Examining the Impact of the World Crude Oil Price on China's Agricultural Commodity Prices: The Case of Corn, Soybean, and Pork

This study investigates effects of the world crude oil price on feed grain prices and pork prices in China. The results from time series techniques show the influences of crude oil price are not significant over the study period. The pork demand and supply result in the skyrocketing pork price.Agribusiness, Demand and Price Analysis,

Fourier domain preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithm for atmospheric tomography

By 'atmospheric tomography' we mean the estimation of a layered atmospheric turbulence profile from measurements of the pupil-plane phase (or phase gradients) corresponding to several different guide star directions. We introduce what we believe to be a new Fourier domain preconditioned conjugate gradient (FD-PCG) algorithm for atmospheric tomography, and we compare its performance against an existing multigrid preconditioned conjugate gradient (MG-PCG) approach. Numerical results indicate that on conventional serial computers, FD-PCG is as accurate and robust as MG-PCG, but it is from one to two orders of magnitude faster for atmospheric tomography on 30 m class telescopes. Simulations are carried out for both natural guide stars and for a combination of finite-altitude laser guide stars and natural guide stars to resolve tip-tilt uncertainty

Vanishing Viscosity Approach to the Compressible Euler Equations for Transonic Nozzle and Spherically Symmetric Flows

We are concerned with globally defined entropy solutions to the Euler equations for compressible fluid flows in transonic nozzles with general cross-sectional areas. Such nozzles include the de Laval nozzles and other more general nozzles whose cross-sectional area functions are allowed at the nozzle ends to be either zero (closed ends) or infinity (unbounded ends). To achieve this, in this paper, we develop a vanishing viscosity method to construct globally defined approximate solutions and then establish essential uniform estimates in weighted $L^p$ norms for the whole range of physical adiabatic exponents $\gamma\in (1, \infty)$, so that the viscosity approximate solutions satisfy the general $L^p$ compensated compactness framework. The viscosity method is designed to incorporate artificial viscosity terms with the natural Dirichlet boundary conditions to ensure the uniform estimates. Then such estimates lead to both the convergence of the approximate solutions and the existence theory of globally defined finite-energy entropy solutions to the Euler equations for transonic flows that may have different end-states in the class of nozzles with general cross-sectional areas for all $\gamma\in (1, \infty)$. The approach and techniques developed here apply to other problems with similar difficulties. In particular, we successfully apply them to construct globally defined spherically symmetric entropy solutions to the Euler equations for all $\gamma\in (1, \infty)$.Comment: 32 page

Pseudogap and Fermi-arc Evolution in the Phase-fluctuation Scenario

Pseudogap phenomena and the formation of Fermi arcs in underdoped cuprates are numerically studied in the presence of phase fluctuations that are simulated by an XY model. Most importantly the spectral function for each Monte Carlo sample is calculated directly and efficiently by the Chebyshev polynomials without having to diagonalize the fermion Hamiltonian, which enables us to handle a system large enough to achieve sufficient momentum/energy resolution. We find that the momentum dependence of the energy gap is identical to that of a pure d-wave superconductor well below the KT-transition temperature ($T_{KT}$), while displays an upturn deviation from $\cos k_x - \cos k_y$ with increasing temperature. An abrupt onset of the Fermi arcs is observed above $T_{KT}$ and the arc length exhibits a similar temperature dependence to the thermally activated vortex excitations.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure