Emergency Farm Adjustments in the Wheat Area of South Dakota

SummaryThis circular tells briefly the story of some farmers in the Spring Wheat section of South Dakota. It shows the strenuous effort being made by these men to reduce expenses or to shift their production so that their income will equal their expenses.It illustrates certain adjustments that are being followed on some of the farms and suggests some changes that might be profitable on these and other farms.The most serious difficulty arises from the effort to pay the fixed charges-interest, taxes, and payments on indebtedness. On nearly all farms some adjustments are being made to obtain a farm income large enough to meet the immediately pressing expenses. These adjustments have taken the form of:1. Reducing cash expenses as much as is possible, sometimes to the extent that production is restricted or is carried on at greater risk. The effort to reduce expenses has in most cases led to a lower standard of living for the farm family.2. Reducing capital assets to meet payment demanded on indebtedness even though this means the abandonment of a practical long time system of farming.3. Family labor and the equipment is used to the limit of its capacity in an effort to increase the livestock enterprises and the acreage of crops so that the cash income can be increased.4. In some cases the acreage of cash grain has been increased at the expense of feed grains, legumes, or a cropping system that would be advantageous over the long period of time.5. In other cases, herd of stock cattle have been shifted to dairy production. In others, the practice of selling cattle as feeders has been changed to sale as finished or “warmed up cattle.”6. Farmers with low priced feed surplus have sometime found it necessary to shift from a conservative production program to the more speculative one of feeding livestock.7. In extreme cases, the operators have found it necessary to relinquish title to their farms and to continue operation as tenants to preserve their working capital and continue farming.8. Only farmers relatively free of debt can reduce operations and wait for an improvement of prices

Data Integration over NoSQL Stores Using Access Path Based Mappings

International audienceDue to the large amount of data generated by user interactions on the Web, some companies are currently innovating in the domain of data management by designing their own systems. Many of them are referred to as NoSQL databases, standing for 'Not only SQL'. With their wide adoption will emerge new needs and data integration will certainly be one of them. In this paper, we adapt a framework encountered for the integration of relational data to a broader context where both NoSQL and relational databases can be integrated. One important extension consists in the efficient answering of queries expressed over these data sources. The highly denormalized aspect of NoSQL databases results in varying performance costs for several possible query translations. Thus a data integration targeting NoSQL databases needs to generate an optimized translation for a given query. Our contributions are to propose (i) an access path based mapping solution that takes benefit of the design choices of each data source, (ii) integrate preferences to handle conflicts between sources and (iii) a query language that bridges the gap between the SQL query expressed by the user and the query language of the data sources. We also present a prototype implementation, where the target schema is represented as a set of relations and which enables the integration of two of the most popular NoSQL database models, namely document and a column family stores

Metastability in Interacting Nonlinear Stochastic Differential Equations II: Large-N Behaviour

We consider the dynamics of a periodic chain of N coupled overdamped particles under the influence of noise, in the limit of large N. Each particle is subjected to a bistable local potential, to a linear coupling with its nearest neighbours, and to an independent source of white noise. For strong coupling (of the order N^2), the system synchronises, in the sense that all oscillators assume almost the same position in their respective local potential most of the time. In a previous paper, we showed that the transition from strong to weak coupling involves a sequence of symmetry-breaking bifurcations of the system's stationary configurations, and analysed in particular the behaviour for coupling intensities slightly below the synchronisation threshold, for arbitrary N. Here we describe the behaviour for any positive coupling intensity \gamma of order N^2, provided the particle number N is sufficiently large (as a function of \gamma/N^2). In particular, we determine the transition time between synchronised states, as well as the shape of the "critical droplet", to leading order in 1/N. Our techniques involve the control of the exact number of periodic orbits of a near-integrable twist map, allowing us to give a detailed description of the system's potential landscape, in which the metastable behaviour is encoded

The Continuum Directed Random Polymer

Motivated by discrete directed polymers in one space and one time dimension, we construct a continuum directed random polymer that is modeled by a continuous path interacting with a space-time white noise. The strength of the interaction is determined by an inverse temperature parameter beta, and for a given beta and realization of the noise the path evolves in a Markovian way. The transition probabilities are determined by solutions to the one-dimensional stochastic heat equation. We show that for all beta > 0 and for almost all realizations of the white noise the path measure has the same Holder continuity and quadratic variation properties as Brownian motion, but that it is actually singular with respect to the standard Wiener measure on C([0,1]).Comment: 21 page

RDF Querying

Reactive Web systems, Web services, and Web-based publish/ subscribe systems communicate events as XML messages, and in many cases require composite event detection: it is not sufficient to react to single event messages, but events have to be considered in relation to other events that are received over time. Emphasizing language design and formal semantics, we describe the rule-based query language XChangeEQ for detecting composite events. XChangeEQ is designed to completely cover and integrate the four complementary querying dimensions: event data, event composition, temporal relationships, and event accumulation. Semantics are provided as model and fixpoint theories; while this is an established approach for rule languages, it has not been applied for event queries before

Ruelle-Perron-Frobenius spectrum for Anosov maps

We extend a number of results from one dimensional dynamics based on spectral properties of the Ruelle-Perron-Frobenius transfer operator to Anosov diffeomorphisms on compact manifolds. This allows to develop a direct operator approach to study ergodic properties of these maps. In particular, we show that it is possible to define Banach spaces on which the transfer operator is quasicompact. (Information on the existence of an SRB measure, its smoothness properties and statistical properties readily follow from such a result.) In dimension $d=2$ we show that the transfer operator associated to smooth random perturbations of the map is close, in a proper sense, to the unperturbed transfer operator. This allows to obtain easily very strong spectral stability results, which in turn imply spectral stability results for smooth deterministic perturbations as well. Finally, we are able to implement an Ulam type finite rank approximation scheme thus reducing the study of the spectral properties of the transfer operator to a finite dimensional problem.Comment: 58 pages, LaTe

Dissipation time and decay of correlations

We consider the effect of noise on the dynamics generated by volume-preserving maps on a d-dimensional torus. The quantity we use to measure the irreversibility of the dynamics is the dissipation time. We focus on the asymptotic behaviour of this time in the limit of small noise. We derive universal lower and upper bounds for the dissipation time in terms of various properties of the map and its associated propagators: spectral properties, local expansivity, and global mixing properties. We show that the dissipation is slow for a general class of non-weakly-mixing maps; on the opposite, it is fast for a large class of exponentially mixing systems which include uniformly expanding maps and Anosov diffeomorphisms.Comment: 26 Pages, LaTex. Submitted to Nonlinearit

Coherent States Measurement Entropy

Coherent states (CS) quantum entropy can be split into two components. The dynamical entropy is linked with the dynamical properties of a quantum system. The measurement entropy, which tends to zero in the semiclassical limit, describes the unpredictability induced by the process of a quantum approximate measurement. We study the CS--measurement entropy for spin coherent states defined on the sphere discussing different methods dealing with the time limit $n \to \infty$. In particular we propose an effective technique of computing the entropy by iterated function systems. The dependence of CS--measurement entropy on the character of the partition of the phase space is analysed.Comment: revtex, 22 pages, 14 figures available upon request (e-mail: [email protected]). Submitted to J.Phys.