25,594 research outputs found
Seeking a solution of the Pioneer Anomaly
The 1972 and 1973 launched Pioneer 10 and 11 were the first missions to
explore the outer solar system. They achieved stunning breakthroughs in
deep-space exploration. But around 1980 an unmodeled force of \sim 8 \times
10^{-8} cm/s^2, directed approximately towards the Sun, appeared in the
tracking data. It later was unambiguously verified as not being an artifact.
The origin remains unknown (although radiant heat remains a likely cause).
Increasing effort has gone into understanding this anomaly. We review the
situation and describe programs to resolve the issue.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, invited talk at the Fourth Meeting on CPT and
Lorentz Symmetry, 8-11 Aug. 2007, held at Indiana Universit
Earth Flyby Anomalies
In a reference frame fixed to the solar system's center of mass, a
satellite's energy will change as it is deflected by a planet. But a number of
satellites flying by Earth have also experienced energy changes in the
Earth-centered frame -- and that's a mystery.Comment: 5 pagea 3 figure
An Assessment of the Economic, Environmental and Social Impacts of NSW Agriculture's Wheat Breeding Program
The Wagga wheat breeding program has been operating for over 100 years. In that time, it has released a flow of new wheat varieties for wheat growers in south-eastern Australia. Those varieties have led to increases in both yields and grain quality. The average annual rate of yield improvement in NSW has been 3.2% compared to the average for Australia of 2.4% with a significant proportion of these productivity gains arising from new varieties. In this analysis, the investment in that program from 1980 to 2003 has been evaluated. Given the lags inherent in wheat breeding investments, the benefits from those investments are being measured from 1993 to 2020. The broad structure of the program has remained relatively stable for most of the period since 1980. The program consists of 2-3 wheat breeders, one breeder-pathologist, and a cereal chemist, with appropriate technical and field support, totaling approximately 15 full-time equivalents per year. The costs of the program have averaged approximately 321 million. The economic benefits of the breeding program are shared by producers, processors and consumers in the wheat industry, some of whom live overseas. Because Australia is largely a price taker on world wheat markets and because the wheat processing and distribution sector in Australia is generally considered to be competitive, most of the benefits of the wheat breeding program are likely to remain with producers. However these gains are offset by declines in the world price in response to advancing technology throughout the world. These economic benefits have positive social consequences, largely through their contribution to the incomes of farmers and those who handle and process wheat in regional NSW. Some of these gains are in the form of new marketing and processing industries around the increasingly specialised industry segments resulting directly from the changes that have occurred in wheat varieties. Perhaps these new skills add to the social capital of towns in the wheat belt of NSW. In environmental terms, the wheat breeding program itself is not likely to have major impacts, since the wheat industry would have been very similar whether or not there was a Wagga breeding program. However, to the extent that improved productivity from the Wagga program's varieties has allowed an expansion of the wheat industry, there could be some negative environmental consequences of the breeding program, such as those arising from the clearing of land, increased cultivation and increased use of herbicides. On the other hand, the high levels of disease resistance developed and maintained has meant that wheat production is not associated with large-scale fungicide use, and hence the danger of chemical contamination of the environment is less than it would have been without the resistance developed in this program. Some of these environmental impacts affect the costs and incomes of wheat farmers and hence are reflected in economic benefits and some spill over to the broader community and have not been valued here. It is not clear that these social and environmental impacts would be much different without the Wagga breeding program, except through the extent to which the Wagga program has allowed the wheat industry in NSW to develop more than it otherwise would have. Without the Wagga program the slower gains in yield and quality would also be associated with some social and environmental impacts, and it is the difference that is critical in evaluating the Wagga program. The costs of this program have been met partly by the NSW taxpayers through NSW Agriculture and partly by the grains industry through levies from the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC). The recent introduction of variety royalty payments ("end-point royalties") has not yet led to significant funding, but may be expected to do so in the future. The nature of the outputs of plant breeding programs is that there are large economic benefits that flow directly to producers, processors and consumers in the industry. However the social and environmental impacts on the broader community, while not explicitly valued here, are considered to be small relative to economic benefits and relative to some other programs of NSW Agriculture that have been evaluated. Hence it is appropriate that the industry, though GRDC levies and royalties on production, has increasingly funded the operations of the wheat breeding program. Recent institutional changes for the wheat breeding program have made it even more commercially-based for the future and less reliant on government funding. The new institutional arrangements for wheat breeding programs and the strengthening role of the private sector in supplying varieties traditionally supplied by the public sector mean that the place of public wheat breeding programs is being re-assessed. A key question is whether publicly-operated programs, can offer some additional benefits either to the industry or to the community, which would not result from the complete privatisation of the wheat breeding sector. While those issues have not been addressed directly in this analysis, the results indicate that past investments in public wheat breeding program at Wagga have certainly been a productive use of public funds over the past 20 years or so.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,
