6,247 research outputs found
Graduation Rates in Arkansas
In April 2014, the National Center for Education Statistics published a national report on state-level graduation rates in 2010-11 and 2011-12. The news was positive for the nation, as the national rate reached 80% for the first time, and for Arkansas, as students in the Natural State boasted higher than average rates in both years. While the statewide news was good, Arkansans may well be interested in the graduation rates of particular schools across the state
High Order QED Corrections in Physics of Positronium
High-order perturbative corrections to positronium decays and hyperfine
splitting are briefly reviewed. Theoretical predictions are compared to the
most recent experimental data. Perspectives of future calculations are
discussed.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, talk given at Workshop on Positronium Physics, ETH
Honggerberg, Zurich, May 30-31, 2003, a misprint in Eq. (1) correcte
The State of Education in Arkansas 2008: How Much Are Arkansas Schools Spending?
Over the last half century, more than forty states across the nation have experienced school finance lawsuits as a consequence of funding gaps between rich and poor districts. Arkansas is one such state, with a long history of school funding battles in the courts. The legal challenges began in 1983, when the Arkansas Supreme Court initially found the state\u27s school funding system unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the state constitution1 . The court found “no legitimate state purpose” and “no rational relationship to educational needs” in the state\u27s method of financing public schools. This initial finding set the course of education policymaking in Arkansas ever since
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Quaestor: Query web caching for database-as-a-service providers
Today, web performance is primarily governed by round-trip latencies between end devices and cloud services. To improve performance, services need to minimize the delay of accessing data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to low latency that relies on existing content delivery and web caching infrastructure. The main idea is to enable application-independent caching of query results and records with tunable consistency guarantees, in particular bounded staleness. Q
uaestor
(Query Store) employs two key concepts to incorporate both expiration-based and invalidation-based web caches: (1) an Expiring Bloom Filter data structure to indicate potentially stale data, and (2) statistically derived cache expiration times to maximize cache hit rates. Through a distributed query invalidation pipeline, changes to cached query results are detected in real-time. The proposed caching algorithms offer a new means for data-centric cloud services to trade latency against staleness bounds, e.g. in a database-as-a-service. Q
uaestor
is the core technology of the backend-as-a-service platform Baqend, a cloud service for low-latency websites. We provide empirical evidence for Q
uaestor
's scalability and performance through both simulation and experiments. The results indicate that for read-heavy workloads, up to tenfold speed-ups can be achieved through Q
uaestor
's caching.
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On the number of representations providing noiseless subsystems
This paper studies the combinatoric structure of the set of all
representations, up to equivalence, of a finite-dimensional semisimple Lie
algebra. This has intrinsic interest as a previously unsolved problem in
representation theory, and also has applications to the understanding of
quantum decoherence. We prove that for Hilbert spaces of sufficiently high
dimension, decoherence-free subspaces exist for almost all representations of
the error algebra. For decoherence-free subsystems, we plot the function
which is the fraction of all -dimensional quantum systems which
preserve bits of information through DF subsystems, and note that this
function fits an inverse beta distribution. The mathematical tools which arise
include techniques from classical number theory.Comment: 17 pp, 4 figs, accepted for Physical Review
Computational science and re-discovery: open-source implementations of ellipsoidal harmonics for problems in potential theory
We present two open-source (BSD) implementations of ellipsoidal harmonic
expansions for solving problems of potential theory using separation of
variables. Ellipsoidal harmonics are used surprisingly infrequently,
considering their substantial value for problems ranging in scale from
molecules to the entire solar system. In this article, we suggest two possible
reasons for the paucity relative to spherical harmonics. The first is
essentially historical---ellipsoidal harmonics developed during the late 19th
century and early 20th, when it was found that only the lowest-order harmonics
are expressible in closed form. Each higher-order term requires the solution of
an eigenvalue problem, and tedious manual computation seems to have discouraged
