An Internet-Based Tool for Weather Risk Management

This paper introduces a web-based computer program designed to evaluate weather risk man-agement and weather insurance in the United States. The paper outlines the economics of weather risk in terms of agricultural production and household well-being; defines weather risk in terms of intensity, duration, and frequency; and illustrates the computer program use by comparing heat and precipitation risks at Ardmore, Oklahoma, and Ithaca, New York.weather insurance, heat insurance, precipitation insurance, crop insurance, weather derivatives, Risk and Uncertainty,

Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater

The expression liturgical drama was formulated in 1834 as a metaphor and hardened into formal category only later in the nineteenth century. Prior to this invention, the medieval rites and representations that would forge the category were understood as distinct and unrelated classes: as liturgical rites no longer celebrated or as theatrical works of dubious quality. If this distinction between liturgical rites and non-liturgical representations holds, should we not examine the works called liturgical drama according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them? Given the ways that the words liturgy and drama have been understood, moreover, combining them makes little sense. Given the distinctions that exist within the repertory, the expression also has no definable referent. Ultimately, the expression has little utility if we wish to appreciate how these rites and representations were understood at the time they were copied, celebrated, or performed.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_edam/1004/thumbnail.jp

Searching for Markets: The Geography of Supermarket Access in the United States

Reinvestment Fund’s LSA analysis is designed to help investors and policymakers identify areas in the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia with both inequitable and inadequate access to healthy food as well as sufficient demand for new or expanded food retail. First developed for the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund in 2010, the LSA analysis looks at income, distance to existing stores and car ownership rates to identify places where households do not have reasonable access to supermarkets. An LSA area is a cluster Census block groups with a population of at least 5,000 where residents must travel significantly farther to reach a supermarket than residents in well-served block groups with similar population densities and car ownership rates. The LSA analysis defines ‘well-served’ block groups as those where the median family income is at least 120% of the area median income. The LSA analysis is unique in that it goes beyond simply identifying areas with limited access to supermarkets; the analysis also measures the extent to which LSA areas can support new or expanded food retail options. Reinvestment Fund estimates “retail leakage” for all LSA areas, i.e. locally unmet demand for food, and then compares that amount to the demand necessary to support a new supermarket, approximately $14 million annually. In LSA areas with less than$14 million in leakage, there may be opportunities to finance new small stores, to expand existing stores, or to support alternative models of providing healthy food like farmers markets or community-supported agriculture programs

Experiences from semantic web service tutorials

We have given around 20 tutorials on Semantic Web Services in international events during the last two years. This position paper presents our experiences and depicts central aspects relevant for education, dissemination and exploitation of Semantic Web and Semantic Web service technologies in academia and industry

A Case Study in Light Industrial Buildings

The title of this thesis is A Case Study in Light Industrial Buildings. After research in this area I am more convinced than ever that such a study is needed. The single building that represents most of today\u27s monuments is no longer solving the problem that arises in a complex society. We as architects are no longer as naive to think that form alone can solve the challenges of the 21st century. A philosopher a few years ago said we were in an era of analysis aid that the next era would be that of suspended judgement. These qualities of analysis and synthesis have been employed by architects for some time but usually by a single person acting alone and acting on a single isolated building. It worked then; it does not work now. No longer can design be limited to one individual\u27s intuition and experience. What is needed is a closer look at the organization or structure inherent in types of buildings and complexes of buildings. This structure in context with goals, constraints, and trends should evolve into an architecture that is not only unique but that solves the problems

