61 research outputs found
Flood of September 20-23, 1969 in the Gadsden County area, Florida
The center of low pressure of a tropical disturbance which
moved northward in the Gulf of Mexico, reached land between
Panama City and Port St. Joe, Florida, on September 20, 1969. This
system was nearly stationary for 48 hours producing heavy rainfall
in the Quincy-Havana area, 70-80 miles northeast of the center.
Rainfall associated with the tropical disturbance exceeded 20
inches over a part of Gadsden County, Florida, during September 20
through 23, 1969, and the maximum rainfall of record occurred at
Quincy with 10.87 inches during a 6-hour period on September 21.
The 48-hour maximum of 17.71 inches exceeded the 1 in 100-year
probability of 16 inches for a 7-day period.
The previous maximum rainfall of record at Quincy (more than
12 inches) was on September 14-15, 1924. The characteristics of this
historical storm were similar in path and effect to the September
1969 tropical disturbance.
Peak runoff from a 1.4-square mile area near Midway, Florida,
was 1,540 cfs (cubic feet per second) per square mile. A peak discharge
of 45,600 cfs on September 22 at the gaging station on the
Little River near Quincy exceeded the previous peak of 25,400 cfs
which occurred on December 4, 1964. The peak discharge of 89,400
cfs at Ochlockonee River near Bloxham exceeded the April 1948
peak of 50,200 cfs, which was the previous maximum of record, by
1.8 times. Many flood-measurement sites had peak discharges in
excess of that of a 50-year flood.
Nearly 520,000 in contractual work was required to replace four
bridges that were destroyed. Agricultural losses were estimated at
$1,000,000. (44 page document
Probing the primordial power spectra with inflationary priors
We investigate constraints on power spectra of the primordial curvature and
tensor perturbations with priors based on single-field slow-roll inflation
models. We stochastically draw the Hubble slow-roll parameters and generate the
primordial power spectra using the inflationary flow equations. Using data from
recent observations of CMB and several measurements of geometrical distances in
the late Universe, Bayesian parameter estimation and model selection are
performed for models that have separate priors on the slow-roll parameters. The
same analysis is also performed adopting the standard parameterization of the
primordial power spectra. We confirmed that the scale-invariant
Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum is disfavored with increased significance from
previous studies. While current observations appear to be optimally modeled
with some simple models of single-field slow-roll inflation, data is not enough
constraining to distinguish these models.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, 7 tables, accepted for publication in JCA
Reconstruction of the Primordial Power Spectrum using Temperature and Polarisation Data from Multiple Experiments
We develop a method to reconstruct the primordial power spectrum, P(k), using
both temperature and polarisation data from the joint analysis of a number of
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations. The method is an extension of
the Richardson-Lucy algorithm, first applied in this context by Shafieloo &
Souradeep. We show how the inclusion of polarisation measurements can decrease
the uncertainty in the reconstructed power spectrum. In particular, the
polarisation data can constrain oscillations in the spectrum more effectively
than total intensity only measurements. We apply the estimator to a compilation
of current CMB results. The reconstructed spectrum is consistent with the
best-fit power spectrum although we find evidence for a `dip' in the power on
scales k ~ 0.002 Mpc^-1. This feature appears to be associated with the WMAP
power in the region 18 < l < 26 which is consistently below best--fit models.
We also forecast the reconstruction for a simulated, Planck-like survey
including sample variance limited polarisation data.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, comments welcom
Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search
Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe
Economies of scale in the production of swine manure Economias de escala na produção de dejetos de suínos
Manure production on grower/finisher swine operations in the United States was examined using data from 184 grower/finisher swine operations that participated in the United States National Animal Health Monitoring System's 1995 National Swine Study. Two methods were used: one, assuming that pigs produced 8.4% of their body weight in manure each day; another using the difference between feed fed and weight gained as a proxy variable to study manure production. Using this latter approach, a production function was developed. The function exhibited diminishing returns to scale when food waste was not fed to pigs, but constant returns to scale when food waste was included in their diets. The difference between feed fed and weight gained was lower on operations that restricted entry to employees only.<br>A produção de dejetos em granjas de crescimento e terminação de suínos nos Estados Unidos foi avaliada utilizando dados de 184 granjas participantes de um estudo nacional de 1995 do "United States National Animal Health Monitoring System". Dois métodos foram usados: um considerando que suínos produzem 8,4% do seu peso corporal de dejetos por dia e o outro usando a diferença entre o alimento ingerido e o ganho de peso como um indicador para o estudo da produção de esterco. Através desse último procedimento, desenvolveu-se uma função de produção
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