applications and theoretical studies. The second explanation is practical: even
with modern computers and accurate eigenvalue algorithms, expansions in
ellipsoidal harmonics are significantly more challenging to compute than those
in Cartesian or spherical coordinates. The present implementations reduce the
"barrier to entry" by providing an easy and free way for the community to begin
using ellipsoidal harmonics in actual research. We demonstrate our
implementation using the specific and physiologically crucial problem of how
charged proteins interact with their environment, and ask: what other
analytical tools await re-discovery in an era of inexpensive computation?Comment: 25 pages, 3 figure
Relativistic coupled-cluster single-double method applied to alkali-metal atoms
A relativistic version of the coupled-cluster single-double (CCSD) method is
developed for atoms with a single valence electron. In earlier work, a
linearized version of the CCSD method (with extensions to include a dominant
class of triple excitations) led to accurate predictions for energies,
transition amplitudes, hyperfine constants, and other properties of monovalent
atoms. Further progress in high-precision atomic structure calculations for
heavy atoms calls for improvement of the linearized coupled-cluster
methodology. In the present work, equations for the single and double
excitation coefficients of the Dirac-Fock wave function, including all
non-linear coupled-cluster terms that contribute at the single-double level are
worked out. Contributions of the non-linear terms to energies, electric-dipole
matrix elements, and hyperfine constants of low-lying states in alkali-metal
atoms from Li to Cs are evaluated and the results are compared with other
calculations and with precise experiments.Comment: 12 page
Modelling radiation-induced cell cycle delays
Ionizing radiation is known to delay the cell cycle progression. In
particular after particle exposure significant delays have been observed and it
has been shown that the extent of delay affects the expression of damage such
as chromosome aberrations. Thus, to predict how cells respond to ionizing
radiation and to derive reliable estimates of radiation risks, information
about radiation-induced cell cycle perturbations is required. In the present
study we describe and apply a method for retrieval of information about the
time-course of all cell cycle phases from experimental data on the mitotic
index only. We study the progression of mammalian cells through the cell cycle
after exposure. The analysis reveals a prolonged block of damaged cells in the
G2 phase. Furthermore, by performing an error analysis on simulated data
valuable information for the design of experimental studies has been obtained.
The analysis showed that the number of cells analyzed in an experimental sample
should be at least 100 to obtain a relative error less than 20%.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Radiation and
Environmental Biophysic
Gamma radiation survey of the LDEF spacecraft
The retrieval of the Long Duration Exposure Facility spacecraft in January 1990 after nearly six years in orbit offered a unique opportunity to study the long term buildup of induced radioactivity in the variety of materials on board. We conducted the first complete gamma-ray survey of a large spacecraft on LDEF shortly after its return to earth. A surprising observation was the Be-7 activity which was seen primarily on the leading edge of the satellite, implying that it was picked up by LDEF in orbit. This is the first known evidence for accretion of a radioactive isotope onto an orbiting spacecraft. Other isotopes observed during the survey, the strongest being Na-22, are all attributed to activation of spacecraft components. Be-7 is a spallation product of cosmic rays on nitrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere. However, the observed density is much greater than expected due to cosmic-ray production in situ. This implies transport of Be-7 from much lower altitudes up to the LDEF orbit
Remote sensing research for agricultural applications
Materials and methods used to characterize selected soil properties and agricultural crops in San Joaquin County, California are described. Results show that: (1) the location and widths of TM bands are suitable for detecting differences in selected soil properties; (2) the number of TM spectral bands allows the quantification of soil spectral curve form and magnitude; and (3) the spatial and geometric quality of TM data allows for the discrimination and quantification of within field variability of soil properties. The design of the LANDSAT based multiple crop acreage estimation experiment for the Idaho Department of Water Resources is described including the use of U.C. Berkeley's Survey Modeling Planning Model. Progress made on Peditor software development on MIDAS, and cooperative computing using local and remote systems is reported as well as development of MIDAS microcomputer systems
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