Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Australia and New Zealand

In 1990, Australia and New Zealand were ranked around 25th and 35th in terms of GNP per capita, having been the highest-income countries in the world one hundred years earlier. The poor performance over that long period contrasts markedly with that of the past 15 years, when these two economies out-performed most other high-income countries. This difference in growth performance is due to major economic policy reforms during the past two to three decades. We provide new evidence on the extent of governmental distortions to agricultural incentives in particular in the two economies since the late 1940s, both directly and indirectly (and negatively) via manufacturing protection.Distorted incentives, agricultural and trade policy reform, Agricultural and Food Policy, F13, F14, Q17, Q18,

The Polynomial Method Augmented by Supervised Training for Hand-Printed Character Recognition

We present a pattern recognition algorithm for hand-printed characters, based on a combination of the classical least squares method and a neural-network-type supervised training algorithm. Characters are mapped, nonlinearly, to feature vectors using selected quadratic polynomilas of the given pixels. We use a method for extracting an equidistributed subsample of all possible quadratic features. This method creates pattern classifiers with accuracy competitive to feed-forward systems trained using back propagation; however back propagation training takes longer by a factor of ten to fifty. (This makes our system particularly attractive for experimentation with other forms of feature representation, other character sets, etc.) The resulting classifier runs much faster in use than the back propagation trained systems, because all arithmetic is done using bit and integer operations

Theory of Structural Glasses and Supercooled Liquids

We review the Random First Order Transition Theory of the glass transition, emphasizing the experimental tests of the theory. Many distinct phenomena are quantitatively predicted or explained by the theory, both above and below the glass transition temperature $T_g$. These include: the viscosity catastrophe and heat capacity jump at $T_g$, and their connection; the non-exponentiality of relaxations and their correlation with the fragility; dynamic heterogeneity in supercooled liquids owing to the mosaic structure; deviations from the Vogel-Fulcher law, connected with strings or fractral cooperative rearrangements; deviations from the Stokes-Einstein relation close to $T_g$; aging, and its correlation with fragility; the excess density of states at cryogenic temperatures due to two level tunneling systems and the Boson Peak.Comment: submitted to Ann. Rev. Phys. Che

Ground failure along the New River caused by the October 1979 Imperial Valley earthquake sequence

We recognized a number of ground failures along the south bank of the New River north of Brawley, California, following the 15 October 1979 Imperial Valley, California, earthquake sequence. The zone includes a large pond and numerous sand boils, apparently caused by liquefaction, near the Del Rio Country Club. These ground failures, together with failures at the New River bridge west of Brawley and at Wiest Lake, form a discontinuous zone 10 km long. While this zone appears to coincide with the aftershocks following the 16 October 1979, M_L 5.8, Brawley earthquake (the largest aftershock of the Imperial Valley earthquake), a cause and effect relationship cannot be demonstrated. No evidence of tectonic surface faulting could be found

Spin-Orbital Entanglement and Violation of the Goodenough-Kanamori Rules

We point out that large composite spin-orbital fluctuations in Mott insulators with $t_{2g}$ orbital degeneracy are a manifestation of quantum entanglement of spin and orbital variables. This results in a dynamical nature of the spin superexchange interactions, which fluctuate over positive and negative values, and leads to an apparent violation of the Goodenough-Kanamori rules. [{\it Published in Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 96}, 147205 (2006).}]Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Genetic Algorithm Selection of Features for Hand-printed Character Identification

We have constructed a linear discriminator for hand-printed character recognition that uses a (binary) vector of 1,500 features based on an equidistributed collection of products of pixel pairs. This classifier is competitive with other techniques, but faster to train and to run for classification. However, the 1,500-member feature set clearly contains many redundant (overlapping or useless) members, anda significantly smaller set would be very desirable (e.g., for faster training, a faster and smaller application program, and a smaller system suitable for hardware implementation). A system using the small set of features should also be better at generalization, since fewer features are less likely to allow a system to memorize noise in the training data. Several approaches to using a genetic algorithm to search for effective small subsets of features have been tried, and we have successfully derived a 300-element set of features and built a classifier whose performance is as good on our training and testing set as the system using the full set

Combinatorial Proofs of Fermat\u27s, Lucas\u27s, and Wilson\u27s Theorems

No abstract provided in this article

Advances in Linear Pixel Shuffling

Given an interval or a higher dimensional block of points, that may be either continuous or discrete, how can we probe that set in a smooth manner, visiting all its regions without slighting some and overprobing others? The method should be easy to program, to understand, and to run efficiently. We investigate a method of visiting the pixels (the elements of a rectangular matrix) and the points in the real unit cube based on an arithmetic progression with wrap-around (modular arithmetic). For appropriate choices of parameters, choices that generalize Fibonacci numbers and the golden mean, we find equidistributed collections of pixels or points, respectively. We illustrate this equidistributivity with a novel approach to progressive rendering of digital images. We also suggest several opportunities for its application to other areas of image processing and computing