Adaptation to Climate Change: Land Use and Livestock Management Change in the U.S.

Replaced with revised version of paper 01/26/11Climate Change, Stocking Rate, Land Use, Livestock Management, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Livestock Production/Industries,

CLIMATE CHANGE INFLUENCES ON THE RISK OF AVIAN INFLUENZA OUTBREAKS AND ASSOCIATED ECONOMIC LOSS

This paper examines the effect that climate has on Avian Influenza outbreak probability. The statistical analysis shows across a broad region the probability of an outbreak declines by 0.22% when the temperature rises 1 Celsius degree and increases by 0.34% when precipitation increases by 1millimeter. These results indicate that the realized climate change of the last 20 years not only has been a factor behind recent HPAI outbreaks, but that climate change is likely to play an even greater role in the future. The statistical results indicate that overall, the risk of an AI outbreak has been increased by 51% under past climate change and 3-4% under future climate change. An economic evaluation shows the increased probability of outbreaks has caused damages of about $107 million in China and$29 million in the United States due to past climate change. In the year of 2011-2030, for countries with a high proportion of chicken production, economic loss could reach $105-$146 million in China and $12-$18 million in the United Sates.Climate change, Avian Influenza outbreaks, GDP loss, Environmental Economics and Policy, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Gate defined quantum dot realized in a single crystalline InSb nanosheet

Single crystalline InSb nanosheet is an emerging planar semiconductor material with potential applications in electronics, infrared optoelectronics, spintronics and topological quantum computing. Here we report on realization of a quantum dot device from a single crystalline InSb nanosheet grown by molecular-beam epitaxy. The device is fabricated from the nanosheet on a Si/SiO2 substrate and the quantum dot confinement is achieved by top gate technique. Transport measurements show a series of Coulomb diamonds, demonstrating that the quantum dot is well defined and highly tunable. Tunable, gate-defined, planar InSb quantum dots offer a renewed platform for developing semiconductor-based quantum computation technology.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Anisotropic Pauli spin-blockade effect and spin-orbit interaction field in an InAs nanowire double quantum dot

We report on experimental detection of the spin-orbit interaction field in an InAs nanowire double quantum dot device. In the spin blockade regime, leakage current through the double quantum dot is measured and is used to extract the effects of spin-orbit interaction and hyperfine interaction on spin state mixing. At finite magnetic fields, the leakage current arising from the hyperfine interaction is suppressed and the spin-orbit interaction dominates spin state mixing. We observe dependence of the leakage current on the applied magnetic field direction and determine the direction of the spin-orbit interaction field. We show that the spin-orbit field lies in a direction perpendicular to the nanowire axis but with a pronounced off-substrate-plane angle. It is for the first time that such an off-substrate-plane spin-orbit field in an InAs nanowire has been detected. The results are expected to have an important implication in employing InAs nanowires to construct spin-orbit qubits and topological quantum devices.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, Supporting Informatio

A model for the growth of a population exhibiting stage structure: cannibalism and cooperation

AbstractA model of a stage-structured population with fixed maturity time for the immature stage and interaction terms that may be interpreted as cooperation or cannibalism is proposed. The existence and stability of the equilibrium set are discussed. In the case of cannibalism, it is shown by a numerical example how a Hopf bifurcation could result in a stable periodic solution

Two-dimensional Mott variable-range hopping transport in a disordered MoS2_2 nanoflake

The transport characteristics of a disordered MoS$_2$ nanoflake in the insulator regime are studied by electrical and magnetotransport measurements. The layered MoS$_2$ nanoflake is exfoliated from a bulk MoS$_2$ crystal and the conductance $G$ and magnetoresistance are measured in a four-probe setup over a wide range of temperatures. At high temperatures, we observe that $\log_{10}G$ exhibits a $-T^{-1}$ temperature dependence and the transport in the nanoflake dominantly arises from thermal activation. At low temperatures, where the transport in the nanoflake dominantly takes place via variable-range hopping (VRH) processes, we observe that $\log_{10}G$ exhibits a $-T^{-1/3}$ temperature dependence, an evidence for the two-dimensional (2D) Mott VRH transport. The measured low-field magnetoresistance of the nanoflake in the insulator regime exhibits a quadratic magnetic field dependence $\sim \alpha B^2$ with $\alpha\sim T^{-1}$, fully consistent with the 2D Mott VRH transport in the nanoflake.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, and Supplemental Material

