22,349 research outputs found
DOES FCS ASSOCIATION SIZE AFFECT CREDIT AVAILABILITY?
An analysis of the characteristics of farm businesses by size of FCS direct lending association suggests that further consolidation of FCS lending should have limited negative impacts on credit availability. Commercial-sized farm businesses with FCS real estate debt appeared similar to those who obtained credit from competing lenders, but smaller associations and those with fewer stockholders per branch appeared to serve larger and more wealthy commercial-sized farms.credit availability, direct lending association, Agricultural Finance,
Heuristic Refinement Method for the Derivation of Protein Solution Structures: Validation on Cytochrome B562
A method is described for determining the family of protein structures compatible with solution data obtained primarily from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Starting with all possible conformations, the method systematically excludes conformations until the remaining structures are only those compatible with the data. The apparent computational intractability of this approach is reduced by assembling the protein in pieces, by considering the protein at several levels of abstraction, by utilizing constraint satisfaction methods to consider only a few atoms at a time, and by utilizing artificial intelligence methods of heuristic control to decide which actions will exclude the most conformations. Example results are presented for simulated NMR data from the known crystal structure of cytochrome b562 (103 residues). For 10 sample backbones an average root-mean-square deviation from the crystal of 4.1 A was found for all alpha-carbon atoms and 2.8 A for helix alpha-carbons alone. The 10 backbones define the family of all structures compatible with the data and provide nearly correct starting structures for adjustment by any of the current structure determination methods
Cultures of Human Tissues in Virology: A Study of Their Application in Diagnostic Virology with Particular Reference to a Previously Unrecognised Virus Associated with Aseptic Meningitis
Abstract Not Provided
A Study of Single Pulses in the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey
We reprocessed the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey, searching for single
pulses out to a DM of 5000 pc cm with widths of up to one second. We
recorded single pulses from 264 known pulsars and 14 Rotating Radio Transients.
We produced amplitude distributions for each pulsar which we fit with
log-normal distributions, power-law tails, and a power-law function divided by
an exponential function, finding that some pulsars show a deviation from a
log-normal distribution in the form of an excess of high-energy pulses. We
found that a function consisting of a power-law divided by an exponential fit
the distributions of most pulsars better than either log-normal or power-law
functions. For pulsars that were detected in a periodicity search, we computed
the ratio of their single-pulse signal-to-noise ratios to their signal-to-noise
ratios from a Fourier transform and looked for correlations between this ratio
and physical parameters of the pulsars. The only correlation found is the
expected relationship between this ratio and the spin period. Fitting
log-normal distributions to the amplitudes of pulses from RRATs showed similar
behaviour for most RRATs. Here, however, there seem to be two distinct
distributions of pulses, with the lower-energy distribution being consistent
with noise. Pulse-energy distributions for two of the RRATS processed were
consistent with those found for normal pulsars, suggesting that pulsars and
RRATs have a common emission mechanism, but other factors influence the
specific emission properties of each source class.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA
A Highly Ordered Faraday-Rotation Structure in the Interstellar Medium
We describe a Faraday-rotation structure in the Interstellar Medium detected
through polarimetric imaging at 1420 MHz from the Canadian Galactic Plane
Survey (CGPS). The structure, at l=91.8, b=-2.5, has an extent of ~2 degree,
within which polarization angle varies smoothly over a range of ~100 degree.
Polarized intensity also varies smoothly, showing a central peak within an
outer shell. This region is in sharp contrast to its surroundings, where
low-level chaotic polarization structure occurs on arcminute scales. The
Faraday-rotation structure has no counterpart in radio total intensity, and is
unrelated to known objects along the line of sight, which include a Lynds
Bright Nebula, LBN 416, and the star cluster M39 (NGC7092). It is interpreted
as a smooth enhancement of electron density. The absence of a counterpart,
either in optical emission or in total intensity, establishes a lower limit to
its distance. An upper limit is determined by the strong beam depolarization in
this direction. At a probable distance of 350 +/- 50 pc, the size of the object
is 10 pc, the enhancement of electron density is 1.7 cm-3, and the mass of
ionized gas is 23 M_sun. It has a very smooth internal magnetic field of
strength 3 microG, slightly enhanced above the ambient field. G91.8-2.5 is the
second such object to be discovered in the CGPS, and it seems likely that such
structures are common in the Magneto-Ionic Medium.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, ApJ accepte
Quantum picturalism for topological cluster-state computing
Topological quantum computing is a way of allowing precise quantum
computations to run on noisy and imperfect hardware. One implementation uses
surface codes created by forming defects in a highly-entangled cluster state.
Such a method of computing is a leading candidate for large-scale quantum
computing. However, there has been a lack of sufficiently powerful high-level
languages to describe computing in this form without resorting to single-qubit
operations, which quickly become prohibitively complex as the system size
increases. In this paper we apply the category-theoretic work of Abramsky and
Coecke to the topological cluster-state model of quantum computing to give a
high-level graphical language that enables direct translation between quantum
processes and physical patterns of measurement in a computer - a "compiler
language". We give the equivalence between the graphical and topological
information flows, and show the applicable rewrite algebra for this computing
model. We show that this gives us a native graphical language for the design
and analysis of topological quantum algorithms, and finish by discussing the
possibilities for automating this process on a large scale.Comment: 18 pages, 21 figures. Published in New J. Phys. special issue on
topological quantum computin
Equational reasoning with context-free families of string diagrams
String diagrams provide an intuitive language for expressing networks of
interacting processes graphically. A discrete representation of string
diagrams, called string graphs, allows for mechanised equational reasoning by
double-pushout rewriting. However, one often wishes to express not just single
equations, but entire families of equations between diagrams of arbitrary size.
To do this we define a class of context-free grammars, called B-ESG grammars,
that are suitable for defining entire families of string graphs, and crucially,
of string graph rewrite rules. We show that the language-membership and
match-enumeration problems are decidable for these grammars, and hence that
there is an algorithm for rewriting string graphs according to B-ESG rewrite
patterns. We also show that it is possible to reason at the level of grammars
by providing a simple method for transforming a grammar by string graph
rewriting, and showing admissibility of the induced B-ESG rewrite pattern.Comment: International Conference on Graph Transformation, ICGT 2015. The
final publication is available at Springer via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21145-9_
The GHZ/W-calculus contains rational arithmetic
Graphical calculi for representing interacting quantum systems serve a number
of purposes: compositionally, intuitive graphical reasoning, and a logical
underpinning for automation. The power of these calculi stems from the fact
that they embody generalized symmetries of the structure of quantum operations,
which, for example, stretch well beyond the Choi-Jamiolkowski isomorphism. One
such calculus takes the GHZ and W states as its basic generators. Here we show
that this language allows one to encode standard rational calculus, with the
GHZ state as multiplication, the W state as addition, the Pauli X gate as
multiplicative inversion, and the Pauli Z gate as additive inversion.Comment: In Proceedings HPC 2010, arXiv:1103.226
Integrating TV/digital data spectrograph system
A 25-mm vidicon camera was previously modified to allow operation in an integration mode for low-light-level astronomical work. The camera was then mated to a low-dispersion spectrograph for obtaining spectral information in the 400 to 750 nm range. A high speed digital video image system was utilized to digitize the analog video signal, place the information directly into computer-type memory, and record data on digital magnetic tape for permanent storage and subsequent analysis
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