WERE U.S. CROP YIELDS RANDOM IN RECENT YEARS?

Crop Production/Industries,

Search for C=+C=+ charmonium and bottomonium states in e+e−→γ+Xe^+e^-\to \gamma+ X at B factories

We study the production of $C=+$ charmonium states $X$ in $e^+e^-\to \gamma + X$ at B factories with $X=\eta_c(nS)$ (n=1,2,3), $\chi_{cJ}(mP)$ (m=1,2), and $^1D_2(1D)$. In the S and P wave case, contributions of tree-QED with one-loop QCD corrections are calculated within the framework of nonrelativistic QCD(NRQCD) and in the D-wave case only the tree-QED contribution are considered. We find that in most cases the QCD corrections are negative and moderate, in contrast to the case of double charmonium production $e^+e^-\to J/\psi + X$, where QCD corrections are positive and large in most cases. We also find that the production cross sections of some of these states in $e^+e^-\to \gamma + X$ are larger than that in $e^+e^-\to J/\psi + X$ by an order of magnitude even after the negative QCD corrections are included. So we argue that search for the X(3872), X(3940), Y(3940), and X(4160) in $e^+e^-\to \gamma + X$ at B factories may be helpful to clarify the nature of these states. For completeness, the production of bottomonium states in $e^+e^-$ annihilation is also discussed.Comment: 13pages, 4 figure

Stochastic Reinforcement Learning

In reinforcement learning episodes, the rewards and punishments are often non-deterministic, and there are invariably stochastic elements governing the underlying situation. Such stochastic elements are often numerous and cannot be known in advance, and they have a tendency to obscure the underlying rewards and punishments patterns. Indeed, if stochastic elements were absent, the same outcome would occur every time and the learning problems involved could be greatly simplified. In addition, in most practical situations, the cost of an observation to receive either a reward or punishment can be significant, and one would wish to arrive at the correct learning conclusion by incurring minimum cost. In this paper, we present a stochastic approach to reinforcement learning which explicitly models the variability present in the learning environment and the cost of observation. Criteria and rules for learning success are quantitatively analyzed, and probabilities of exceeding the observation cost bounds are also obtained.Comment: AIKE 201

A Bilingual Child's Acquisition of Mandarin and English: Same or Different Rate?

This paper is descriptive in nature. It looks at the utterances of one Malaysian-Chinese bilingual child who was specifically spoken to in Mandarin and English from birth. The aim of this paper is to highlight the different speech components present in the two languages. There is some evidence to show that the child's preferred language is not necessarily the dominant language. The child was observed closely by the researcher cum mother over a period of seven months. Initial utterances were tape recorded but later discarded due to impracticality. Subsequent utterances were then spontaneously recorded into journals as and when they occurred within the child's home with details such as time, date, place and participants indicated. Transcribed orthographically, data were then categorized according to the languages heard and then the speech components (see Hoff, 2009; Foster-Cohen, 1999; Crystal, 1997) respectively. A frequency count of all these utterances suggests that 59% of the child's utterances were in English while 19% were in Mandarin (dominant language) with smaller percentages subscribing to the various environmental languages. Data also indicate that more nouns were used in English and but slightly more verbs and noun phrases were used in Mandarin. This phenomenon was also used as a determinant to gauge the rate of acquisition of the two languages. A very small percentage of the child's data were also articulated as complete sentences but this was done in mixed languages, which could be a typical phenomenon of bilingual language acquisition at the early stage

Search for Bc(ns)B_c(ns) via the Bc(ns)→Bc(ms)π+π−B_c(ns)\to B_c(ms)\pi^+\pi^- transition at LHCb and Z0Z_0 factory

It is interesting to study the characteristics of the whole family of $B_c$ which contains two different heavy flavors. LHC and the proposed $Z^0$ factory provide an opportunity because a large database on the $B_c$ family will be achieved. $B_c$ and its excited states can be identified via their decay modes. As suggested by experimentalists, $B_c^*(ns)\to B_c+\gamma$ is not easy to be clearly measured, instead, the trajectories of $\pi^+$ and $\pi^-$ occurring in the decay of $B_c(ns)\to B_c(ms)+\pi^+\pi^-$ ($n>m$) can be unambiguously identified, thus the measurement seems easier and more reliable, therefore this mode is more favorable at early running stage of LHCb and the proposed $Z^0$ factory. In this work, we calculate the rate of $B_c(ns)\to B_c(ms)+\pi^+\pi^-$ in terms of the QCD multipole-expansion and the numerical results indicate that the experimental measurements with the luminosity of LHC and $Z^0$ factory are feasible.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figures and 4 tables, acceptted by SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy (Science in China Series G

