Using survey participants to estimate the impact of nonparticipation

The authors evaluate the effectiveness of two models often used to measure the extent of nonparticipation bias in survey estimates. The first model establishes a "continuum of resistance" to being surveyed, placing people who were interviewed after one phone call on one end and nonparticipants on the other. The second assumes that there are "classes" of nonparticipants and that similar classes can be found among participants; it identifies groups of participants thought to be like nonparticipants and uses them as "proxies" to estimate the characteristics of nonparticipants. The authors use these models to examine how accurately they estimate the characteristics of nonparticipants and the impact of nonparticipation on survey estimates of means of child support awards and payments in Wisconsin. They find that neither model detects the true extent of nonparticipation bias.

α\alpha-Particle Spectrum in the Reaction p+11^{11}B→α+8Be∗→3α\to \alpha + ^8Be^*\to 3\alpha

Using a simple phenomenological parametrization of the reaction amplitude we calculated $\alpha$-particle spectrum in the reaction p+$^{11}$B$\to \alpha + ^8Be^*\to 3\alpha$ at the resonance proton energy 675 KeV. The parametrization includes Breit-Wigner factor with an energy dependent width for intermediate $^8Be^*$ state and the Coulomb and the centrifugal factors in $\alpha$-particle emission vertexes. The shape of the spectrum consists of a well defined peak corresponding to emission of the primary $\alpha$ and a flat shoulder going down to very low energy. We found that below 1.5 MeV there are 17.5% of $\alpha$'s and below 1 MeV there are 11% of them.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Shakura-Sunyaev Disk Can Smoothly Match Advection-Dominated Accretion Flow

We use the standard Runge-Kutta method to solve the set of basic equations describing black hole accretion flows composed of two-temperature plasma. We do not invoke any extra energy transport mechanism such as thermal conduction and do not specify any ad hoc outer boundary condition for the advection-dominated accretion flow (ADAF) solution. We find that in the case of high viscosity and non-zero radiative cooling, the ADAF solution can have an asymptotic approach to the Shakura-Sunyaev disk (SSD) solution, and the SSD-ADAF transition radius is close to the central black hole. Our results further prove the mechanism of thermal instability-triggered SSD-ADAF transition suggested previously by Takeuchi & Mineshige and Gu & Lu.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Simultaneous Observations of GRS 1758-258 in 1997 by VLA, IRAM, SEST, RXTE and OSSE: Spectroscopy and Timing

We report the results of our multi-wavelength observations of GRS 1758-258 made in August 1997. The energy bands include radio, millimeter, X-ray, and gamma-ray. The observations enable us to obtain a complete spectrum of the source over an energy range of 2 - 500 keV. The spectrum shows that GRS 1758-258 was in its hard state. It is well fitted by the Sunyaev-Titarchuk (ST) Compton scattering model. The spectrum is also fit by a power law with an exponential cutoff (PLE) plus a soft black-body component. The temperature of the soft component is about 1.2 keV, and the energy flux is less than 1.5% of the total X- and gamma-ray flux. The deduced hydrogen column density is in the range of (0.93 - 2.0) 10^{22} cm^{-2}. No significant iron lines are detected. The radio emission has a flat energy spectrum. The daily radio, X-ray and gamma-ray light curves show that GRS 1758-258 was stable during the observation period, but was highly variable on smaller time scales in X- and gamma-rays. The power density spectra are typical for the low-state, but we find the photon flux for the 5 to 10 keV band to be more variable than that in the other two energy bands (2 - 5 keV and 10 - 40 keV). Harmonically spaced quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) are observed in the power spectra. The phase lags between the hard photons and the soft photons have a flat distribution over a wide range of frequencies. A high coherence of about 1.0 (0.01 - 1 Hz) between the hard photons and the soft photons is also obtained in our observations. We compare these results with two variation models. Our millimeter observations did not reveal any conclusive signatures of an interaction between the jet from GRS 1758-258 and the molecular cloud that lies in the direction of GRS 1758-258.Comment: 32 pages, 13 figures, to appear in ApJ, 2000, V.533, no. 1, Apr. 10. For better figure resolution, please directly download the paper from http://spacsun.rice.edu/~lin/publication.htm

Toward a Deterministic Model of Planetary Formation IV: Effects of Type-I Migration

