PRICES AND PRICING POLICIES FOR SMALL ANIMAL AND EQUINE VETERINARY SERVICES: A STUDY OF TEACHING HOSPITALS AND MICHIGAN PRIVATE PRACTICES DURING 2000

Prices are a key determinant of financial performance for virtually any business in either the public or private sector, and the Veterinary Teaching Hospital at Michigan State University (MSU-VTH) offers no exception. To achieve consistent success, it is critical that a business understands the prevailing conditions in the marketplace when setting prices for its goods and services. Important issues to address include: 1. What are the prices of similar goods and services produced by other firms? 2. How important is price as a choice factor when customers select a source of these goods and services? 3. How do staff members view prices at the point-of-sale? 4. How are prices determined? These questions are especially crucial in small businesses such as those typical of the veterinary profession, where the decision-makers tend to be technical experts rather than trained business managers. Without this information, these decision-makers often have very little basis on which to develop a pricing policy.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Using NASA's Giovanni Web Portal to Access and Visualize Satellite-based Earth Science Data in the Classroom

One of the biggest obstacles for the average Earth science student today is locating and obtaining satellite-based remote sensing data sets in a format that is accessible and optimal for their data analysis needs. At the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC) alone, on the order of hundreds of Terabytes of data are available for distribution to scientists, students and the general public. The single biggest and time-consuming hurdle for most students when they begin their study of the various datasets is how to slog through this mountain of data to arrive at a properly sub-setted and manageable data set to answer their science question(s). The GES DISC provides a number of tools for data access and visualization, including the Google-like Mirador search engine and the powerful GES-DISC Interactive Online Visualization ANd aNalysis Infrastructure (Giovanni) web interface

Direct Detection of the Brown Dwarf GJ 802B with Adaptive Optics Masking Interferometry

We have used the Palomar 200" Adaptive Optics (AO) system to directly detect the astrometric brown dwarf GJ 802B reported by Pravdo et al. 2005. This observation is achieved with a novel combination of aperture masking interferometry and AO. The dynamical masses are 0.175$\pm$0.021 M$_\odot$ and 0.064$\pm$0.032 M$_\odot$ for the primary and secondary respectively. The inferred absolute H band magnitude of GJ 802B is M$_H$=12.8 resulting in a model-dependent T$_\mathrm{eff}$ of 1850 $\pm$ 50K and mass range of 0.057--0.074 M$_\odot$.Comment: 4 Pages, 5 figures, emulateapj format, submitted to ApJ

PVR: Patch-to-Volume Reconstruction for Large Area Motion Correction of Fetal MRI

In this paper we present a novel method for the correction of motion artifacts that are present in fetal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of the whole uterus. Contrary to current slice-to-volume registration (SVR) methods, requiring an inflexible anatomical enclosure of a single investigated organ, the proposed patch-to-volume reconstruction (PVR) approach is able to reconstruct a large field of view of non-rigidly deforming structures. It relaxes rigid motion assumptions by introducing a specific amount of redundant information that is exploited with parallelized patch-wise optimization, super-resolution, and automatic outlier rejection. We further describe and provide an efficient parallel implementation of PVR allowing its execution within reasonable time on commercially available graphics processing units (GPU), enabling its use in the clinical practice. We evaluate PVR's computational overhead compared to standard methods and observe improved reconstruction accuracy in presence of affine motion artifacts of approximately 30% compared to conventional SVR in synthetic experiments. Furthermore, we have evaluated our method qualitatively and quantitatively on real fetal MRI data subject to maternal breathing and sudden fetal movements. We evaluate peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and cross correlation (CC) with respect to the originally acquired data and provide a method for visual inspection of reconstruction uncertainty. With these experiments we demonstrate successful application of PVR motion compensation to the whole uterus, the human fetus, and the human placenta.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. v2: wadded funders acknowledgements to preprin

Masses of Astrometrically-Discovered and Imaged Binaries: G 78-28AB and GJ 231.1BC

The Stellar Planet Survey (STEPS) is an ongoing astrometric search for giant planets and brown dwarfs around a sample of ~30 M-dwarfs. We have discovered several low-mass companions by measuring the motion of our target stars relative to their reference frames. The highest mass discovery thus far is G 78-28B, a companion to the M-dwarf G 78-28A. The orbital period is 4.18 +/- 0.03 y, the system mass is 0.565 +/- 0.055 Msolar, and the semi-major axis is 2.19 +/- 0.10 AU. Imaging observations with the Keck laser guide star adaptive optics (LGSAO) and the Palomar AO instruments resolved the system and also yielded JHK-band delta magnitudes. We use the orbital solution, light ratios, and mass-luminosity relationships to derive component masses of MA = 0.370 +/- 0.034 Msolar and MB = 0.195 +/- 0.021 Msolar. G 78-28B is of type M4 V based upon its colors and mass. We also discovered GJ 231.1C, a companion to GJ 231.1B, with STEPS and imaged the companion with LGSAO and Palomar AO, but the orbital period is longer than our observing baseline; thus the system parameters are less constrained. In GJ 231.1BC the masses are MB = 0.25 +/- 0.06 Msolar and MC =0.12 +/- 0.02 Msolar. The inferred spectral type of GJ 231.1C is M5 V. We demonstrate the results of the current state of mass estimation techniques with our data.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, accepted for Ap

