Termite Distribution in Michigan

Subterranean termites have been present in Michigan for a long time. They were reported as being destructive to buildings in 1920 (Anonymous, 1961), and apparently damage done at that time was increasing over what had occurred earlier. Notwithstanding this long time presence of termites in the state a majority of the population still looks upon the termite as a strange insect most likely to be encountered in the South. All too many home owners and building proprietors as well as others are unacquainted with presence of termites in their areas. At the same time monetary loss due to termite attack is considerable. As an example, control costs and losses to structures in Tennessee due to termites in 1971 were reported (Anonymous, 1972) as over $8 million. Expenditures are less than this in Michigan but still substantial. Because of these facts it was felt that a wide cross-section of the public would benefit from knowledge of locations in Michigan where termites are present and most likely to cause damage. Unfortunately the general public is not aware that there are effective control methods to prevent damage where termites are a hazard. Retieulitermes flavipes (Kollar) is the most commonly encountered termite in Michigan. Other species found in the State are Reticulitermes arenincola Goellner and R. tibialis Banks. Areninocola is reported from the very southwest corner of the State and R. tibialis is known from scattered localities

Searches with Boosted Objects

Boosted objects - particles whose transverse momentum is greater than twice their mass - are becoming increasingly important as the LHC continues to explore energies in the TeV range. The sensitivity of searches for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model depends critically on the efficient reconstruction and identification (tagging) of their unique detector signatures. This contribution provides a review of searches for new physics carried out by the ATLAS and CMS experiments that rely on the reconstruction and identification of boosted top quarks as well as boosted $W$, $Z$ and Higgs bosons. A particular emphasis is placed on the different substructure techniques and tagging algorithms for top quarks and bosons employed by the two experiments.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures. Proceedings of the XXXIV Physics in Collision Symposium, Bloomington, Indiana, September 16-20, 201

Vertical stratification of iron in atmospheres of blue horizontal-branch stars

The aim of this study is to search for observational evidence of vertical iron stratification in the atmosphere of fourteen blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars. We have found from our numerical simulations that five BHB stars: B22, B186 in the globular cluster NGC 288, WF2-820, WF2-2692 in M13 and B203 in M15 show clear signatures of the vertical stratification of iron whose abundance increases toward the lower atmosphere. Two other BHB stars (B334 in M15 and B176 in M92) also show possible iron stratification in their atmosphere. A dependence of the slope of iron stratification on the effective temperature was also discovered. It is found that the vertical stratification of iron is strongest in BHB stars with Teff around 11,500K. The slope of iron abundance decreases as Teff increases and becomes negligible for the BHB stars with Teff= 14,000K. These results support the hypothesis regarding the efficiency of atomic diffusion in the stellar atmospheres of BHB stars with Teff > 11,500K.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Credit risk transfer, real sector productivity, and financial deepening

We derive the effects of credit risk transfer (CRT) markets on real sector productivity and on the volume of financial intermediation in a model where banks choose their optimal degree of CRT and monitoring. We find that CRT increases productivity in the up-market real sector but decreases it in the low-end segment. If optimal, CRT unambiguously fosters financial deepening, i.e., it reduces credit-rationing in the economy. These effects rely upon the ability of banks to commit to the optimal CRT at the funding stage. The optimal degree of CRT depends on the combination of moral hazard, general riskiness, and the cost of monitoring in non-monotonic ways

Holography as a highly efficient RG flow II: An explicit construction

We complete the reformulation of the holographic correspondence as a \emph{highly efficient RG flow} that can also determine the UV data in the field theory in the strong coupling and large $N$ limit. We introduce a special way to define operators at any given scale in terms of appropriate coarse-grained collective variables, without requiring the use of the elementary fields. The Wilsonian construction is generalised by promoting the cut-off to a functional of these collective variables. We impose three criteria to determine the coarse-graining. The first criterion is that the effective Ward identities for local conservation of energy, momentum, etc. should preserve their standard forms, but in new scale-dependent background metric and sources which are functionals of the effective single trace operators. The second criterion is that the scale-evolution equations of the operators in the actual background metric should be state-independent, implying that the collective variables should not explicitly appear in them. The final criterion is that the endpoint of the scale-evolution of the RG flow can be transformed to a fixed point corresponding to familiar non-relativistic equations with a finite number of parameters, such as incompressible non-relativistic Navier-Stokes, under a certain universal rescaling of the scale and of the time coordinate. Using previous work, we explicitly show that in the hydrodynamic limit each such highly efficient RG flow reproduces a unique classical gravity theory with precise UV data that satisfy our IR criterion. We obtain the explicit coarse-graining which reproduces Einstein's equations. In a simple example, we are also able to compute the beta function. Finally, we show how our construction can be interpolated with the traditional Wilsonian RG flow at a suitable scale, and can be used to develop new non-perturbative frameworks for QCD-like theories.Comment: 1+59 pages; Introduction slightly expanded, Section V on beta function in highly efficient RG flow added, version accepted in PR