Prediction for unintegrated parton distributions

Unintegrated parton distributions in the proton and nucleus are predicted by a modified DGLAP equation incorporating the shadowing corrections, which include exact energy-momentum conservation in each splitting and fusion vertices. We find that the nuclear shadowing effects are obvious, although they are far from the saturation limit. On the other hand, we point out that the suppression of the unintegrated gluon distribution toward lower $k_t^2$ may arise from the valence-like input rather than the saturation effects.Comment: Review article, 50 pages, 19 figures. To appear in Physical Review

Effects of introducing low-cost high-speed rail on air-rail competition:Modelling and numerical analysis for Paris-Marseille

Given the trend of railway liberalization in Europe and Asia, we explore the effects of introducing low-cost high-speed rail as an answer to the railway reform on air-rail competition. In particular, by proposing a vertically differentiated model, we first derive the optimal pricing policies as well as the corresponding profits and market shares for low-cost high-speed rail (LCR), full-service high-speed rail (FSR) and air transport (Air). We do so for two types of LCR entrants, namely the incumbent owned entrant (to the FSR company) and the independently owned entrants. For both situations, we prove analytically that introducing LCR leads to reduced FSR and Air fares as well as to reduced Air traffic. The fare and traffic reductions increase with the passenger's time value and with the LCR travel time, while they decrease with the Air unit seat cost. Moreover, all LCR effects are stronger for an independently operated LCR. We apply our model to the Paris-Marseille route, based on data collected from publicly available sources. It is found that introducing an independently owned (incumbent owned) LCR on this route leads to 39% (33%) less air traffic, 20% (14%) less FSR traffic and a 37% (29%) increase in total rail traffic. Furthermore, this comes with increases of 2% (8%) in combined railway profit and 6% (5%) in total social welfare. These results support the decision of French policy makers to have LCR and FSR operated by the same company, as it comes with much higher combined railway profits and almost the same welfare increase as independently owned LCR. Further sensitivity analyses suggest that most LCR passengers would otherwise have traveled by FSR or Air, although LCR also attracts new passengers. In addition, offering a low-cost alternative is more effective if passengers value time more highly. Implications in terms of methodology and industry are provided.</p

ATACseqQC: a Bioconductor package for post-alignment quality assessment of ATAC-seq data

BACKGROUND: ATAC-seq (Assays for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing) is a recently developed technique for genome-wide analysis of chromatin accessibility. Compared to earlier methods for assaying chromatin accessibility, ATAC-seq is faster and easier to perform, does not require cross-linking, has higher signal to noise ratio, and can be performed on small cell numbers. However, to ensure a successful ATAC-seq experiment, step-by-step quality assurance processes, including both wet lab quality control and in silico quality assessment, are essential. While several tools have been developed or adopted for assessing read quality, identifying nucleosome occupancy and accessible regions from ATAC-seq data, none of the tools provide a comprehensive set of functionalities for preprocessing and quality assessment of aligned ATAC-seq datasets. RESULTS: We have developed a Bioconductor package, ATACseqQC, for easily generating various diagnostic plots to help researchers quickly assess the quality of their ATAC-seq data. In addition, this package contains functions to preprocess aligned ATAC-seq data for subsequent peak calling. Here we demonstrate the utilities of our package using 25 publicly available ATAC-seq datasets from four studies. We also provide guidelines on what the diagnostic plots should look like for an ideal ATAC-seq dataset. CONCLUSIONS: This software package has been used successfully for preprocessing and assessing several in-house and public ATAC-seq datasets. Diagnostic plots generated by this package will facilitate the quality assessment of ATAC-seq data, and help researchers to evaluate their own ATAC-seq experiments as well as select high-quality ATAC-seq datasets from public repositories such as GEO to avoid generating hypotheses or drawing conclusions from low-quality ATAC-seq experiments. The software, source code, and documentation are freely available as a Bioconductor package at https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/ATACseqQC.html