The Corn and Climate Report

Summarizes research on climate change and its impact on Midwestern agriculture, how to mitigate its effects, and other issues discussed among weather and climate service providers, agribusiness providers, producers, and state advisors at a 2008 workshop

Spectral properties of the hierarchical product of graphs

The hierarchical product of two graphs represents a natural way to build a larger graph out of two smaller graphs with less regular and therefore more heterogeneous structure than the Cartesian product. Here we study the eigenvalue spectrum of the adjacency matrix of the hierarchical product of two graphs. Introducing a coupling parameter describing the relative contribution of each of the two smaller graphs, we perform an asymptotic analysis for the full spectrum of eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix of the hierarchical product. Specifically, we derive the exact limit points for each eigenvalue in the limits of small and large coupling, as well as the leading-order relaxation to these values in terms of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the two smaller graphs. Given its central roll in the structural and dynamical properties of networks, we study in detail the Perron-Frobenius, or largest, eigenvalue. Finally, as an example application we use our theory to predict the epidemic threshold of the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model on a hierarchical product of two graphs

Identifying Codes and Domination in the Product of Graphs

An identifying code in a graph is a dominating set that also has the property that the closed neighborhood of each vertex in the graph has a distinct intersection with the set. The minimum cardinality of an identifying code in a graph $G$ is denoted \gid(G). We consider identifying codes of the direct product $K_n \times K_m$. In particular, we answer a question of Klav\v{z}ar and show the exact value of \gid(K_n \times K_m). It was recently shown by Gravier, Moncel and Semri that for the Cartesian product of two same-sized cliques \gid(K_n \Box K_n) = \lfloor{\frac{3n}{2}\rfloor}. Letting $m \ge n \ge 2$ be any integers, we show that \IDCODE(K_n \cartprod K_m) = \max\{2m-n, m + \lfloor n/2 \rfloor\}. Furthermore, we improve upon the bounds for \IDCODE(G \cartprod K_m) and explore the specific case when $G$ is the Cartesian product of multiple cliques. Given two disjoint copies of a graph $G$, denoted $G^1$ and $G^2$, and a permutation $\pi$ of $V(G)$, the permutation graph $\pi G$ is constructed by joining $u \in V(G^1)$ to $\pi(u) \in V(G^2)$ for all $u \in V(G^1)$. The graph $G$ is said to be a universal fixer if the domination number of $\pi G$ is equal to the domination number of $G$ for all $\pi$ of $V(G)$. In 1999 it was conjectured that the only universal fixers are the edgeless graphs. We prove the conjecture