Modeling problems in mucus viscoelasticity and mucociliary clearance

From the common cold and allergies to severe chronic and acute respiratory impairments, the function of the body\u27s mucociliary clearance mechanism plays a primary defense role. Mucus demonstrates numerous non-Newtonian behaviors which set it apart from viscous fluids. Among them: Bingham plastic behavior, shear-thinning, and elasticity on short time scales due to relaxation time. Experimental evidence suggests that certain rheologies promote effective transport. In an effort to reveal the mechanisms controlling transport, models are developed. Firstly, a steady state model which idealizes the mucus as a rigid body is created in order to bring together disparate bodies of experimental work from the literature. The force balance reveals that the force cilia are capable of exerting cannot be related, simply, to the velocity of mucus. That is, only a fraction of the force cilia are capable of exerting is required to steadily transport mucus at the velocities observed experimentally. Likewise, the velocities estimated by this model when cilia force is the input are overestimated by one to two orders of magnitude. This incongruity formally motivates the inclusion of one of mucus\u27s rheological behaviors, stress relaxation. The first viscoelastic problem considered is the response of the linear Maxwell fluid to an oscillating plate. Though a problem commonly discussed in textbooks on theoretical viscoelasticity, the complete analytical solutions are not provided. Here, solutions are found and graphed in terms of the phase and amplitude of the velocity field resultant from the oscillations of the plate; all derivations are shown in their entirety. The effects of stress relaxation (sometimes referred to as memory) and inertia on phase and amplitude are shown to have frequency dependence. Furthermore, it is shown that oscillatory shear perturbations to a viscoelastic Maxwell fluid always travel further and faster away from the source as Deborah number (a dimensionless parameter governing the importance of viscoelastic forces, De=0 corresponds to a Newtonian fluid) is increased. The limitation of the linear Maxwell fluid is illustrated by attempting to apply the constitutive equation to a thin film flow problem. It is found that the stress field of the solution only differs from the viscous case if the boundary conditions are transient; that is, the constitutive equation cannot account for the changes in stress that occur over space. The time derivative must be replaced by a Convected Derivative to achieve the proper Lagrangian to Eulerian coordinate transformation and is considered in a final set of problems. Three problems were completed using the Upper Convected Maxwell model for viscoelasticity. The first considers a purely unidirectional shear flow which, unlike a viscous fluid, possesses tensile stresses along streamlines. The model posits that these additional stresses are essential for transport by allowing regions which are actively sheared, to hold up inactive regions. A novel relationship between applied stress and relaxation time is developed; the model shows that increasing the relaxation time of mucus decreases the amount of stress that must be imparted by cilia. In the second two problems, the UCM equations are simplified via a perturbation series expansion for small Weissenberg number (also a dimensionless group governing the importance of viscoelastic forces). This technique allows the analytically solvable viscous (also referred to as the unperturbed or order one) solutions to be used to estimate the impact of small amounts of stress memory. It is found that elasticity increases the developing region of a viscous flow; all stress components are convected downstream due to flow memory. Likewise, in the sinusoidally varying stress case, the velocity field is always shifted further away from the phase of the applied stress as viscoelastic forces are increased. It is also found that the departure from the viscous solution is dramatically reduced if the stress distribution is moving at the same velocity as the mucal flow. This shows the benefit of an antiplectic wave speed (the physiologically relevant case in which the phase of the cilial beat is moving opposite to transport) as there is no danger that these two can be in phase with one another. Model restrictions prevent quantitative gauges of transport efficiency as a function of metachronal wave parameters and relaxation time to be made. Several additional problems are proposed to address unanswered modeling questions and experimental solutions for the lack of rheological data on tracheal mucus are suggested

Dynamics and Statics of Liquid-Liquid and Gas-Liquid interfaces on Non-Uniform Substrates at the Micron and Sub-Micron Scales

Droplets and bubbles are ubiquitous motifs found in natural and industrial processes. In the absence of significant external forces, liquid-liquid and gas-liquid interfaces form constant mean curvature surfaces that locally minimize the free energy of a given system subject to constraints. However, even for sub-micron bubbles and droplets free of hydrodynamic and hydrostatic stresses (small Capillary, Weber, and Bond numbers), non-equilibrium at the contact line of sessile bubbles and droplets can influence geometries and dynamics. First, the wetting of micron-sized ellipsoidal particles was considered. In the space of axially symmetric interfaces, it is found that multiple constant mean curvature surfaces can satisfy volume and contact angle constraints. Partial encapsulation may be preferred even when the droplet\u27s volume is sufficient to fully engulf the particle. The co-existence of multiple equilibrium states suggests possible hysteretic encapsulation behavior. Secondly, motivated by electron microscopy observations of sub-micron bubbles in a liquid cell, a small mobile and growing bubble confined between two weakly diverging plates is considered theoretically. Scaling analysis suggests that observed bubbles move by continuously wetting and de-wetting the substrates onto which they are adhered. 2D and 3D models are constructed incorporating the Blake-Haynes mechanism, which relates the dynamic contact angle to contact line velocity; partial pinning of the contact line is also considered. In 2D, the system is fully described by a set of non-linear ordinary differential equations that can be readily solved. In 3D, the non-linear PDE system and constraints were solved using a pseudo-spectral method. Both 2D and 3D models predict that in order for a doubly confined bubble to grow in a super-saturated solution it must first increase its curvature; this is in contrast to a free-floating bubble whose curvature always decreases with the addition of mass/volume. Since the surface concentration is proportional to the internal pressure of the bubble, this geometric change temporarily regulates the growth of the bubble. The model predicts growth rates like those observed experimentally that are several orders of magnitude lower than predictions made by classical mass transfer driven growth theory developed by Epstein and Plesset

FARM-HOUSEHOLD ANALYSIS OF POLICIES AFFECTING PEANUT PRODUCTION IN SENEGAL

A farm-level survey of 150 households was conducted in the peanut basin of Senegal, and a profit function system estimated, for the purpose of analyzing the effects of policies affecting the peanut sector. Producer price of peanuts has relatively little effect on production, but producer price of millet influences peanut seed demand.Agricultural and Food Policy, Demand and Price Analysis,

Some remarks on the notions of general covariance and background independence

In the first part of this paper I review some of the difficulties that seem to obstruct generally valid definitions of "general covariance" and/or "background independence" The second and more historical part deals with a rather strange argument that Einstein put forward in his 1913 "Entwurf paper" with M. Grossmann to discredit scalar theories of gravity in order to promote general covariance.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures. Contribution to ``An assessment of current paradigms in the physics of fundamental interactions'', edited by I.O. Stamatescu (Springer Verlag, to appear