the basin of attraction of z=0. In particular, we find a capture zone for which this basin has a unique connected component, whose boundary is then non-locally connected. However, there are parameter values for which the boundary of the immediate basin of z=0 is a quasicircle.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures. Accepted for publication in the International Journal of bifurcation and Chao

Stability of Intercelular Exchange of Biochemical Substances Affected by Variability of Environmental Parameters

Communication between cells is realized by exchange of biochemical substances. Due to internal organization of living systems and variability of external parameters, the exchange is heavily influenced by perturbations of various parameters at almost all stages of the process. Since communication is one of essential processes for functioning of living systems it is of interest to investigate conditions for its stability. Using previously developed simplified model of bacterial communication in a form of coupled difference logistic equations we investigate stability of exchange of signaling molecules under variability of internal and external parameters.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure