Alfalfa Weevil Hatch is Upon Us

The map below indicates the accumulated degree days for each of the nine Iowa crop reporting districts. Degree-day information indicates that alfalfa weevil larvae should be hatching this week in southern Iowa. In central Iowa counties, weevils should be hatching by the third week of April; and in northern Iowa, weevils should hatch the last full week of April. That means that fields in southern Iowa should be scouted now

Watch alfalfa for blister beetles

Blister beetles are occasional late-summer problems in Iowa alfalfa fields. The beetles feed on alfalfa and soybean foliage, but leaf loss is not of economic importance. The real problem with blister beetles lies in their toxicity to livestock, especially horses, when accidentally consumed in feed. The beetles produce cantharidin, an irritant that causes painful blistering when the insects are handled. The cantharidin remains in the beetle\u27s body even after it dies. That becomes a problem when alfalfa is swathed, during which dead blister beetles can be incorporated into the hay as it is made

Be aware of corn leaf aphids

Field specialists and crop advisors in southern and western Iowa report the development of potentially serious corn leaf aphid infestations. Insecticide treatment is ineffective while the tassels are still in the whorl, but fields with in-whorl aphid populations need to be watched

Drift issues, late application considerations, and soybean fungicides

Offsite movement of pesticides by drift is an important consideration when making any pesticide application but can be an even greater concern when products are applied later in the growing season. There are several reasons for increased concern with later applications. One is that off-target movement of products from mid-season pesticide applications can affect non-target plants and other organisms more because they are actively growing. A common scenario illustrating this point is a postemergence-applied corn herbicide that drifts onto an emerged soybean crop versus a product that was soil-applied before soybeans were planted

Partition Functions, the Bekenstein Bound and Temperature Inversion in Anti-de Sitter Space and its Conformal Boundary

We reformulate the Bekenstein bound as the requirement of positivity of the Helmholtz free energy at the minimum value of the function L=E- S/(2\pi R), where R is some measure of the size of the system. The minimum of L occurs at the temperature T=1/(2\pi R). In the case of n-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime, the rather poorly defined size R acquires a precise definition in terms of the AdS radius l, with R=l/(n-2). We previously found that the Bekenstein bound holds for all known black holes in AdS. However, in this paper we show that the Bekenstein bound is not generally valid for free quantum fields in AdS, even if one includes the Casimir energy. Some other aspects of thermodynamics in anti-de Sitter spacetime are briefly touched upon.Comment: Latex, 32 page

G/G Models and W_N strings

We derive the BRST cohomology of the G/G topological model for the case of A^{(1)}_{N-1} . It is shown that at level k={p/q}-N the latter describes the (p,q) W_N minimal model coupled to $W_N$ gravity (plus some extra ``topological sectors").Comment: 17 page

Algorithmic Debugging of Real-World Haskell Programs: Deriving Dependencies from the Cost Centre Stack

Existing algorithmic debuggers for Haskell require a transformation of all modules in a program, even libraries that the user does not want to debug and which may use language features not supported by the debugger. This is a pity, because a promising ap- proach to debugging is therefore not applicable to many real-world programs. We use the cost centre stack from the Glasgow Haskell Compiler profiling environment together with runtime value observations as provided by the Haskell Object Observation Debugger (HOOD) to collect enough information for algorithmic debugging. Program annotations are in suspected modules only. With this technique algorithmic debugging is applicable to a much larger set of Haskell programs. This demonstrates that for functional languages in general a simple stack trace extension is useful to support tasks such as profiling and debugging

Supergravity Instabilities of Non-Supersymmetric Quantum Critical Points

Motivated by the recent use of certain consistent truncations of M-theory to study condensed matter physics using holographic techniques, we study the SU(3)-invariant sector of four-dimensional, N=8 gauged supergravity and compute the complete scalar spectrum at each of the five non-trivial critical points. We demonstrate that the smaller SU(4)^- sector is equivalent to a consistent truncation studied recently by various authors and find that the critical point in this sector, which has been proposed as the ground state of a holographic superconductor, is unstable due to a family of scalars that violate the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound. We also derive the origin of this instability in eleven dimensions and comment on the generalization to other embeddings of this critical point which involve arbitrary Sasaki-Einstein seven manifolds. In the spirit of a resurging interest in consistent truncations, we present a formal treatment of the SU(3)-invariant sector as a U(1)xU(1) gauged N=2 supergravity theory coupled to one hypermultiplet.Comment: 46 page

Some relations between Lagrangian models and synthetic random velocity fields

We propose an alternative interpretation of Markovian transport models based on the well-mixedness condition, in terms of the properties of a random velocity field with second order structure functions scaling linearly in the space time increments. This interpretation allows direct association of the drift and noise terms entering the model, with the geometry of the turbulent fluctuations. In particular, the well known non-uniqueness problem in the well-mixedness approach is solved in terms of the antisymmetric part of the velocity correlations; its relation with the presence of non-zero mean helicity and other geometrical properties of the flow is elucidated. The well-mixedness condition appears to be a special case of the relation between conditional velocity increments of the random field and the one-point Eulerian velocity distribution, allowing generalization of the approach to the transport of non-tracer quantities. Application to solid particle transport leads to a model satisfying, in the homogeneous isotropic turbulence case, all the conditions on the behaviour of the correlation times for the fluid velocity sampled by the particles. In particular, correlation times in the gravity and in the inertia dominated case, respectively, longer and shorter than in the passive tracer case; in the gravity dominated case, correlation times longer for velocity components along gravity, than for the perpendicular ones. The model produces, in channel flow geometry, particle deposition rates in agreement with experiments.Comment: 54 pages, 8 eps figures included; contains additional material on SO(3) and on turbulent channel flows. Few typos correcte

Kaehler forms and cosmological solutions in type II supergravities

We consider cosmological solutions to type II supergravity theories where the spacetime is split into a FRW universe and a K\"ahler space, which may be taken to be Calabi-Yau. The various 2-forms present in the theories are taken to be proportional to the K\"ahler form associated to the K\"ahler space.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX2