Making Ends Meet: Private Food Assistance and the Working Poor

Concern is growing that large segments of low-income Americans are slipping through, or are not adequately served by, the public food assistance safety net. Many of these individuals are turning to the private network of food pantries and soup kitchens for their nourishment. In particular, a significant percentage of individuals seeking private food assistance are the working poor. In this paper, we look at the characteristics of a sample of employed Virginia households who depend on soup kitchens or food pantries to help them make ends meet. Our data indicate that these individuals have demographic characteristics that do not bode well for their being able to earn high enough wages to all allow them to meet basic family needs without some type of additional supports.

Consumer Willingness to Pay for Irradiated Beef

This study examines consumer willingness to pay for irradiated beef products. About 58 percent of the respondents are willing to pay a premium for irradiated beef. An ordered probit with sample selection model was estimated. Standard errors of the marginal effects of the ordered probit model were estimated using the bootstrap method. Our findings suggest that females and those who think that improper handling contributes to food poisoning are more likely to pay a premium of 50 cents per pound of irradiated beef than others. Those who trust the irradiation technology are also more likely to pay a premium of between 5 to 25 cents per pound for irradiated beef. Supply chain implications are discussed.Consumer Behavior, Food Chain, Food Irradiation, Willingness to Pay, Consumer/Household Economics,

Increasing power for voxel-wise genome-wide association studies : the random field theory, least square kernel machines and fast permutation procedures

Imaging traits are thought to have more direct links to genetic variation than diagnostic measures based on cognitive or clinical assessments and provide a powerful substrate to examine the influence of genetics on human brains. Although imaging genetics has attracted growing attention and interest, most brain-wide genome-wide association studies focus on voxel-wise single-locus approaches, without taking advantage of the spatial information in images or combining the effect of multiple genetic variants. In this paper we present a fast implementation of voxel- and cluster-wise inferences based on the random field theory to fully use the spatial information in images. The approach is combined with a multi-locus model based on least square kernel machines to associate the joint effect of several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) with imaging traits. A fast permutation procedure is also proposed which significantly reduces the number of permutations needed relative to the standard empirical method and provides accurate small p-value estimates based on parametric tail approximation. We explored the relation between 448,294 single nucleotide polymorphisms and 18,043 genes in 31,662 voxels of the entire brain across 740 elderly subjects from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Structural MRI scans were analyzed using tensor-based morphometry (TBM) to compute 3D maps of regional brain volume differences compared to an average template image based on healthy elderly subjects. We find method to be more sensitive compared with voxel-wise single-locus approaches. A number of genes were identified as having significant associations with volumetric changes. The most associated gene was GRIN2B, which encodes the N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) glutamate receptor NR2B subunit and affects both the parietal and temporal lobes in human brains. Its role in Alzheimer's disease has been widely acknowledged and studied, suggesting the validity of the approach. The various advantages over existing approaches indicate a great potential offered by this novel framework to detect genetic influences on human brains

APPLICATION OF A BIO-ECONOMIC-ENGINEERING MODEL FOR SHRIMP MARICULTURE SYSTEMS

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Equivalences between spin models induced by defects

The spectrum of integrable spin chains are shown to be independent of the ordering of their spins. As an application we introduce defects (local spin inhomogeneities in homogenous chains) in two-boundary spin systems and, by changing their locations, we show the spectral equivalence of different boundary conditions. In particular we relate certain nondiagonal boundary conditions to diagonal ones.Comment: 14 pages, 16 figures, LaTeX, Extended versio

Low temperature shape relaxation of 2-d islands by edge diffusion

We present a precise microscopic description of the limiting step for low temperature shape relaxation of two dimensional islands in which activated diffusion of particles along the boundary is the only mechanism of transport allowed. In particular, we are able to explain why the system is driven irreversibly towards equilibrium. Based on this description, we present a scheme for calculating the duration of the limiting step at each stage of the relaxation process. Finally, we calculate numerically the total relaxation time as predicted by our results and compare it with simulations of the relaxation process.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Locally Accessible Information of Multisite Quantum Ensembles Violates Monogamy

Locally accessible information is a useful information-theoretic physical quantity of an ensemble of multiparty quantum states. We find it has properties akin to quantum as well as classical correlations of single multiparty quantum states. It satisfies monotonicity under local quantum operations and classical communication. However we show that it does not follow monogamy, an important property usually satisfied by quantum correlations, and actually violates any such relation to the maximal extent. Violation is obtained even for locally indistinguishable, but globally orthogonal, multisite ensembles. The results assert that while single multiparty quantum states are monogamous with respect to their shared quantum correlations, ensembles of multiparty quantum states may not be so. The results have potential implications for quantum communication systems.Comment: 6 pages, RevTeX

Probing Wolf-Rayet Winds: Chandra/HETG X-Ray Spectra of WR 6

With a deep Chandra/HETGS exposure of WR 6, we have resolved emission lines whose profiles show that the X-rays originate from a uniformly expanding spherical wind of high X-ray-continuum optical depth. The presence of strong helium-like forbidden lines places the source of X-ray emission at tens to hundreds of stellar radii from the photosphere. Variability was present in X-rays and simultaneous optical photometry, but neither were correlated with the known period of the system or with each other. An enhanced abundance of sodium revealed nuclear processed material, a quantity related to the evolutionary state of the star. The characterization of the extent and nature of the hot plasma in WR 6 will help to pave the way to a more fundamental theoretical understanding of the winds and evolution of massive stars.Comment: Accepted by the Astrophysical Journa

Refined Razumov-Stroganov conjectures for open boundaries

Recently it has been conjectured that the ground-state of a Markovian Hamiltonian, with one boundary operator, acting in a link pattern space is related to vertically and horizontally symmetric alternating-sign matrices (equivalently fully-packed loop configurations (FPL) on a grid with special boundaries).We extend this conjecture by introducing an arbitrary boundary parameter. We show that the parameter dependent ground state is related to refined vertically symmetric alternating-sign matrices i.e. with prescribed configurations (respectively, prescribed FPL configurations) in the next to central row. We also conjecture a relation between the ground-state of a Markovian Hamiltonian with two boundary operators and arbitrary coefficients and some doubly refined (dependence on two parameters) FPL configurations. Our conjectures might be useful in the study of ground-states of the O(1) and XXZ models, as well as the stationary states of Raise and Peel models.Comment: 11 pages LaTeX, 8 postscript figure