Contrasting behaviors between the rapidly intensifying and slowly intensifying tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic and Eastern Pacific basins

Based on 35-yr (1982-2016) best track and Statistical Hurricane Intensity Prediction Scheme data, this study examined climatology of rapidly intensifying (RI) and slowly intensifying (SI) events as well as their time evolutions of storm-related and environmental parameters for tropical cyclones (TCs) in both North Atlantic (AL) and eastern North Pacific (EP) basins. Major hurricanes were intensified mainly through RI while tropical depression and tropical storms were intensified through SI. The percentage of TCs that underwent RI peaks in the late hurricane season whereas the percentage of TCs that underwent SI peaks early. For the first time in the literature, this study found that RI events have significantly different storm-related and environmental characteristics than SI events for before-, during-, and after-event stages. In both AL and EP basins, RI events always intensify significantly faster during the previous 12 h, are located farther south, and have warmer sea surface and 200-hPa temperatures, greater ocean heat content, larger 200-hPa divergence, weaker vertical wind shear, and weaker 200-hPa westerly flow than SI events for all event-relative stages. In the AL basin, RI events have larger low-level and midlevel relative humidity and larger 850-hPa relative vorticity than SI events for all event-relative stages in the AL and most event-relative stages in the EP. RI events are associated with more convectively unstable atmosphere and are farther away from their maximum potential intensities than SI events for most event-relative stages in the AL and for all event-relative stages in the EP

Interactive Music Recommendation: Context,Content and Collaborative Filtering

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

The identification of attitudes towards ambiguity and risk from asset demand

Individuals behave differently when they know the objective probability of events and when they do not. The smooth ambiguity model accommodates both ambiguity (uncertainty) and risk. For an incomplete, competitive asset market, we develop a revealed preference test for asset demand to be consistent with the maximization of smooth ambiguity preferences; and we show that ambiguity preferences constructed from finite observations converge to underlying ambiguity preferences as observations become dense. Subsequently, we give sufficient conditions for the asset demand generated by smooth ambiguity preferences to identify the ambiguity and risk indices as well as the ambiguity probability measure. We do not require ambiguity beliefs to be observable: in a generalized specification, they may not even be defined. An ambiguity free asset plays an important role for identification

Differential pathogenicity of two different recombinant PVYNTN isolates in Physalis floridana is likely determined by the coat protein gene

A previous study has identified two types of recombinant variants of Potato virus Y strain NTN (PVYNTN) in China and sequenced the complete genome of the variant PVYNTN-HN2. In this study, the complete genome of isolate PVYNTN-HN1 was fully sequenced and analyzed. The most striking difference between the two variants was the location of recombinant joint three (RJ3). In PVYNTN-HN1, like other typical European-PVYNTN isolates such as PVYNTN-Hun, the RJ3 was located at nucleotide (nt) 9183, namely the 3' proximal end of the CP gene (nt. 8571-9371), thus leading to most (the first 613 nucleotides from the 5' proximal end) of the CP gene (801 bp) with a PVYN origin and PVYN-serotype; whereas in contrast, the RJ3 in PVYNTN-HN2 was located at nt 8572, consequently leading to a CP gene of PVYO origin and PVYO-serotype. The varied genome composition among PVYO, PVYN, PVYN:O, PVYNTN-HN1 and PVYNTN-HN2 made them useful for the investigation of possible roles of gene segment(s) in symptom formation on host plants. When Physalis floridana plants were infected with different PVY isolates, two types of symptoms were induced. PVYN and PVYNTN-HN1 induced mild symptoms (mainly mild mottling) whereas PVYO, PVYN:O and PVYNTN-HN2 induced serve symptoms including leaf and stem necrosis, leaf-drop and stunting. These results, together with a previous study using artificial PVY chimeras, demonstrate that the CP gene, especially the 5' proximal segment (nt 8572-9183), and/or CP likely determine the pathogenicity of PVY in P. floridana

Preference under ambiguity : testing and identification

This dissertation focuses on testing and identifying individual ambiguity preference under the framework of "smooth ambiguity preference" developed by Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (2005). Following the seminal contributions of Allais (1953) and Ellsberg (1961), experimental data have consistently demonstrated that individuals do not behave in accordance with predictions of the expected utility model when they face uncertainty. As one important class of ambiguity utility, the smooth ambiguity model distinguishes ambiguity aversion from risk aversion, which makes the comparative statics possible. However, currently there is little work on testing and recovering such preferences based on observable choices. The dissertation contains four parts. Chapter 2 uses two approaches to derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for observed individual portfolio choice to be compatible with the smooth ambiguity preference. The first approach is the revealed preference method, and is based on finite observations. The second approach is demand function testing, and is based on infinite observations. Chapter 3 establishes the conditions under which the smooth ambiguity preference can be uniquely identified from individual demand functions. In Chapter 4, I extend the argument of Varian (1988) to multiple observations and incomplete market case to non-parametrically test different shapes of risk aversion, and then to test hypotheses on shapes of ambiguity aversion. In Chapter 5, to use household survey data to identify household risk and ambiguity aversion, I build a simple parametric model to identify household risk and ambiguity aversion from their saving and portfolio choice. The data from the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth 2008 and 2010 support the constant relative risk aversion and constant relative ambiguity aversion hypothesis, and give evidence of the magnitude of household risk and ambiguity aversion

3-Eth­oxy-4-hydroxy­benzaldehyde

The title compound (ethyl vanillin), C9H10O3, an important food additive and flavouring agent approved by FAO/WHO, has a vanilla odor four times that of vanillin and shows anti­­mutagenic activity. There are two mol­ecules in the asymmetric unit, each having a planar conformation and an intramolecular O—H⋯O bond. Mol­ecules are connected side-by-side, building infinite ribbons along c via inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds between the carbonyl and hydroxyl groups. The ribbons are then packed into layers perpendicular to the a axis

Bearing Capacities of the Structure and Joint of JUNO Central Detector

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) central detector will be placed underground to detect neutrinos. In order to achieve the feasible scheme for JUNO, the structural scheme of an acrylic ball supported by a double-layer stainless steel latticed shell is designed and modeled using ABAQUS software. The bearing capacity of the structure under working condition is investigated and influences of external factors are analyzed. For the purpose of studying the load-bearing behavior of the joint of acrylic and stainless steel in this scheme, tests of three joint specimens are conducted and the results are compared with finite element (FE) predictions. It is concluded that the structure is safe and reliable under the effects of external factors. The bearing capacity of the joint is at least 2 times as large as the design load and the stress on the acrylic is limited within 10MPa

Z-ICL: Zero-Shot In-Context Learning with Pseudo-Demonstrations

Although large language models can be prompted for both zero- and few-shot learning, performance drops significantly when no demonstrations are available. In this paper, we introduce Z-ICL, a new zero-shot method that closes the gap by constructing pseudo-demonstrations for a given test input using a raw text corpus. Concretely, pseudo-demonstrations are constructed by (1) finding the nearest neighbors to the test input from the corpus and pairing them with random task labels, and (2) applying a set of techniques to reduce the amount of direct copying the model does from the resulting demonstrations. Evaluation on nine classification datasets shows that Z-ICL outperforms previous zero-shot methods by a significant margin, and is on par with in-context learning with labeled training data in the few-shot setting. Overall, Z-ICL provides a significantly higher estimate of the zero-shot performance levels of a model, and supports future efforts to develop better pseudo-demonstrations that further improve zero-shot results.Comment: 11 pages; 9 figure