SIMULATION ANALYSIS TO ESTIMATE THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE IN THE UNITED STATES

Livestock Production/Industries,

INDEMNIFICATION UNDER ANIMAL DISEASE CONTROL PROGRAMS WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE

Livestock Production/Industries,

Quality-based Multimodal Classification Using Tree-Structured Sparsity

Recent studies have demonstrated advantages of information fusion based on sparsity models for multimodal classification. Among several sparsity models, tree-structured sparsity provides a flexible framework for extraction of cross-correlated information from different sources and for enforcing group sparsity at multiple granularities. However, the existing algorithm only solves an approximated version of the cost functional and the resulting solution is not necessarily sparse at group levels. This paper reformulates the tree-structured sparse model for multimodal classification task. An accelerated proximal algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem, which is an efficient tool for feature-level fusion among either homogeneous or heterogeneous sources of information. In addition, a (fuzzy-set-theoretic) possibilistic scheme is proposed to weight the available modalities, based on their respective reliability, in a joint optimization problem for finding the sparsity codes. This approach provides a general framework for quality-based fusion that offers added robustness to several sparsity-based multimodal classification algorithms. To demonstrate their efficacy, the proposed methods are evaluated on three different applications - multiview face recognition, multimodal face recognition, and target classification.Comment: To Appear in 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2014

Skills and Perceptions of Entry-Level Staff Supervision

The following study consisted of 532 respondents to a survey related to the supervision of entrylevel staff in student affairs. Participants included both supervisors of entry-level staff and entrylevel staff themselves. Individuals shared their thoughts and experiences regarding the supervision of this population. Themes emerged in four areas: Readiness for the supervisory role, challenges related to supervision, supervisor skills, and working through transition. Implications and recommendations for practice and further research are discussed

Branching Structures in Elastic Shape Optimization

Fine scale elastic structures are widespread in nature, for instances in plants or bones, whenever stiffness and low weight are required. These patterns frequently refine towards a Dirichlet boundary to ensure an effective load transfer. The paper discusses the optimization of such supporting structures in a specific class of domain patterns in 2D, which composes of periodic and branching period transitions on subdomain facets. These investigations can be considered as a case study to display examples of optimal branching domain patterns. In explicit, a rectangular domain is decomposed into rectangular subdomains, which share facets with neighbouring subdomains or with facets which split on one side into equally sized facets of two different subdomains. On each subdomain one considers an elastic material phase with stiff elasticity coefficients and an approximate void phase with orders of magnitude softer material. For given load on the outer domain boundary, which is distributed on a prescribed fine scale pattern representing the contact area of the shape, the interior elastic phase is optimized with respect to the compliance cost. The elastic stress is supposed to be continuous on the domain and a stress based finite volume discretization is used for the optimization. If in one direction equally sized subdomains with equal adjacent subdomain topology line up, these subdomains are consider as equal copies including the enforced boundary conditions for the stress and form a locally periodic substructure. An alternating descent algorithm is employed for a discrete characteristic function describing the stiff elastic subset on the subdomains and the solution of the elastic state equation. Numerical experiments are shown for compression and shear load on the boundary of a quadratic domain.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Susceptibility Amplitude Ratios Near a Lifshitz Point

The susceptibility amplitude ratio in the neighborhood of a uniaxial Lifshitz point is calculated at one-loop level using field-theoretic and $\epsilon_{L}$-expansion methods. We use the Schwinger parametrization of the propagator in order to split the quadratic and quartic part of the momenta, as well as a new special symmetry point suitable for renormalization purposes. For a cubic lattice (d = 3), we find the result $\frac{C_{+}}{C_{-}} = 3.85$.Comment: 7 pages, late

Taming the Yukawa potential singularity: improved evaluation of bound states and resonance energies

Using the tools of the J-matrix method, we absorb the 1/r singularity of the Yukawa potential in the reference Hamiltonian, which is handled analytically. The remaining part, which is bound and regular everywhere, is treated by an efficient numerical scheme in a suitable basis using Gauss quadrature approximation. Analysis of resonance energies and bound states spectrum is performed using the complex scaling method, where we show their trajectories in the complex energy plane and demonstrate the remarkable fact that bound states cross over into resonance states by varying the potential parameters.Comment: 8 pages, 2 tables, 1 figure. 2 mpg videos and 1 pdf table file are available upon request from the corresponding Autho