947 research outputs found
Are Choice Experiments Incentive Compatible? A Test with Quality Differentiated Beef Steaks
This study compares hypothetical and nonhypothetical responses to choice experiment questions. We test for hypothetical bias in a choice experiment involving beef ribeye steaks with differing quality attributes. In general, hypothetical responses predicted higher probabilities of purchasing beef steaks than nonhypothetical resposnes. Thus, hypothetical choices overestimate total willingness-to-pay for beef steaks. However, marginal willingness-to-pay for a change in steak quality is, in general, not statistically different across hypothetical and actual payment settings.CVM, conjoint analysis, heteroskedastic extreme value model, hypothetical bias, multinomial probit, random parameters logit.
Abnormal hemoglobins in Malta : the significance of two fetal and an adult variant
The study of human hemoglobin variants has a special place in hemoglobin research. The discovery of hemoglobin F (Malta) by Cauchi et al. (1969) and the high incidence of this hemoglobin in Maltese newborns gave us the opportunity to initiate a systematic study of a fetal hemoglobin variant. During the course of our screening of cord blood samples we have found a new fetal variant, hemoglobin F-Malta-II. We have also found that some families with Hb-F-Malta-II have a new adult hemoglobin variant, which we have called "Hemoglobin St. Luke's". We have redesignated Hb F(Malta) as Hb-F-Malta-I. The purpose of this article is to give briefly the relevance of Hb-F-Malta-I and Hb-F-Malta-II to current concepts of the genetics of the Îł-chain of fetal hemoglobin (Huisman et aI., 1972), and to give a brief description of Hb St. Luke's (Bannister et al., 1972).peer-reviewe
Variance of transmitted power in multichannel dissipative ergodic structures invariant under time reversal
We use random matrix theory (RMT) to study the first two moments of the wave
power transmitted in time reversal invariant systems having ergodic motion.
Dissipation is modeled by a number of loss channels of variable coupling
strength. To make a connection with ultrasonic experiments on ergodic
elastodynamic billiards, the channels injecting and collecting the waves are
assumed to be negligibly coupled to the medium, and to contribute essentially
no dissipation. Within the RMT model we calculate the quantities of interest
exactly, employing the supersymmetry technique. This approach is found to be
more accurate than another method based on simplifying naive assumptions for
the statistics of the eigenfrequencies and the eigenfunctions. The results of
the supersymmetric method are confirmed by Monte Carlo numerical simulation and
are used to reveal a possible source of the disagreement between the
predictions of the naive theory and ultrasonic measurements.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure
A Model for the Stray Light Contamination of the UVCS Instrument on SOHO
We present a detailed model of stray-light suppression in the spectrometer
channels of the Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer (UVCS) on the SOHO
spacecraft. The control of diffracted and scattered stray light from the bright
solar disk is one of the most important tasks of a coronagraph. We compute the
fractions of light that diffract past the UVCS external occulter and
non-specularly pass into the spectrometer slit. The diffracted component of the
stray light depends on the finite aperture of the primary mirror and on its
figure. The amount of non-specular scattering depends mainly on the
micro-roughness of the mirror. For reasonable choices of these quantities, the
modeled stray-light fraction agrees well with measurements of stray light made
both in the laboratory and during the UVCS mission. The models were constructed
for the bright H I Lyman alpha emission line, but they are applicable to other
spectral lines as well.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, Solar Physics, in pres
Building and Testing a Statistical Shape Model of the Human Ear Canal
Abstract. Today the design of custom in-the-ear hearing aids is based on personal experience and skills and not on a systematic description of the variation of the shape of the ear canal. In this paper it is described how a dense surface point distribution model of the human ear canal is built based on a training set of laser scanned ear impressions and a sparse set of anatomical landmarks placed by an expert. The landmarks are used to warp a template mesh onto all shapes in the training set. Using the vertices from the warped meshes, a 3D point distribution model is made. The model is used for testing for gender related differences in size and shape of the ear canal.
Atomic Model of Susy Hubbard Operators
We apply the recently proposed susy Hubbard operators to an atomic model. In
the limiting case of free spins, we derive exact results for the entropy which
are compared with a mean field + gaussian corrections description. We show how
these results can be extended to the case of charge fluctuations and calculate
exact results for the partition function, free energy and heat capacity of an
atomic model for some simple examples. Wavefunctions of possible states are
listed. We compare the accuracy of large N expansions of the susy spin
operators with those obtained using `Schwinger bosons' and `Abrikosov
pseudo-fermions'. For the atomic model, we compare results of slave boson,
slave fermion, and susy Hubbard operator approximations in the physically
interesting but uncontrolled limiting case of N->2. For a mixed representation
of spins we estimate the accuracy of large N expansions of the atomic model. In
the single box limit, we find that the lowest energy saddle-point solution
reduces to simply either slave bosons or slave fermions, while for higher boxes
this is not the case. The highest energy saddle-point solution has the
interesting feature that it admits a small region of a mixed representation,
which bears a superficial resemblance to that seen experimentally close to an
antiferromagnetic quantum critical point.Comment: 17 pages + 7 pages Appendices, 14 figures. Substantial revision
New single-ended objective measure for non-intrusive speech quality evaluation
peer-reviewedThis article proposes a new output-based method for non-intrusive assessment of speech quality of voice communication systems and evaluates its performance. The method requires access to the processed (degraded) speech only, and is based on measuring perception-motivated objective auditory distances between the voiced parts of the output speech to appropriately matching references extracted from a pre-formulated codebook. The codebook is formed by optimally clustering a large number of parametric speech vectors extracted from a database of clean speech records. The auditory distances are then mapped into objective Mean Opinion listening quality scores. An efficient data-mining tool known as the self-organizing map (SOM) achieves the required clustering and mapping/reference matching processes. In order to obtain a perception-based, speaker-independent parametric representation of the speech, three domain transformation techniques have been investigated. The first technique is based on a perceptual linear prediction (PLP) model, the second utilises a bark spectrum (BS) analysis and the third utilises mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC). Reported evaluation results show that the proposed method provides high correlation with subjective listening quality scores, yielding accuracy similar to that of the ITU-T P.563 while maintaining a relatively low computational complexity. Results also demonstrate that the method outperforms the PESQ in a number of distortion conditions, such as those of speech degraded by channel impairments.acceptedpeer-reviewe
Conversion of an instantaneous activating K+ channel into a slow activating inward rectifier
The miniature channel, Kcv, is a structural equivalent of the pore of all K+ channels. Here, we follow up on a previous observation that a largely voltage-insensitive channel can be converted into a slow activating inward rectifier after extending the outer transmembrane domain by one Ala. This gain of rectification can be rationalized by dynamic salt bridges at the cytosolic entrance to the channel; opening is favored by voltage-sensitive formation of salt bridges and counteracted by their disruption. Such latent voltage sensitivity in the pore could be relevant for the understanding of voltage gating in complex Kv channels
Formation of thick bottom nepheloid layers in the Western Mediterranean basin after major dense shelf water cascading events
Formation of basin-wide bottom nepheloid layer in the Western Mediterranean after the major dense shelf water cascading events.
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