An Automated Method for the Detection and Extraction of HI Self-Absorption in High-Resolution 21cm Line Surveys

We describe algorithms that detect 21cm line HI self-absorption (HISA) in large data sets and extract it for analysis. Our search method identifies HISA as spatially and spectrally confined dark HI features that appear as negative residuals after removing larger-scale emission components with a modified CLEAN algorithm. Adjacent HISA volume-pixels (voxels) are grouped into features in (l,b,v) space, and the HI brightness of voxels outside the 3-D feature boundaries is smoothly interpolated to estimate the absorption amplitude and the unabsorbed HI emission brightness. The reliability and completeness of our HISA detection scheme have been tested extensively with model data. We detect most features over a wide range of sizes, linewidths, amplitudes, and background levels, with poor detection only where the absorption brightness temperature amplitude is weak, the absorption scale approaches that of the correlated noise, or the background level is too faint for HISA to be distinguished reliably from emission gaps. False detection rates are very low in all parts of the parameter space except at sizes and amplitudes approaching those of noise fluctuations. Absorption measurement biases introduced by the method are generally small and appear to arise from cases of incomplete HISA detection. This paper is the third in a series examining HISA at high angular resolution. A companion paper (Paper II) uses our HISA search and extraction method to investigate the cold atomic gas distribution in the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey.Comment: 39 pages, including 14 figure pages; to appear in June 10 ApJ, volume 626; figure quality significantly reduced for astro-ph; for full resolution, please see http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/~gibson/hisa/cgps1_survey

WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth!

The quantitative aspirations of economists and financial analysts have for many years been based on the belief that it should be possible to build models of economic systems - and financial markets in particular - that are as predictive as those in physics. While this perspective has led to a number of important breakthroughs in economics, "physics envy" has also created a false sense of mathematical precision in some cases. We speculate on the origins of physics envy, and then describe an alternate perspective of economic behavior based on a new taxonomy of uncertainty. We illustrate the relevance of this taxonomy with two concrete examples: the classical harmonic oscillator with some new twists that make physics look more like economics, and a quantitative equity market-neutral strategy. We conclude by offering a new interpretation of tail events, proposing an "uncertainty checklist" with which our taxonomy can be implemented, and considering the role that quants played in the current financial crisis.Comment: v3 adds 2 reference

Substrates of the \u3cem\u3eArabidopsis thaliana\u3c/em\u3e Protein Isoaspartyl Methyltransferase 1 Identified Using Phage Display and Biopanning

The role of protein isoaspartyl methyltransferase (PIMT) in repairing a wide assortment of damaged proteins in a host of organisms has been inferred from the affinity of the enzyme for isoaspartyl residues in a plethora of amino acid contexts. The identification of PIMT target proteins in plant seeds, where the enzyme is highly active and proteome long-lived, has been hindered by large amounts of isoaspartate-containing storage proteins. Mature seed phage display libraries circumvented this problem. Inclusion of the PIMT co-substrate, S-adenosylmethionine (AdoMet), during panning permitted PIMT to retain aged phage in greater numbers than controls lacking co-substrate or when PIMT protein binding was poisoned with S-adenosyl homocysteine. After four rounds, phage titer plateaued in AdoMet-containing pans, whereas titer declined in both controls. This strategy identified 17 in-frame PIMT target proteins, including a cupin-family protein similar to those identified previously using on-blot methylation. All recovered phage had at least one susceptible Asp or Asn residue. Five targets were recovered independently. Two in-frame targets were produced in Escherichia coli as recombinant proteins and shown by on-blot methylation to acquire isoAsp, becoming a PIMT target. Both gained isoAsp rapidly in solution upon thermal insult. Mutant analysis of plants deficient in any of three in-frame PIMT targets resulted in demonstrable phenotypes. An over-representation of clones encoding proteins involved in protein production suggests that the translational apparatus comprises a subgroup for which PIMT-mediated repair is vital for orthodox seed longevity. Impaired PIMT activity would hinder protein function in these targets, possibly resulting in poor seed performance