Use of remote sensing in agriculture

The remote sensing studies of (a) cultivated peanut areas in Southeastern Virginia; (b) studies at the Virginia Truck and Ornamentals Research Station near Painter, Virginia, the Eastern Virginia Research Station near Warsaw, Virginia, the Tidewater Research and Continuing Education Center near Suffolk, Virginia, and the Southern Piedmont Research and Continuing Education Center Blackstone, Virginia; and (c) land use classification studies at Virginia Beach, Virginia are presented. The practical feasibility of using false color infrared imagery to detect and determine the areal extent of peanut disease infestation of Cylindrocladium black rot and Sclerotinia blight is demonstrated. These diseases pose a severe hazard to this major agricultural food commodity. The value of remote sensing technology in terrain analyses and land use classification of diverse land areas is also investigated. Continued refinement of spectral signatures of major agronomic crops and documentation of pertinent environmental variables have provided a data base for the generation of an agricultural-environmental prediction model

High precision cryogenic thermal conductivity standards

New apparatus allows accurate simultaneous measurement of thermal conductivity, electrical resistivity, and thermopower for technically important materials, such as new or uncommon alloys. A list of materials investigated is presented. Sources for obtaining data on these materials, as well as the source giving a description of the apparatus, are cited

Level crossing in the three-body problem for strongly interacting fermions in a harmonic trap

We present a solution of the three-fermion problem in a harmonic potential across a Feshbach resonance. We compare the spectrum with that of the two-body problem and show that it is energetically unfavorable for the three fermions to occupy one lattice site rather than two. We also demonstrate the existence of an energy level crossing in the ground state with a symmetry change of its wave function, suggesting the possibility of a phase transition for the corresponding many-body case.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, typos corrected, references adde

Universal monopole scaling near transitions from the Coulomb phase

Certain frustrated systems, including spin ice and dimer models, exhibit a Coulomb phase at low temperatures, with power-law correlations and fractionalized monopole excitations. Transitions out of this phase, at which the effective gauge theory becomes confining, provide examples of unconventional criticality. This work studies the behavior at nonzero monopole density near such transitions, using scaling theory to arrive at universal expressions for the crossover phenomena. For a particular transition in spin ice, quantitative predictions are made through a duality mapping to the XY model, and confirmed using Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: 4.5 pages, 4 figure

A new Lyropecten (Pectinidae, Bivalvia, Mollusca) from the central California Miocene, USA

A new pectinid, Lyropecten terrysmithae n. sp., has been recognized in middle to late Miocene rock units referred to as the Monterey Formation and Santa Margarita Sandstone in the southern Salinas Valley, central California. Previously, L. terrysmithae had been identified as a flat form belonging to either L. estrellanus or L. catalinae, then more recently to Argopecten sp. The earlier assignments were based on its moderate size and a radial rib count nearly identical to these taxa. However, its hinge, flat unledged valves, looped lamellar growth lines, and hinge crura set L. terrysmithae apart from Argopecten and all species of Lyropecten. Localities where it occurs in the Salinas Valley that can be accurately dated are from the late middle to middle late Miocene “Margaritan” California provincial molluscan stage. While L. terrysmithae has been collected at other sites, those localities lack diagnostic age-specific species necessary to determine an accurate geological age and maybe older

Use of remote sensing in agriculture

Remote sensing studies in Virginia and Chesapeake Bay areas to investigate soil and plant conditions via remote sensing technology are reported ant the results given. Remote sensing techniques and interactions are also discussed. Specific studies on the effects of soil moisture and organic matter on energy reflection of extensively occurring Sassafras soils are discussed. Greenhouse and field studies investigating the effects of chlorophyll content of Irish potatoes on infrared reflection are presented. Selected ground truth and environmental monitoring data are shown in summary form. Practical demonstrations of remote sensing technology in agriculture are depicted and future use areas are delineated

Internal Migration and Regional Population Dynamics in Europe: Estonia Case Study

