Critical loads for nutrient nitrogen for soil-vegetation systems

Members of the UK Critical Loads Advisory Group (CLAG) have calculated critical loads for nutrient nitrogen to produce maps for Great Britain. The results of three methods, based upon the conclusions from the Lokeberg workshop are described below. Two of these methods use the empirical approachand the other the steady state equation ("mass balance") for nitrogen saturation

A daily representation of Great Britain's energy vectors : Natural gas, electricity and transport fuels

In much of Europe there is a strong push to decarbonise energy demands, including the largest single end-use demand – heat. Moving heat demands over to the electrical network poses significant challenges and the use of hybrid energy vector and storage systems (heat and electrical storage) will be a critical component in managing this transition. As an example of these challenges (facing many developed countries), the scale of recently available daily energy flows through the UK’s electrical, gas and transport systems are presented. When this data is expressed graphically it illustrates important differences in the demand characteristics of these different vectors; these include the quantity of energy delivered through the networks on a daily basis, and the scale of variability in the gas demand over multiple timescales (seasonal, weekly and daily). As the UK proceeds to migrate heating demands to the electrical network in its drive to cut carbon emissions, electrical demand will significantly increase. Additionally, the greater variability and uncertainty shown in the gas demand will also migrate to the electrical demand posing significant difficulties for the maintenance of a secure and reliable electrical system in the coming decades. The paper concludes an analysis of the different means of accommodating increasingly volatile electricity demands in future energy networks

A Need for a Paradigm Shift in the Spanish Banking Sector? The Evolution from Regional to Multinational Banks in Spain.

Since the approval of Spain¿s 2012 National Budget on March 30, 2012, some doubts and controversies have added up to many fears in the private sector regarding the measures and stimuli that the Spanish government was going to undertake. At the same time, this situation was in some measure aggravated by the financial backlog of many small and medium companies, which are and will continue, in the following years to be completely unable to comply with their financial requirements. In line with Boronat Ombuena¿s (2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2012) requirements in his new approach to finance and private sector liaisons, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the recent years of the credit sector in Spain as well as its direct and mid-term effects that its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have contributed up to date, and will still produce in the near future. We will take a closer look at the evolution of the banking sector in Spain from 1995 to 2012 through a historically-based methodology, compiling and synthesizing the existing financial and risk market information and analyzing its evolution. We shall observe that in a single year, the total number of savings banks in Spain decreased from 45 to only 15 entities and that the risks the financial system took over these last few years were not equally distributed across the entities, resulting in an advanced foreclosure of the regional savings banks and in a market-share growth for the commercial banking entities. This process has resulted in creating larger entities and, in some cases, a vacuum of regional and local credit entities that in the mid-long term will eventually end up in a representative loss on credit availability. These circumstances call into question the need for a paradigm change and most importantly, new approaches to solve the new challenges that can result in the financial fluidity of the system and the eventual recovery of the economic structure

The Relative Value of AER P&P Economic Education Papers

The CEE had been allocated one session in the AER Papers and Proceedings (P&P) since 1964. In 2008, the American Economic Association evaluated the allocation of AER Papers and Proceedings sessions to various AEA Committees. In response, the CEE was asked to prepare a one-page rationale for keeping that session. Their response (Committee on Economic Education, 2008) made several important defenses of the session, including that the quality of the papers published in these sessions must speak for itself. In this paper, we propose to evaluate the relative quality of AER P&P papers through citation analysis. Using the Social Science Citation Index, the citation counts of CEE AER P&P papers are compared to other papers included in the issue

Elastic Scattering of 200 MeV Polarized Protons from 9-Be and 16-O

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant NSF PHY 78-22774 A02 & A03 and by Indiana Universit

Proteus: A Hierarchical Portfolio of Solvers and Transformations

In recent years, portfolio approaches to solving SAT problems and CSPs have become increasingly common. There are also a number of different encodings for representing CSPs as SAT instances. In this paper, we leverage advances in both SAT and CSP solving to present a novel hierarchical portfolio-based approach to CSP solving, which we call Proteus, that does not rely purely on CSP solvers. Instead, it may decide that it is best to encode a CSP problem instance into SAT, selecting an appropriate encoding and a corresponding SAT solver. Our experimental evaluation used an instance of Proteus that involved four CSP solvers, three SAT encodings, and six SAT solvers, evaluated on the most challenging problem instances from the CSP solver competitions, involving global and intensional constraints. We show that significant performance improvements can be achieved by Proteus obtained by exploiting alternative view-points and solvers for combinatorial problem-solving.Comment: 11th International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems. The final publication is available at link.springer.co

Split vortices in optically coupled Bose-Einstein condensates

We study a rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensate in which an optically induced Josephson coupling allows for population transfer between the two species. In a regime where separation of species is favored, the ground state of the rotating system displays domain walls with velocity fields normal to them. Such a configuration looks like a vortex split into two halves, with atoms circulating around the vortex and changing their internal state in a continuous way.Comment: 4 EPS pictures, 4 pages; Some errata have been corrected and thep resentation has been slightly revise

The Optical Model Analysis of 200 MeV p + 16-O Elastic Scattering

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant NSF PHY 81-14339 and by Indiana Universit

Occurrence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in surface waters near industrial hog operation spray fields

Industrial hog operations (IHOs) have been identified as a source of antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, including methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). However, few studies have investigated the presence of antibiotic-resistant S. aureus in the environment near IHOs, specifically surface waters proximal to spray fields where IHO liquid lagoon waste is sprayed. Surface water samples (n = 179) were collected over the course of approximately one year from nine locations in southeastern North Carolina and analyzed for the presence of presumptive MRSA using CHROMagar MRSA media. Culture-based, biochemical, and molecular tests, as well as matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry were used to confirm that isolates that grew on CHROMagar MRSA media were S. aureus. Confirmed S. aureus isolates were then tested for susceptibility to 16 antibiotics and screened for molecular markers of MRSA (mecA, mecC) and livestock adaptation (absence of scn). A total of 12 confirmed MRSA were detected in 9 distinct water samples. Nine of 12 MRSA isolates were also multidrug-resistant (MDRSA [i.e., resistant to ≥ 3 antibiotic classes]). All MRSA were scn-positive and most (11/12) belonged to a staphylococcal protein A (spa) type t008, which is commonly associated with humans. Additionally, 12 confirmed S. aureus that were methicillin-susceptible (MSSA) were recovered, 7 of which belonged to spa type t021 and were scn-negative (a marker of livestock-adaptation). This study demonstrated the presence of MSSA, MRSA, and MDRSA in surface waters adjacent to IHO lagoon waste spray fields in southeastern North Carolina. To our knowledge, this is the first report of waterborne S. aureus from surface waters proximal to IHOs

Approximate Deadline-Scheduling with Precedence Constraints

We consider the classic problem of scheduling a set of n jobs non-preemptively on a single machine. Each job j has non-negative processing time, weight, and deadline, and a feasible schedule needs to be consistent with chain-like precedence constraints. The goal is to compute a feasible schedule that minimizes the sum of penalties of late jobs. Lenstra and Rinnoy Kan [Annals of Disc. Math., 1977] in their seminal work introduced this problem and showed that it is strongly NP-hard, even when all processing times and weights are 1. We study the approximability of the problem and our main result is an O(log k)-approximation algorithm for instances with k distinct job deadlines