Selected Characteristics of Savings and Thrift Plans for Private Industry Workers

[Excerpt] This issue of Beyond the Numbers looks at the growth in the prevalence and at selected characteristics of employer-provided savings and thrift plans in private industry in the United States. The data for this article come from the National Compensation Survey: Health and Retirement Plan Provisions in Private Industry in the United States, 2012. In some instances, comparisons of 2012 data are made to 2009 data, which came from National Compensation Survey: Health and Retirement Plan Provisions in Private Industry in the United States, 2009

Chicago Board of Trade Ethanol Contract Efficiency

Firms producing ethanol may find management of the price risk associated with production of this leading alternative fuel a key factor to continued success. As with other agricultural commodities, the influence and ability of futures contracts to serve as a risk management tool deserves attention.contract efficiency, ethanol, futures contracts, Crop Production/Industries, Risk and Uncertainty, Q13, Q43, M31,

Lunar horizon glow and the Clementine mission

The Clementine spacecraft is to be launched into Earth orbit in late January for subsequent insertion into lunar orbit in late February, 1994. There, its primary mission is to produce -- over a period of about two months -- a new photographic map of the entire surface of the Moon; this will be done, in a variety of wavelengths and spatial resolutions, in a manner greatly superior to that previously accomplished for the whole Moon. It will then go on to fly by and photograph the asteroid Geographos. A secondary goal that has been accepted for this mission is to take a series of photographs designed to capture images of, and determine the brightness and extent of, the Lunar Horizon Glow (LHG). One form of LHG is caused by the solar stimulation of emission from Na and K atoms in the lunar exosphere. The scale height of this exosphere is of the order of 100 km. There are also brighter LHG components, with much smaller scale heights, that appear to be caused by scattered off of an exospheric lunar dust cloud

Continued investigation of LDEF's structural frame and thermal blankets by the Meteoroid and Debris Special Investigation Group

This report focuses on the data acquired by detailed examination of LDEF intercostals, 68 of which are now in possession of the Meteoroid and Debris Special Investigation Group (M&D SIG) at JSC. In addition, limited data will be presented for several small sections from the A0178 thermal control blankets that were examined/counted prior to being shipped to Principal Investigators (PI's) for scientific study. The data presented here are limited to measurements of crater and penetration-hole diameters and their frequency of occurrence which permits, yet also constrains, more model-dependent, interpretative efforts. Such efforts will focus on the conversion of crater and penetration-hole sizes to projectile diameters (and masses), on absolute particle fluxes, and on the distribution of particle-encounter velocities. These are all complex issues that presently cannot be pursued without making various assumptions which relate, in part, to crater-scaling relationships, and to assumed trajectories of natural and man-made particle populations in LEO that control the initial impact conditions

Origins of Solar System Dust Beyond Jupiter

The measurements of cosmic interplanetary dust by the instruments on board the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft contain the dynamical signature of dust generated by Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects, as well as short period Oort Cloud comets and short period Jupiter family comets. While the dust concentration detected between Jupiter and Saturn is mainly due to the cometary components, the dust outside Saturn's orbit is dominated by grains originating from the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt. In order to sustain a dust concentration that accounts for the Pioneer measurements, short period external Jupiter family comets, on orbits similar to comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann-1, have to produce $8\times 10^4:{\rm g}:{\rm s}^{-1}$ of dust grains with sizes between 0.01 and $6:{\rm mm}$. A sustained production rate of $3\times 10^5:{\rm g}:{\rm s}^{-1}$ has to be provided by short period Oort cloud comets on 1P/Halley-like orbits. The comets can not, however, account for the dust flux measured outside Saturn's orbit. The measurements there can only be explained by a generation of dust grains in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt by mutual collisions of the source objects and by impacts of interstellar dust grains onto the objects' surfaces. These processes have to release in total $5\times 10^7:{\rm g}:{\rm s}^{-1}$ of dust from the Edgeworth Kuiper belt objects in order to account for the amount of dust found by Pioneer beyond Saturn, making the Edgeworth-Kuiper disk the brightest extended feature of the Solar System when observed from afar

Achieving Innovation and Affordability Through Standardization of Materials Development and Testing