High-dimensional Ising model selection using -regularized logistic regression
We consider the problem of estimating the graph associated with a binary
Ising Markov random field. We describe a method based on -regularized
logistic regression, in which the neighborhood of any given node is estimated
by performing logistic regression subject to an -constraint. The method
is analyzed under high-dimensional scaling in which both the number of nodes
and maximum neighborhood size are allowed to grow as a function of the
number of observations . Our main results provide sufficient conditions on
the triple and the model parameters for the method to succeed in
consistently estimating the neighborhood of every node in the graph
simultaneously. With coherence conditions imposed on the population Fisher
information matrix, we prove that consistent neighborhood selection can be
obtained for sample sizes with exponentially decaying
error. When these same conditions are imposed directly on the sample matrices,
we show that a reduced sample size of suffices for the
method to estimate neighborhoods consistently. Although this paper focuses on
the binary graphical models, we indicate how a generalization of the method of
the paper would apply to general discrete Markov random fields.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOS691 the Annals of
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Distributions associated with general runs and patterns in hidden Markov models
This paper gives a method for computing distributions associated with
patterns in the state sequence of a hidden Markov model, conditional on
observing all or part of the observation sequence. Probabilities are computed
for very general classes of patterns (competing patterns and generalized later
patterns), and thus, the theory includes as special cases results for a large
class of problems that have wide application. The unobserved state sequence is
assumed to be Markovian with a general order of dependence. An auxiliary Markov
chain is associated with the state sequence and is used to simplify the
computations. Two examples are given to illustrate the use of the methodology.
Whereas the first application is more to illustrate the basic steps in applying
the theory, the second is a more detailed application to DNA sequences, and
shows that the methods can be adapted to include restrictions related to
biological knowledge.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOAS125 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Directly Measured Limit on the Interplanetary Matter Density from Pioneer 10 and 11
The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft had exceptional deep-space navigational
capabilities. The accuracies of their orbit reconstruction were limited,
however, by a small, anomalous, Doppler frequency drift that can be interpreted
as an acceleration of (8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^{-8} cm/s^2 directed toward the Sun.
We investigate the possibility that this anomaly could be due to a drag on the
spacecraft from their passing through the interplanetary medium. Although this
mechanism is an appealing one, the existing Pioneer radiometric data would
require an unexpectedly high mass density of interplanetary dust for this
mechanism to work. Further, the magnitude of the density would have to be
nearly constant at distances ~ 20-70 AU. Therefore, it appears that such an
explanation is very unlikely, if not ruled out. Despite this, the measured
frequency drift by itself places a directly-measured, model-independent limit
of \lessim 3 x 10^{-19} g/cm^3 on the mass density of interplanetary dust in
the outer(~20-70 AU) solar system. Lower experimental limits can be placed if
one presumes a model that varies with distance. An example is the limit \lessim
6 x 10^{-20} g/cm^3 obtained for the model with an axially-symmetric density
distribution that falls off as the inverse of the distance. We emphasize that
the limits obtained are experimentally-measured, in situ limits. A mission to
investigate the anomaly would be able to place a better limit on the density,
or perhaps even to measure it.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, publication versio
The Pioneer Anomaly: The Data, its Meaning, and a Future Test
The radio-metric Doppler tracking data from the Pioneer 10/11 spacecraft,
from between 20-70 AU, yields an unambiguous and independently confirmed
anomalous blue shift drift of a_t = (2.92 \pm 0.44)\times 10^{-18} s/s^2. It
can be interpreted as being due to a constant acceleration of a_P = (8.74 \pm
1.33) \times 10^{-8} cm/s^2 directed towards the Sun. No systematic effect has
been able to explain the anomaly, even though such an origin is an obvious
candidate. We discuss what has been learned (and what might still be learned)
from the data about the anomaly, its origin, and the mission design
characteristics that would be needed to test it. Future mission options are
proposed.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, to be published in the AIP Conference
Proceedings of the 2nd Mexican Meeting on Mathematical and Experimental
Physic
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