Estonia has experienced a long-lasting and strong influence of international migration on regional population growth. Post-war immigrants account for about 36 per cent of the total population, and are concentrated in larger cities of Northern Estonia. Regionally, the relative proportions of the native-born and immigrant origin sub-populations are important for the understanding of population change and internal migration flows in the 1980-1990s. In Estonia, the quality of migration data requires careful assessment. The preservation of Soviet-type record-keeping has reduced data quality in the 1990s, already low, and use of the data should keep data quality problems in mind. Otherwise, false conclusions can be reached. To describe internal migration patterns, it has proved technically feasible and very useful to disaggregate the county population into rural and urban components, and correspondingly, the migration flows into four directions (urban-urban, urban-rural, rural-urban and rural-rural). During the 1980s the pattern of population growth and internal migration has changed in Estonia. Reflecting the turnaround in long-term population processes, migration development reached the advanced stage with more or less regionally balanced in- and out-migration flows and decreasing importance of net migration. Accordingly, to understand current trends and patterns, explanations must be sought from the 1980s which has served a starting point for the present trends rather than from the period of economic transition in the 1990s. As a part of the turnaround, the century-long persistent rural depopulation has come to an end and the moderate growth has started reflecting natural population increase as well as deurbanization. In the 1980s two developments have occurred in parallel: migratory increase of rural population led by a deurbanizing native-born population, and continued urban population growth as a result of the population momentum of pre-transition immigrants. In future decades, the urban deconcentration will probably be the underlying trend in Estonia. In Estonia, noticeable proportion of territory and population is located in islands. However, the island population does not show any systematic difference in the type of internal migration. Particularly, the depopulation of island populations, observed in several comparable European cases, is not occurring. Each life-course stage was found to have its specific migration pattern, more stable than the pattern for the total population. In many cases the changes of internal migration are determined by the change in the proportion of population in different life-course stages. Additionally, the life-course approach has been useful in demonstrating the features of the present Estonian internal migration pattern which appear closer to the countries of comparable in demographic development, more or less regardless of the significant differences in the level of economic development. Among life-course groups, in Estonia the older working age population was characterized by the strongest deurbanization intensities in 1995. The same group has also undergone the largest modification of migration pattern during the economic transition (1987-1995)

Higgs transitions of spin ice

Frustrated magnets such as spin ice exhibit Coulomb phases, where correlations have power-law forms at long distances. Applied perturbations can cause ordering transitions which cannot be described by the usual Landau paradigm, and are instead naturally viewed as Higgs transitions of an emergent gauge theory. Starting from a classical statistical model of spin ice, it is shown that a variety of possible phases and transitions can be described by this approach. Certain cases are identified where continuous transitions are argued to be likely; the predicted critical behavior may be tested in experiments or numerical simulations.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures; v2: published version with minor changes; ancillary file "Figures3D.nb" is a Mathematica (v7) notebook containing figures as rotatable 3D graphics (see http://www.wolfram.com/cdf-player/ for a free viewer

GRIDCC: Real-time workflow system

The Grid is a concept which allows the sharing of resources between distributed communities, allowing each to progress towards potentially different goals. As adoption of the Grid increases so are the activities that people wish to conduct through it. The GRIDCC project is a European Union funded project addressing the issues of integrating instruments into the Grid. This increases the requirement of workflows and Quality of Service upon these workflows as many of these instruments have real-time requirements. In this paper we present the workflow management service within the GRIDCC project which is tasked with optimising the workflows and ensuring that they meet the pre-defined QoS requirements specified upon them

Diabetes and kidney cancer: A direct or indirect association?

A positive association between diabetes and kidney cancer has been reported in several investigations, but it is unclear whether diabetes or its complications account for this association. Recent advances in estimating direct associations may be useful for elucidating the association between diabetes and kidney cancer. Therefore, we performed a case-control analysis to evaluate whether the direct association between diabetes and kidney cancer is the primary concern in this exposure-outcome relation. Discharge data (with International Classification of Diseases – 9 codes) from 2001 for hospitals throughout Florida were used to construct a case-control population of inpatients aged ≥45 years. Cases (n=1,909) were inpatients with malignant kidney cancer and controls (n=6,451) were inpatients with motor vehicle injuries. Diabetes status was ascertained for cases and controls. Covariates that required adjustment to estimate the total (age, gender, ethnicity, obesity, and smoking) and direct (age, gender, ethnicity, obesity, smoking, hypertension, and kidney disease) associations were identified in a directed acyclic graph. Binary logistic regression was used to estimate the adjusted total and direct odds ratios (ORs) and corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of kidney cancer for diabetics. The odds of kidney cancer were higher for inpatients with diabetes than inpatients without diabetes when estimating the total association (OR=1.27, 95%CI: 1.10, 1.47) but attenuated when estimating the direct association (OR=1.08, 95%CI: 0.93, 1.25). Our findings provide preliminary insight that the direct association between diabetes and kidney cancer may not be the primary concern in this exposure-outcome relation; indirect pathways (i.e. diabetic complications) may have greater influence on this relation. A similar analysis using longitudinal data with appropriately measured covariates may provide more definitive conclusions and could have implications for kidney cancer prevention among diabetics