The successful expansion of development, innovation, and production within the aeronautics industry during the 20th century was facilitated by collaboration of government agencies with the commercial aviation companies. One of the initial products conceived from the collaboration was the ANC-5 Bulletin, first published in 1937. The ANC-5 Bulletin had intended to standardize the requirements of various government agencies in the design of aircraft structure. The national space policy shift in priority for NASA with an emphasis on transferring the travel to low earth orbit to commercial space providers highlights an opportunity and a need for the national and global space industries. The same collaboration and standardization that is documented and maintained by the industry within MIL-HDBK-5 (MMPDS-01) and MIL-HBDK-17 (nonmetallic mechanical properties) can also be exploited to standardize the thermal performance properties, processing methods, test methods, and analytical methods for use in aircraft and spacecraft design and associated propulsion systems. In addition to the definition of thermal performance description and standardization, the standardization for test methods and analysis for extreme environments (high temperature, cryogenics, deep space radiation, etc) would also be highly valuable to the industry. Its subsequent revisions and conversion to MIL-HDBK-5 and then MMPDS-01 established and then expanded to contain standardized mechanical property design values and other related design information for metallic materials used in aircraft, missiles, and space vehicles. It also includes guidance on standardization of composition, processing, and analytical methods for presentation and inclusion into the handbook. This standardization enabled an expansion of the technologies to provide efficiency and reliability to the consumers. It can be established that many individual programs within the government agencies have been overcome with development costs generated from these nonstandard requirements. Without industry standardization and acceptance, the programs are driven to shoulder the costs of determining design requirements, performance criteria, and then material qualification and certification. A significant investment that the industry could make to both reduce individual program development costs and schedules while expanding commercial space flight capabilities would be to invest in standardizing material performance properties for high temperature, cryogenic, and deep space environments for both metallic and nonmetallic materials

Bounds on the entanglability of thermal states in liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance

The role of mixed state entanglement in liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) quantum computation is not yet well-understood. In particular, despite the success of quantum information processing with NMR, recent work has shown that quantum states used in most of those experiments were not entangled. This is because these states, derived by unitary transforms from the thermal equilibrium state, were too close to the maximally mixed state. We are thus motivated to determine whether a given NMR state is entanglable - that is, does there exist a unitary transform that entangles the state? The boundary between entanglable and nonentanglable thermal states is a function of the spin system size $N$ and its temperature $T$. We provide new bounds on the location of this boundary using analytical and numerical methods; our tightest bound scales as $N \sim T$, giving a lower bound requiring at least $N \sim 22,000$ proton spins to realize an entanglable thermal state at typical laboratory NMR magnetic fields. These bounds are tighter than known bounds on the entanglability of effective pure states.Comment: REVTeX4, 15 pages, 4 figures (one large figure: 414 K

The solar maximum satellite capture cell: Impact features and orbital debris and micrometeoritic projectile materials

The physical properties of impact features observed in the Solar Max main electronics box (MEB) thermal blanket generally suggest an origin by hypervelocity impact. The chemistry of micrometeorite material suggests that a wide variety of projectile materials have survived impact with retention of varying degrees of pristinity. Impact features that contain only spacecraft paint particles are on average smaller than impact features caused by micrometeorite impacts. In case both types of materials co-occur, it is belevied that the impact feature, generally a penetration hole, was caused by a micrometeorite projectile. The typically smaller paint particles were able to penetrate though the hole in the first layer and deposit in the spray pattern on the second layer. It is suggested that paint particles have arrived with a wide range of velocities relative to the Solar Max satellite. Orbiting paint particles are an important fraction of materials in the near-Earth environment. In general, the data from the Solar Max studies are a good calibration for the design of capture cells to be flown in space and on board Space Station. The data also suggest that development of multiple layer capture cells in which the projectile may retain a large degree of pristinity is a feasible goal

Plasmon attenuation and optical conductivity of a two-dimensional electron gas

In a ballistic two-dimensional electron gas, the Landau damping does not lead to plasmon attenuation in a broad interval of wave vectors q << k_F. Similarly, it does not contribute to the optical conductivity \sigma (\omega, q) in a wide domain of its arguments, E_F > \omega > qv_F, where E_F, k_F and v_F are, respectively, the Fermi energy, wavevector and velocity of the electrons. We identify processes that result in the plasmon attenuation in the absence of Landau damping. These processes are: the excitation of two electron-hole pairs, phonon-assisted excitation of one pair, and a direct plasmon-phonon conversion. We evaluate the corresponding contributions to the plasmon linewidth and to the optical conductivity.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; final form, misprints correcte