2004 Michigan Dairy Farm Business Analysis Summary

This report summarizes the financial and production records of 144 dairy farms from throughout Michigan. To be included, the farms must have produced at least 50 percent of gross cash farm income from milk and dairy animal sales. The farms in this report were located throughout Michigan. The records came from Michigan State University's Telfarm project, the Farm Credit Service system, or by AgriSolutions in Michigan. The values were pooled into averages for reporting purposes. The farms are larger than would be the average of all dairy farms in Michigan. While considerable variation in the data exist, average values are reported in the summary tables and discussion that follows.Livestock Production/Industries,

Activity recognition from videos with parallel hypergraph matching on GPUs

In this paper, we propose a method for activity recognition from videos based on sparse local features and hypergraph matching. We benefit from special properties of the temporal domain in the data to derive a sequential and fast graph matching algorithm for GPUs. Traditionally, graphs and hypergraphs are frequently used to recognize complex and often non-rigid patterns in computer vision, either through graph matching or point-set matching with graphs. Most formulations resort to the minimization of a difficult discrete energy function mixing geometric or structural terms with data attached terms involving appearance features. Traditional methods solve this minimization problem approximately, for instance with spectral techniques. In this work, instead of solving the problem approximatively, the exact solution for the optimal assignment is calculated in parallel on GPUs. The graphical structure is simplified and regularized, which allows to derive an efficient recursive minimization algorithm. The algorithm distributes subproblems over the calculation units of a GPU, which solves them in parallel, allowing the system to run faster than real-time on medium-end GPUs

The Discourses of Vincent Chase

In lieu of an abstract, below is the first paragraph of the paper. There is a common notion that those who make it big, whether it be as a professional athlete, a Grammy award-winning artist, or as an A-list actor, forget where they came from. Fame and fortune go to their heads and they become completely different people than they once were prior to their fame. Though fictional, one could make the argument that Vincent Chase, the protagonist of H.B.O.\u27s critically acclaimed series Entourage, underwent this drastic shift as the show progressed. One way of analyzing this possible alteration is through the Discourses that Vince was exposed to as a youth growing up in New York and as an A-list actor in Hollywood

PROFITABILITY AND PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY OF THE CROP AND LIVESTOCK ENTERPRISES OF MICHIGAN DAIRY OPERATIONS: 1998 SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

This paper summarizes the 1998 results of the Dairy Profitability and Production Efficiency project. Among the major findings are that the average cost of production was almost exactly equal to the average milk herd revenue on a per hundredweight basis. All eight farms covered variable costs of producing milk. Five of the eight farms showed a profit when all costs of production were included. All six farms that raised their own replacement heifers lost money on the enterprise. With respect to crop production, corn and corn silage were not profitable enterprises. The hay enterprise was profitable for five of the farms.Productivity Analysis,

Specific Functions of the Tumor Suppressor P53 are Activated by P73 and VHL

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)The transcription factor and tumor suppressor protein p53 critically regulates cell survival or death in response to cellular stress. p53 can activate genes involved in a wide variety of processes, including apoptosis, cell cycle arrest, angiogenesis, metabolism, and senescence. Mutations in p53 are common in cancer and alter its interactions with other proteins, but there are other mechanisms and posttranslational modifications that can alter these interactions as well. In some tumors, such as renal cell carcinoma, p53 is commonly inactive even though mutations to TP53 are rare. This suggests that there are other biochemical mechanisms of inhibition, which we explore in this study. Mutations in the DNA-binding domain of p53 result in conformational changes that enable p53 to interact with and inhibit its family member p73, thereby promoting cell survival instead of apoptosis. In contrast, it has been reported that wild-type p53 does not bind to p73. We found that JNK-mediated phosphorylation of Thr81 in the proline-rich domain (PRD) of p53 enabled wild-type p53 to form a complex with p73. The dimerization of wild-type p53 with p73 facilitated the expression of apoptotic target genes such as PUMA and BAX, as well as the induction of apoptosis. In addition to the apoptotic function of p53, the tumor suppressor also plays a major role in the inhibition of angiogenesis. Here we also report a new mechanism where the Mdm2 oncoprotein can indirectly inactive p53 through the regulation of the tumor suppressor VHL. In response to hypoxia, VHL can bind p53, which results in activation of several anti-angiogenic targets of p53 such as THBS1 and COL18A1. Mdm2 regulates the VHL-p53 interaction by conjugating nedd8 to VHL within a region that is important for the VHL-p53 interaction, blocking the induction of anti-angiogenic genes and resulting in a proangiogenic phenotype. Due to its positive regulation of major proangiogenic proteins and its negative regulation of potent inhibitors of angiogenesis, we propose that the oncoprotein Mdm2 is the angiogenic switch. These findings refine our understanding of p53 interactions and activation, specifically for p53-p73 induced cell death and p53-VHL inhibition of angiogenesis.2020-08-0

Entangling two distant oscillators with a quantum reservoir

The generation of entanglement between two oscillators that interact via a common reservoir is theoretically studied. The reservoir is modeled by a one-dimensional harmonic crystal initially in thermal equilibrium. Starting from a separable state, the oscillators can become entangled after a transient time, that is of the order of the thermalization time scale. This behavior is observed at finite temperature even when the oscillators are at a distance significantly larger than the crystal's interparticle spacing. The underlying physical mechanisms can be explained by the dynamical properties of the collective variables of the two oscillators which may decouple from or be squeezed by the reservoir. Our predictions can be tested with an ion chain in a linear Paul trap.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Geminate Triplet Exciton Dynamics in Rubrene Single Crystals

We present a series of investigations on the intermediate timescale dynamics of geminate triplet exciton pairs in rubrene single crystals. In particular, we report the observation of quantum beats — GHz-timescale oscillations produced by energy splittings — in the photoluminescence of rubrene crystals [7], indicating coherence between triplet pairs which lasts at least 40 ns at room temperature. Additionally, we present long-timescale (up to 10 μ s) measurements of the PL dynamics of rubrene without a contribution from nongeminate triplet fusion; these measurements provide support for a random walk model of triplet diffusion and demonstrate a transition in this diffusion’s dimensionality on a timescale of τ ∼ 2μs