8,484 research outputs found
FACTORS EXPLAINING THE DIFFUSION OF HYBRID MAIZE: EVIDENCE FROM LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN IN SUPPORT OF THE LIFE CYCLE THEORY OF SEED INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
Factors affecting the diffusion of hybrid maize are explored using a unique data set from 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our findings not only validate the conventional profitability-based explanations of farmer adoption behavior, but also confirm the importance of supply-side factors, providing empirical support for the life cycle theory of seed industry development.Crop Production/Industries,
Local yield stress statistics in model amorphous solids
We develop and extend a method presented in [S. Patinet, D. Vandembroucq, and
M. L. Falk, Phys. Rev. Lett., 117, 045501 (2016)] to compute the local yield
stresses at the atomic scale in model two-dimensional Lennard-Jones glasses
produced via differing quench protocols. This technique allows us to sample the
plastic rearrangements in a non-perturbative manner for different loading
directions on a well-controlled length scale. Plastic activity upon shearing
correlates strongly with the locations of low yield stresses in the quenched
states. This correlation is higher in more structurally relaxed systems. The
distribution of local yield stresses is also shown to strongly depend on the
quench protocol: the more relaxed the glass, the higher the local plastic
thresholds. Analysis of the magnitude of local plastic relaxations reveals that
stress drops follow exponential distributions, justifying the hypothesis of an
average characteristic amplitude often conjectured in mesoscopic or continuum
models. The amplitude of the local plastic rearrangements increases on average
with the yield stress, regardless of the system preparation. The local yield
stress varies with the shear orientation tested and strongly correlates with
the plastic rearrangement locations when the system is sheared correspondingly.
It is thus argued that plastic rearrangements are the consequence of shear
transformation zones encoded in the glass structure that possess weak slip
planes along different orientations. Finally, we justify the length scale
employed in this work and extract the yield threshold statistics as a function
of the size of the probing zones. This method makes it possible to derive
physically grounded models of plasticity for amorphous materials by directly
revealing the relevant details of the shear transformation zones that mediate
this process
THE PRICING EFFICIENCY OF AGRICULTURAL FUTURES MARKETS: AN ANALYSIS OF PREVIOUS RESEARCH RESULTS
The analysis examines quantitatively the findings of previous studies of the pricing efficiency of various agricultural markets using a logit framework. The findings provide insight into the importance of commodity characteristics, uncertainty, and testing procedures used on the results of past research of pricing efficiency. The study also identifies several areas for further research.Demand and Price Analysis,
Neurofilament Phosphorylation during Development and Disease: Which Came First, the Phosphorylation or the Accumulation?
Posttranslational modification of proteins is a ubiquitous cellular mechanism for regulating protein function. Some of the most heavily modified neuronal proteins are cytoskeletal proteins of long myelinated axons referred to as neurofilaments (NFs). NFs are type IV intermediate filaments (IFs) that can be composed of four subunits, neurofilament heavy (NF-H), neurofilament medium (NF-M), neurofilament light (NF-L), and α-internexin. Within wild type axons, NFs are responsible for mediating radial growth, a process that determines axonal diameter. NFs are phosphorylated on highly conserved lysine-serine-proline (KSP) repeats located along the C-termini of both NF-M and NF-H within myelinated axonal regions. Phosphorylation is thought to regulate aspects of NF transport and function. However, a key pathological hallmark of several neurodegenerative diseases is ectopic accumulation and phosphorylation of NFs. The goal of this review is to provide an overview of the posttranslational modifications that occur in both normal and diseased axons. We review evidence that challenges the role of KSP phosphorylation as essential for radial growth and suggests an alternative role for NF phosphorylation in myelinated axons. Furthermore, we demonstrate that regulation of NF phosphorylation dynamics may be essential to avoiding NF accumulations
Tensor-product representations for string-net condensed states
We show that general string-net condensed states have a natural
representation in terms of tensor product states (TPS) . These TPS's are built
from local tensors. They can describe both states with short-range entanglement
(such as the symmetry breaking states) and states with long-range entanglement
(such as string-net condensed states with topological/quantum order). The
tensor product representation provides a kind of 'mean-field' description for
topologically ordered states and could be a powerful way to study quantum phase
transitions between such states. As an attempt in this direction, we show that
the constructed TPS's are fixed-points under a certain wave-function
renormalization group transformation for quantum states.Comment: 11 pages. RevTeX
Weak positive cloud-to-ground flashes in Northeastern Colorado