In a further development of a deterministic planet-formation model (Ida & Lin 2004), we consider the effect of type-I migration of protoplanetary embryos due to their tidal interaction with their nascent disks. During the early embedded phase of protostellar disks, although embryos rapidly emerge in regions interior to the ice line, uninhibited type-I migration leads to their efficient self-clearing. But, embryos continue to form from residual planetesimals at increasingly large radii, repeatedly migrate inward, and provide a main channel of heavy element accretion onto their host stars. During the advanced stages of disk evolution (a few Myr), the gas surface density declines to values comparable to or smaller than that of the minimum mass nebula model and type-I migration is no longer an effective disruption mechanism for mars-mass embryos. Over wide ranges of initial disk surface densities and type-I migration efficiency, the surviving population of embryos interior to the ice line has a total mass several times that of the Earth. With this reservoir, there is an adequate inventory of residual embryos to subsequently assemble into rocky planets similar to those around the Sun. But, the onset of efficient gas accretion requires the emergence and retention of cores, more massive than a few M_earth, prior to the severe depletion of the disk gas. The formation probability of gas giant planets and hence the predicted mass and semimajor axis distributions of extrasolar gas giants are sensitively determined by the strength of type-I migration. We suggest that the observed fraction of solar-type stars with gas giant planets can be reproduced only if the actual type-I migration time scale is an order of magnitude longer than that deduced from linear theories.Comment: 32 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in Ap

PhyloCSF: a comparative genomics method to distinguish protein-coding and non-coding regions

As high-throughput transcriptome sequencing provides evidence for novel transcripts in many species, there is a renewed need for accurate methods to classify small genomic regions as protein-coding or non-coding. We present PhyloCSF, a novel comparative genomics method that analyzes a multi-species nucleotide sequence alignment to determine whether it is likely to represent a conserved protein-coding region, based on a formal statistical comparison of phylogenetic codon models. We show that PhyloCSF's classification performance in 12-species _Drosophila_ genome alignments exceeds all other methods we compared in a previous study, and we provide a software implementation for use by the community. We anticipate that this method will be widely applicable as the transcriptomes of many additional species, tissues, and subcellular compartments are sequenced, particularly in the context of ENCODE and modENCODE

Rh-doped Ceria: Solar Organics From H2O, CO2 and Sunlight?

AbstractThe depleting supply of fossil fuels and rapidly increasing emissions of anthropogenic greenhouse gases demand sustainable solutions to the unfolding energy and environmental crises. One solution is to store concentrated solar energy in the form of chemical fuels via thermochemical cycles, which produce synthesis gas, a gas mixture of H2 and CO that is the precursor of liquid fuels in the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) processes. To date, research efforts in this field have been devoted exclusively to the improvement of synthesis gas production, and no reports are available in direct generation of organic fuels such as methane and ethanol from H2O and CO2 by solar thermochemical cycles. With the aim to generate higher grade fuels directly from H2O and CO2 via thermochemical processes, we incorporate FT catalysts into the ceria lattice. In this study, we have synthesized rhodium doped ceria by coprecipitation. X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) indicates that the as-synthesized Rh-doped ceria is single-phased. High temperature XRD reveals that the Rh-doped ceria sustains its fluorite structure even at elevated temperatures up to 1400˚C, indicating excellent structural stability highly desired for thermochemical cycles. The formation of oxygen vacancies in ceria due to the substitution of cerium by the lower valent rhodium cations is evidenced by Raman spectra. Rh-doped ceria exhibits an enhanced oxygen storage capacity (OSC) and superior activities in the conversion of H2 and CO2 into methane. These demonstrate great potential of Rh-doped ceria for the production of methane and other chemicals during the reoxidation in a thermochemical cycle, when H2O, instead of H2, is co-fed with CO2. In fact, evidence strongly indicates that the H2 produced from the splitting of H2O is partly consumed when both H2O and CO2 are used for the reoxidation of thermally reduced Rh-doped ceria. Therefore the formation of higher grade fuels seems highly likely

The influence of baryons on the mass distribution of dark matter halos

Using a set of high-resolution N-body/SPH cosmological simulations with identical initial conditions but run with different numerical setups, we investigate the influence of baryonic matter on the mass distribution of dark halos when radiative cooling is NOT included. We compare the concentration parameters of about 400 massive halos with virial mass from $10^{13}$ \Msun to $7.1 \times 10^{14}$ \Msun. We find that the concentration parameters for the total mass and dark matter distributions in non radiative simulations are on average larger by ~3% and 10% than those in a pure dark matter simulation. Our results indicate that the total mass density profile is little affected by a hot gas component in the simulations. After carefully excluding the effects of resolutions and spurious two-body heating between dark matter and gas particles, we conclude that the increase of the dark matter concentration parameters is due to interactions between baryons and dark matter. We demonstrate this with the aid of idealized simulations of two-body mergers. The results of individual halos simulated with different mass resolutions show that the gas profiles of densities, temperature and entropy are subjects of mass resolution of SPH particles. In particular, we find that in the inner parts of halos, as the SPH resolution increases the gas density becomes higher but both the entropy and temperature decrease.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, ApJ in press (v652n1); updated to match with the being published versio