Direct jet reconstruction in p + p and Cu + Cu at PHENIX

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider collides heavy nuclei at ultrarelativistic energies, creating a strongly interacting, partonic medium that is opaque to the passage of high energy quarks and gluons. Direct jet reconstruction applied to these collision systems provides a crucial constraint on the mechanism for in-medium parton energy loss and jet-medium interactions. However, traditional jet reconstruction algorithm operating in the large soft background at RHIC give rise to fake jets well above the intrinsic production rate of high-pT partons, impeding the detection of the low cross section jet signal at RHIC energies. We developed a new jet reconstruction algorithm that uses a Gaussian filter to locate and reconstruct the jet energy. This algorithm is combined with a fake jet rejection scheme that provides efficient jet reconstruction with acceptable fake rate in a background environment up to the central Au + Au collision at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV. We present results of its application in p + p and Cu + Cu collisions using data from the PHENIX detector, namely p + p cross section, Cu + Cu jet yields, the Cu + Cu nuclear modification factor, and Cu + Cu jet-jet azimuthal correlation.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of DPF-2009, Detroit, MI, July 2009, eConf C09072

Cointegration Between Prices of Pecans and Other Edible Nuts: Forecasting and Implications

Crop Production/Industries, Demand and Price Analysis,

A GTD analysis of ogive pedestal

The metal ogive pedestal is claimed to have low radar cross section and low observability features. This study uses the Geometric Theory of Diffraction (GTD) to analyze the pedestal scattering for three cases: direct backscattered field, backscattered field structure, and target/pedestal multiple scattering. This study can be used to evaluate the various ways that the metal conical ogive pedestal can effect the performance of a high quality radar cross section measurement system

Estimating Property Values by Replication: An Alternative to the Traditional Grid and Regression Methods

This paper proposes and develops a replication method for estimating property values, in which optimal weights of comparable property attributes that best duplicate the subject property are determined. In a setting where the number of comparables is large compared to the number of attributes, replication weakly outperforms traditional general least squares regression by making use of potential correlations in the error structure. A similar result obtains in comparison to the grid method, which may suffer from subjective price adjustment factors. The replication method suggests using a large sample regression analysis to obtain the functional form of the error variance-covariance, and then replicating the subject with a smaller, attribute-close set of comparable properties.

Epidemic spreading induced by diversity of agents' mobility

In this paper, we study into the impact of the preference of an individual for public transport on the spread of infectious disease, through a quantity known as the public mobility. Our theoretical and numerical results based on a constructed model reveal that if the average public mobility of the agents is fixed, an increase in the diversity of the agents' public mobility reduces the epidemic threshold, beyond which an enhancement in the rate of infection is observed. Our findings provide an approach to improve the resistance of a society against infectious disease, while preserving the utilization rate of the public transportation system.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

BERLIN CONSUMER PREFERENCES FOR QUALITY ATTRIBUTES OF FRESH VEGETABLES

Consumer/Household Economics,

Consumer Willingness to Pay for Improved Attributes of Fresh Vegetables: A Comparison Between Atlanta and Berlin

Crop Production/Industries, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,