The frequency distributions of the peak magnetic field associated with the first detected return stroke of positive and negative cloud-to-ground (CG) flashes were studied using lightning data from northeastern Colorado. These data were obtained during 1985 with a medium-to-high gain network of three direction finders (DF's). The median signal strength of positive flashes was almost two times that of the negatives for flashes within 300 km of the DF's, which have an inherent detection-threshold bias that tends to discriminate against weak signals. This bias increases with range, and affects the detection of positive and negative flashes in different ways, because of the differing character of their distributions. Positive flashes appear to have a large percentage of signals clustered around very weak values that are lost to the medium-to-high gain Colorado Detection System very quickly with increasing range. The resulting median for positive signals could thus appear to be much larger than the median for negative signals, which are more clustered around intermediate values. When only flashes very close to the DF's are considered, however, the two distributions have almost identical medians. The large percentage of weak positive signals detected close to the DF's has not been explored previously. They have been suggested to come from intracloud discharges and thus are improperly classified as CG flashes. Evidence in hand, points to their being real positive, albeit weak CG flashes. Whether or not they are real positive ground flashes, it is important to be aware of their presence in data from magnetic DF networks
Dynamics and evaporation of defects in Mott-insulating clusters of boson pairs
Repulsively bound pairs of particles in a lattice governed by the
Bose-Hubbard model can form stable incompressible clusters of dimers
corresponding to finite-size n=2 Mott insulators. Here we study the dynamics of
hole defects in such clusters corresponding to unpaired particles which can
resonantly tunnel out of the cluster into the lattice vacuum. Due to bosonic
statistics, the unpaired particles have different effective mass inside and
outside the cluster, and "evaporation" of hole defects from the cluster
boundaries is possible only when their quasi-momenta are within a certain
transmission range. We show that quasi-thermalization of hole defects occurs in
the presence of catalyzing particle defects which thereby purify the Mott
insulating clusters. We study the dynamics of one-dimensional system using
analytical techniques and numerically exact t-DMRG simulations. We derive an
effective strong-interaction model that enables simulations of the system
dynamics for much longer times. We also discuss a more general case of two
bosonic species which reduces to the fermionic Hubbard model in the strong
interaction limit.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, minor update
Curves of every genus with many points, I: Abelian and toric families
Let N_q(g) denote the maximal number of F_q-rational points on any curve of
genus g over the finite field F_q. Ihara (for square q) and Serre (for general
q) proved that limsup_{g-->infinity} N_q(g)/g > 0 for any fixed q. In their
proofs they constructed curves with many points in infinitely many genera;
however, their sequences of genera are somewhat sparse. In this paper, we prove
that lim_{g-->infinity} N_q(g) = infinity. More precisely, we use abelian
covers of P^1 to prove that liminf_{g-->infinity} N_q(g)/(g/log g) > 0, and we
use curves on toric surfaces to prove that liminf_{g-->infty} N_q(g)/g^{1/3} >
0; we also show that these results are the best possible that can be proved
with these families of curves.Comment: LaTeX, 20 page
RJK Observations of the Optical Afterglow of GRB 991216
We present near-infrared and optical observations of the afterglow to the
Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) 991216 obtained with the F. L. Whipple Observatory 1.2-m
telescope and the University of Hawaii 2.2-m telescope. The observations range
from 15 hours to 3.8 days after the burst. The temporal behavior of the data is
well described by a single power-law decay with index -1.36 +/-0.04,
independent of wavelength. The optical spectral energy distribution, corrected
for significant Galactic reddening of E(B-V)=0.626, is well fitted by a single
power-law with index -0.58 +/- 0.08. Combining the IR/optical observations with
a Chandra X-ray measurement gives a spectral index of -0.8 +/- 0.1 in the
synchrotron cooling regime. A comparison between the spectral and temporal
power-law indices suggest that a jet is a better match to the observations than
a simple spherical shock.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal, 12 pages, 4 postscript figure
Access to Care and Cardiovascular Disease Prevention: A Cross-Sectional Study in 2 Latino Communities.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading killer of Americans. CVD is understudied among Latinos, who have high levels of CVD risk factors. This study aimed to determine whether access to health care (ie, insurance status and having a usual source of care) is associated with 4 CVD prevention factors (ie, health care utilization, CVD screening, information received from health care providers, and lifestyle factors) among Latino adults and to evaluate whether the associations depended on CVD clinical risk/disease.Data were collected as part of a community-engaged food environment intervention study in East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights, CA. Logistic regressions were fitted with insurance status and usual source of care as predictors of the 4 CVD prevention factors while controlling for demographics. Analyses were repeated with interactions between self-reported CVD clinical risk/disease and access to care measures.Access to health care significantly increased the odds of CVD prevention. Having a usual source of care was associated with all factors of prevention, whereas being insured was only associated with some factors of prevention. CVD clinical risk/disease did not moderate any associations.Although efforts to reduce CVD risk among Latinos through the Affordable Care Act could be impactful, they might have limited impact in curbing CVD among Latinos, via the law's expansion of insurance coverage. CVD prevention efforts must expand beyond the provision of insurance to effectively lower CVD rates
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