Nuclear Physics on the Light Front

High energy scattering experiments involving nuclei are typically analyzed in terms of light front variables. The desire to provide realistic, relativistic wave functions expressed in terms of these variables led me to try to use light front dynamics to compute nuclear wave functions. The progress is summarized here.Comment: 4 pages, text of presentation made at PANIC9

Civilization, National Culture And Ethical Work Climates: A Comparative Study Of CPA Firms In China And Taiwan

The emergence of China as an economic power has prompted the question, what impact if any has globalization and market liberalization had on the ethical climate of organizations within China and its neighbor Taiwan? Cross-strait tensions have eased over the past few years due to closer economic integration. Although both countries differ in political, as well as organizational design, they share core cultural values embedded within civilization; Confucianism. This study attempts to understand how the correlation established between ethical climates and National culture by Parboteeah, Cullen, Victor, and Sakano are played out against the backdrop of a shared civilization. Will the ethical climates retain or deviate from the core civilization cultural values theorized by Samuel P. Huntington? To answer that question, we collected data from C.P.A. firms in China and Taiwan using the 36-item revised version of the Ethical Climate Questionnaire developed by John B. Cullen, Bart Victor (1988), and James W. Bronson (1993). The results indicated a significant difference in four areas: 1) principal-individual, 2) principle-cosmopolitan, 3) benevolence-individual, and 4) egoism-individual. When correlated with national culture and their core civilizational cultural value of Confucianism, deviations showed that Taiwan moved away from Confucian values by scoring higher in Egoism while retaining Confucianism with a more particularistic culture. China demonstrated a shift away from Confucian values by scoring higher in principle while retaining Confucian values through its score in benevolence

What is the irrigation potential for Africa?

Although irrigation in Africa has the potential to boost agricultural productivities by at least 50 percent, food production on the continent is almost entirely rainfed. The area equipped for irrigation, currently slightly more than 13 million hectares, makes up just 6 percent of the total cultivated area. Eighty-five percent of Africa’s poor live in rural areas and mostly depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. As a result, agricultural development is key to ending poverty on the continent. Many development organizations have recently proposed to significantly increase investments in irrigation in the region. However, the potential for irrigation investments in Africa is highly dependent upon geographic, hydrologic, agronomic, and economic factors that need to be taken into account when assessing the long-term viability and sustainability of planned projects. This paper analyzes large, dam-based and small-scale irrigation investment needs in Africa based on agronomic, hydrologic, and economic factors. This type of analysis can guide country- and local-level assessment of irrigation potential, which will be important to agricultural and economic development in Africa.internal rate of return, Investment, irrigation potential, large-scale irrigation, small-scale irrigation,

Stria Vascularis Dysfunction in a Mouse Model of Mitochondrial Hearing Loss

We recently described a transgenic mouse model of hearing loss induced by over-expression of the mitochondrial ribosomal RNA (rRNA) methyltransferase, TFB1M (Tg-TFB1M). These mice recapitulate maternally inherited deafness caused by the human A1555G mtDNA mutation, which results in increased methylation of the 12S rRNA in mitochondrial ribosomes and tissue-specific susceptibility to apoptosis. The present study aims to identify the specific cellular and tissue based pathologies underlying this form of deafness

The development of an augmented reality (AR) approach to mammographic training: overcoming some real world challenges

A dedicated workstation and its corresponding viewing software are essential requirements in breast screener training. A major challenge of developing further generic screener training technology (in particular, for mammographic interpretation training) is that high-resolution radiological images are required to be displayed on dedicated workstations whilst actual reporting of the images is generally completed on individual standard workstations. Due to commercial reasons, dedicated clinical workstations manufactured by leading international vendors tend not to have critical technical aspects divulged which would facilitate further integration of third party generic screener training technology. With standard workstations, it is noticeable that the conventional screener training depends highly on manual transcription so that traditional training methods can potentially be deficient in terms of real-time feedback and interaction. Augmented reality (AR) provides the ability to co-operate with both real and virtual environments, and therefore can supplement conventional training with virtual registered objects and actions. As a result, realistic screener training can co-operate with rich feedback and interaction in real time. Previous work has shown that it is feasible to employ an AR approach to deliver workstation-independent radiological screening training by superimposing appropriate feedback coupled with the use of interaction interfaces. The previous study addressed presence issues and provided an AR recognisable stylus which allowed for drawing interaction. As a follow-up, this study extends the AR method and investigates realistic effects and the impacts of environmental illumination, application performance and transcription. A robust stylus calibration method is introduced to address environmental changes over time. Moreover, this work introduces a completed AR workflow which allows real time recording, computer analysable training data and further recoverable transcription during post-training. A quantitative evaluation results show an accuracy of more than 80% of user-drawn points being located within a pixel distance of 5

Pathwise uniqueness of the squared Bessel and CIR processes with skew reflection on a deterministic time dependent curve

We investigate pathwise uniqueness for the squared Bessel and Cox-Ingersoll-Ross processes with additional reflection term that is multiplied by some real number strictly between minus one and one. The reflection term is the symmetric local time of the corresponding processes at a deterministic time dependent curve.Comment: Structured introduction and modified Section

Characterization of a large sex determination region in Salix purpurea L. (Salicaceae).

Dioecy has evolved numerous times in plants, but heteromorphic sex chromosomes are apparently rare. Sex determination has been studied in multiple Salix and Populus (Salicaceae) species, and P. trichocarpa has an XY sex determination system on chromosome 19, while S. suchowensis and S. viminalis have a ZW system on chromosome 15. Here we use whole genome sequencing coupled with quantitative trait locus mapping and a genome-wide association study to characterize the genomic composition of the non-recombining portion of the sex determination region. We demonstrate that Salix purpurea also has a ZW system on chromosome 15. The sex determination region has reduced recombination, high structural polymorphism, an abundance of transposable elements, and contains genes that are involved in sex expression in other plants. We also show that chromosome 19 contains sex-associated markers in this S. purpurea assembly, along with other autosomes. This raises the intriguing possibility of a translocation of the sex determination region within the Salicaceae lineage, suggesting a common evolutionary origin of the Populus and Salix sex determination loci

An Optical Interferometric Triaxial Displacement Sensor for Structural Health Monitoring: Characterization of Sliding and Debonding for a Delamination Process

This paper presents an extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometer-based optical fiber sensor (EFPI) for measuring three-dimensional (3D) displacements, including interfacial sliding and debonding during delamination. The idea employs three spatially arranged EFPIs as the sensing elements. In our sensor, the three EFPIs are formed by three endfaces of three optical fibers and their corresponding inclined mirrors. Two coincident roof-like metallic structures are used to support the three fibers and the three mirrors, respectively. Our sensor was calibrated and then used to monitor interfacial sliding and debonding between a long square brick of mortar and its support structure (i.e., a steel base plate) during the drying/curing process. This robust and easy-to-manufacture triaxial EFPI-based 3D displacement sensor has great potential in structural health monitoring, the construction industry, oil well monitoring, and geotechnology