THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURAL LABOR

Labor and Human Capital,

Low-dimensional chaos in populations of strongly-coupled noisy maps

We characterize the macroscopic attractor of infinite populations of noisy maps subjected to global and strong coupling by using an expansion in order parameters. We show that for any noise amplitude there exists a large region of strong coupling where the macroscopic dynamics exhibits low-dimensional chaos embedded in a hierarchically-organized, folded, infinite-dimensional set. Both this structure and the dynamics occuring on it are well-captured by our expansion. In particular, even low-degree approximations allow to calculate efficiently the first macroscopic Lyapunov exponents of the full system.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures. Progress of Theoretical Physics, to appea

Noise-induced macroscopic bifurcations in globally-coupled chaotic units

Large populations of globally-coupled identical maps subjected to independent additive noise are shown to undergo qualitative changes as the features of the stochastic process are varied. We show that for strong coupling, the collective dynamics can be described in terms of a few effective macroscopic degrees of freedom, whose deterministic equations of motion are systematically derived through an order parameter expansion.Comment: Phys. Rev. Lett., accepte

Protrepticus

A new translation and edition of Aristotle's Protrepticus (with critical comments on the fragments) Welcome The Protrepticus was an early work of Aristotle, written while he was still a member of Plato's Academy, but it soon became one of the most famous works in the whole history of philosophy. Unfortunately it was not directly copied in the middle ages and so did not survive in its own manuscript tradition. But substantial fragments of it have been preserved in several works by Iamblichus of Chalcis, a third century A.D. neo-Pythagorean philosopher and educator. On the basis of a close study of Iamblichus' extensive use and excerption of Aristotle's Protrepticus, it is possible to reconstruct the backbone of the lost work, and then to flesh it out with the other surviving reports about the work from antiquity (for example in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other ancient commentators on Aristotle). It is also possible to identify several papyrus fragments of the work, and many references and literary allusions in later authors, especially Cicero, whose own lost dialogue Hortensius was a defense of philosophy modeleld on Aristotle's

The Kuramoto model with distributed shear

We uncover a solvable generalization of the Kuramoto model in which shears (or nonisochronicities) and natural frequencies are distributed and statistically dependent. We show that the strength and sign of this dependence greatly alter synchronization and yield qualitatively different phase diagrams. The Ott-Antonsen ansatz allows us to obtain analytical results for a specific family of joint distributions. We also derive, using linear stability analysis, general formulae for the stability border of incoherence.Comment: 6 page

Solving QCD evolution equations in rapidity space with Markovian Monte Carlo

This work covers methodology of solving QCD evolution equation of the parton distribution using Markovian Monte Carlo (MMC) algorithms in a class of models ranging from DGLAP to CCFM. One of the purposes of the above MMCs is to test the other more sophisticated Monte Carlo programs, the so-called Constrained Monte Carlo (CMC) programs, which will be used as a building block in the parton shower MC. This is why the mapping of the evolution variables (eikonal variable and evolution time) into four-momenta is also defined and tested. The evolution time is identified with the rapidity variable of the emitted parton. The presented MMCs are tested independently, with ~0.1% precision, against the non-MC program APCheb especially devised for this purpose.Comment: version compatible with with the erratum in Acta Physica Polonic

Analysis of the Spectral Energy Distributions of Fermi bright blazars

Blazars are a small fraction of all extragalactic sources but, unlike other objects, they are strong emitters across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. In this study we have conducted a detailed investigation of the broad-band spectral properties of the gamma-ray selected blazars of the Fermi-LAT Bright AGN Sample (LBAS). By combining the accurately estimated Fermi gamma-ray spectra with Swift, radio, NIR-Optical and hard-X/gamma-ray data, collected within three months of the LBAS data taking period, we were able to assemble high-quality and quasi-simultaneous Spectral Energy Distributions (SED) for 48 LBAS blazars.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, "2009 Fermi Symposium", "eConf Proceedings C091122

Platelet-rich gel for the adjuvant treatment of wound healing of transposed flap for arteriovenous fistula in systemic scleroderma

LETTER TO EDITO

The LOFT (Large Observatory for X-ray Timing) background simulations

The Large Observatory For X-ray Timing (LOFT) is an innovative medium-class mission selected for an assessment phase in the framework of the ESA M3 Cosmic Vision call. LOFT is intended to answer fundamental questions about the behaviour of matter in the very strong gravitational and magnetic fields around compact objects. With an effective area of ~10 m^2 LOFT will be able to measure very fast variability in the X-ray fluxes and spectra. A good knowledge of the in-orbit background environment is essential to assess the scientific performance of the mission and to optimize the instrument design. The two main contributions to the background are cosmic diffuse X-rays and high energy cosmic rays; also, albedo emission from the Earth is significant. These contributions to the background for both the Large Area Detector and the Wide Field Monitor are discussed, on the basis of extensive Geant-4 simulations of a simplified instrumental mass model.Comment: Proceedings of SPIE, Vol. 8443, Paper No. 8443-209, 201