Prospects for detection of Υ(1D)→Υ(1S)ππ\Upsilon(1D) \to \Upsilon(1S) \pi \pi via Υ(3S)→Υ(1D)+X\Upsilon(3S) \to \Upsilon(1D) + X

At least one state in the first family of D-wave $b \bar b$ quarkonium levels has been discovered near the predicted mass of 10.16 GeV/$c^2$. This state is probably the one with J=2. This state and the ones with J=1 and J=3 may contribute a detectable amount to the decay $\Upsilon(1D) \to \Upsilon(1S) \pi \pi$, depending on the partial widths for these decays for which predictions vary considerably. The prospects for detection of the chain $\Upsilon(3S) \to \Upsilon(1D) + X \to \Upsilon \pi \pi + X$ are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, 1 figure, to be published in Phys. Rev. D, comment added after Eq. (2

Understanding the newly observed Y(4008) by Belle

Very recently a new enhancement around 4.05 GeV was observed by Belle experiment. In this short note, we discuss some possible assignments for this enhancement, i.e. $\psi(3S)$ and $D^*\bar{D}^*$ molecular state. In these two assignments, Y(4008) can decay into $J/\psi\pi^0\pi^0$ with comparable branching ratio with that of $Y(4008)\to J/\psi\pi^+\pi^-$. Thus one suggests high energy experimentalists to look for Y(4008) in $J/\psi\pi^0\pi^0$ channel. Furthermore one proposes further experiments to search missing channel $D\bar{D}$, $D\bar{D}^*+h.c.$ and especially $\chi_{cJ}\pi^+\pi^-\pi^0$ and $\eta_c\pi^+\pi^-\pi^0$, which will be helpful to distinguish $\psi(3S)$ and $D^*\bar{D}^*$ molecular state assignments for this new enhancement.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Typos correcte

An analysis of the fluctuations of the geomagnetic dipole

The time evolution of the strength of the Earth's virtual axial dipole moment (VADM) is analyzed by relating it to the Fokker-Planck equation, which describes a random walk with VADM-dependent drift and diffusion coefficients. We demonstrate first that our method is able to retrieve the correct shape of the drift and diffusion coefficients from a time series generated by a test model. Analysis of the Sint-2000 data shows that the geomagnetic dipole mode has a linear growth time of 13 to 33 kyr, and that the nonlinear quenching of the growth rate follows a quadratic function of the type [1-(x/x0)^2]. On theoretical grounds, the diffusive motion of the VADM is expected to be driven by multiplicative noise, and the corresponding diffusion coefficient to scale quadratically with dipole strength. However, analysis of the Sint-2000 VADM data reveals a diffusion which depends only very weakly on the dipole strength. This may indicate that the magnetic field quenches the amplitude of the turbulent velocity in the Earth's outer core.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Rectification from Radially-Distorted Scales

This paper introduces the first minimal solvers that jointly estimate lens distortion and affine rectification from repetitions of rigidly transformed coplanar local features. The proposed solvers incorporate lens distortion into the camera model and extend accurate rectification to wide-angle images that contain nearly any type of coplanar repeated content. We demonstrate a principled approach to generating stable minimal solvers by the Grobner basis method, which is accomplished by sampling feasible monomial bases to maximize numerical stability. Synthetic and real-image experiments confirm that the solvers give accurate rectifications from noisy measurements when used in a RANSAC-based estimator. The proposed solvers demonstrate superior robustness to noise compared to the state-of-the-art. The solvers work on scenes without straight lines and, in general, relax the strong assumptions on scene content made by the state-of-the-art. Accurate rectifications on imagery that was taken with narrow focal length to near fish-eye lenses demonstrate the wide applicability of the proposed method. The method is fully automated, and the code is publicly available at https://github.com/prittjam/repeats.Comment: pre-prin