Is Futures Market Mitigating Price Risk: An Exploration of Wheat and Maize Market

Instability of commodity prices has always been a major concern of the producers as well as the consumers in an agriculture-dominated country like India. Farmers in a bid to avert the price risk often tend to go for distress sale and thereby reduce the potential returns. In order to cope up with this problem, futures trading has emerged as a viable option for providing a greater degree of assurance on the price front. Thus, futures markets serve as a risk -shifting function. In the present study, an attempt has been made to look into the mechanism of movement of spot and futures prices for two important food crops in Indian agriculture. The Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) test has been used for both the crops to check the stationarity of the time series data. Most of the series have been observed to follow the stationary pattern at the first difference. The cointegration test has been attempted to find out whether there exists a longrun relationship between spot and futures prices of various contract months for maize and wheat crops. However, there exists a short run disequilibrium between these two. It has been observed that the futures contract behave in an expected manner and there exists a mechanism for long-run equilibrium in the maize as well as wheat crops. This phenomenon of price convergence for both maize and wheat crops clearly states that the farmers are mitigating price risk as spot prices and future prices converges.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Energy-Dependent Timing of Thermal Emission in Solar Flares

We report solar flare plasma to be multi-thermal in nature based on the theoretical model and study of the energy-dependent timing of thermal emission in ten M-class flares. We employ high-resolution X-ray spectra observed by the Si detector of the "Solar X-ray Spectrometer" (SOXS). The SOXS onboard the Indian GSAT-2 spacecraft was launched by the GSLV-D2 rocket on 8 May 2003. Firstly we model the spectral evolution of the X-ray line and continuum emission flux F(\epsilon) from the flare by integrating a series of isothermal plasma flux. We find that multi-temperature integrated flux F(\epsilon) is a power-law function of \epsilon with a spectral index (\gamma) \approx -4.65. Next, based on spectral-temporal evolution of the flares we find that the emission in the energy range E= 4 - 15 keV is dominated by temperatures of T= 12 - 50 MK, while the multi-thermal power-law DEM index (\gamma) varies in the range of -4.4 and -5.7. The temporal evolution of the X-ray flux F(\epsilon,t) assuming a multi-temperature plasma governed by thermal conduction cooling reveals that the temperature-dependent cooling time varies between 296 and 4640 s and the electron density (n_e) varies in the range of n_e= (1.77-29.3)*10^10 cm-3. Employing temporal evolution technique in the current study as an alternative method for separating thermal from non-thermal components in the energy spectra, we measure the break-energy point ranging between 14 and 21\pm1.0 keV.Comment: Solar Physics, in pres

Systematics of Anti magnetic rotation in even-even Cd isotopes

The lifetimes for the high spin levels of the yrast band of $^{110}$Cd has been measured. The estimated B(E2) values decrease with increase in angular momentum. This is the characteristic of Anti magnetic rotation as reported in $^{106,108}$Cd. However, alignment behavior of $^{110}$Cd is completely different from its even-even neighbors. A model based on classical particle plus rotor has been used to explore the underlying systematics and develop a self consistent picture for the observed behavior of these isotopes.Comment: 18 pages including 6 figures. Accepted to be published in PLB, with some modification in the tex

A proposed experimental search for chameleons using asymmetric parallel plates

Light scalar fields coupled to matter are a common consequence of theories of dark energy and attempts to solve the cosmological constant problem. The chameleon screening mechanism is commonly invoked in order to suppress the fifth forces mediated by these scalars, sufficiently to avoid current experimental constraints, without fine tuning. The force is suppressed dynamically by allowing the mass of the scalar to vary with the local density. Recently it has been shown that near future cold atoms experiments using atom-interferometry have the ability to access a large proportion of the chameleon parameter space. In this work we demonstrate how experiments utilising asymmetric parallel plates can push deeper into the remaining parameter space available to the chameleon

The intrinsic features of the specific heat at half-filled Landau levels of two-dimensional electron systems

The specific heat capacity of a two-dimensional electron gas is derived for two types of the density of states, namely, the Dirac delta function spectrum and that based on a Gaussian function. For the first time, a closed form expression of the specific heat for each case is obtained at half-filling. When the chemical potential is temperature-independent, the temperature is calculated at which the specific heat is a maximum. Here the effects of the broadening of the Landau levels are distinguished from those of the different filling factors. In general, the results derived herein hold for any thermodynamic system having similar resonant states.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, to appear in J Low Temp Phys (2010

A conserved role for Snail as a potentiator of active transcription

The transcription factors of the Snail family are key regulators of epithelial-mesenchymal transitions, cell morphogenesis, and tumor metastasis. Since its discovery in Drosophila ~25 years ago, Snail has been extensively studied for its role as a transcriptional repressor. Here we demonstrate that Drosophila Snail can positively modulate transcriptional activation. By combining information on in vivo occupancy with expression profiling of hand-selected, staged snail mutant embryos, we identified 106 genes that are potentially directly regulated by Snail during mesoderm development. In addition to the expected Snail-repressed genes, almost 50% of Snail targets showed an unanticipated activation. The majority of "Snail-activated" genes have enhancer elements cobound by Twist and are expressed in the mesoderm at the stages of Snail occupancy. Snail can potentiate Twist-mediated enhancer activation in vitro and is essential for enhancer activity in vivo. Using a machine learning approach, we show that differentially enriched motifs are sufficient to predict Snail's regulatory response. In silico mutagenesis revealed a likely causative motif, which we demonstrate is essential for enhancer activation. Taken together, these data indicate that Snail can potentiate enhancer activation by collaborating with different activators, providing a new mechanism by which Snail regulates development

Pedagogic model for Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering with quark-hadron duality

We show how quark-hadron duality can emerge for valence spin averaged structure functions, and for the non-forward distributions of Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering. Novel factorisations of the non-forward amplitudes are proposed. Some implications for large angle scattering and deviations from the quark counting rules are illustrated.Comment: Version accepted by Phys. Rev.

Secure Iris Recognition Based on Local Intensity Variations

In this paper we propose a fast and efficient iris recognition algorithm which makes use of local intensity variations in iris textures. The presented system provides fully revocable biometric templates suppressing any loss of recognition performance

A Unified Algebraic Approach to Few and Many-Body Correlated Systems

The present article is an extended version of the paper {\it Phys. Rev.} {\bf B 59}, R2490 (1999), where, we have established the equivalence of the Calogero-Sutherland model to decoupled oscillators. Here, we first employ the same approach for finding the eigenstates of a large class of Hamiltonians, dealing with correlated systems. A number of few and many-body interacting models are studied and the relationship between their respective Hilbert spaces, with that of oscillators, is found. This connection is then used to obtain the spectrum generating algebras for these systems and make an algebraic statement about correlated systems. The procedure to generate new solvable interacting models is outlined. We then point out the inadequacies of the present technique and make use of a novel method for solving linear differential equations to diagonalize the Sutherland model and establish a precise connection between this correlated system's wave functions, with those of the free particles on a circle. In the process, we obtain a new expression for the Jack polynomials. In two dimensions, we analyze the Hamiltonian having Laughlin wave function as the ground-state and point out the natural emergence of the underlying linear $W_{1+\infty}$ symmetry in this approach.Comment: 18 pages, Revtex format, To appear in Physical Review