The Origin of Dust in the Early Universe: Probing the Star Formation History of Galaxies by their Dust Content

Two distinct scenarios for the origin of the ~ 4 \times 10^8 M\odot of dust observed in the high-redshift (z = 6.4) quasar J1148+5251 have been proposed. The first assumes that this galaxy is much younger than the age of the universe at that epoch so that only supernovae (SNe) could have produced this dust. The second scenario assumes a significantly older galactic age, so that the dust could have formed in lower-mass asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. Presenting new integral solutions for the chemical evolution of metals and dust in galaxies, we offer a critical evaluation of these two scenarios, and observational consequences that can discriminate between the two. We show that AGB stars can produce the inferred mass of dust in this object, however, the final mass of surviving dust depends on the galaxy's star formation history (SFH). In general supernovae cannot produce the observed amount of dust unless the average SN event creates over ~ 1 M\odot of dust in its ejecta. However, special SFHs can be constructed in which SNe can produce the inferred dust mass with a reasonable average dust yield of ~ 0.15 M\odot. The two scenarios propose different origins for the galaxy's spectral energy distribution, different star formation efficiencies and stellar masses, and consequently different comoving number densities of J1148+5251-type hyperluminous infrared (IR) objects. The detection of diagnostic mid-IR fine structure lines, and more complete surveys determining the comoving number density of these objects can discriminate between the two scenarios.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. 32 pages including 6 figure

CORRELATION BETWEEN INSULIN RESISTANCE AND SEVERITY OF CORONARY ARTERY DISEASE IN NON-DIABETES

Objective: There is an increased risk of CAD in both diabetes and non-diabetes. Insulin resistance has been associated with development of CAD in this both populations. However, there are not many studies on correlation between insulin resistance and severity of CAD in non-diabetes. The present study aimed to establish a correlation between insulin resistance and severity of CAD in non-diabetic individuals.Methods: A cross-sectional study of 79 consecutive Non-diabetic patients undergoing coronary angiogram for evaluation of clinically suspected coronary artery disease at a tertiary care hospital in Mangalore, Karnataka were recruited. Clinical history, anthropometric and biochemical parameters were analyzed. Insulin resistance was determined by Homeostasis model assessment (HOMA-IR). The severity of CAD was assessed by modified Gensini score. Pearson correlation was done to find out the relation between HOMA-IR and Gensini core.Results: The correlation between log of HOMA-IR and severity of coronary artery disease as assessed by Gensini score (r = -0.053 and p= 0.64) was not significant in non-diabetic patients. The correlations between severity of coronary artery disease and other known risk factors of coronary artery disease were also was not significant.Conclusion: HOMA-IR is negatively associated with severity of CAD in non-diabetes

Evaluation of telerobotic systems using an instrumented task board

An instrumented task board was developed at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). An overview of the task board design, and current development status is presented. The task board was originally developed to evaluate operator performance using the Protoflight Manipulator Arm (PFMA) at MSFC. The task board evaluates tasks for Orbital Replacement Unit (ORU), fluid connect and transfers, electrical connect/disconnect, bolt running, and other basic tasks. The instrumented task board measures the 3-D forces and torques placed on the board, determines the robot arm's 3-D position relative to the task board using IR optics, and provides the information in real-time. The PFMA joint input signals can also be measured from a breakout box to evaluate the sensitivity or response of the arm operation to control commands. The data processing system provides the capability for post processing of time-history graphics and plots of the PFMA positions, the operator's actions, and the PFMA servo reactions in addition to real-time force/torque data presentation. The instrumented task board's most promising use is developing benchmarks for NASA centers for comparison and evaluation of telerobotic performance

Literatūrinio kanono tyrimai: metodologinės gairės

The article presents for the Lithuanian audience an interdisciplinary approach of literary canon studies that integrates diverse methods of various disciplines (sociology of literature and culture, literary and cultural history, teaching of literature, text reception and aesthetic response history, memory and media research and bibliography studies). The most intense development of literary canon studies can be observed in Western Europe and the United States in the last decade of the 20th century. This was due to the fact that the scholars engaged in the field of postcolonialism, gender studies and neo-Marxism gave it a strong impulse by initiating a debate about insufficient representation of some social groups (women, racial or ethnic minorities and people from lower social strata) in high school curricula in the USA. The debate was expanded into theoretical polemics of whether the canon is formed by means of objective aesthetic criteria or, on the contrary, canon depends on the social contract. Methodologically, investigations of literary canon that are genetically related to the tradition of sociology of culture seem to be the most productive, while this perspective provides an apparatus for a detailed investigation of relations between specific interests of literary field and wider national, social or group interests.The framework of this article is based on the studies of John Guillory, Renate von Heydebrand and Simone Winko. Their essential starting point is the understanding of the canon as a sociocultural process in which the political elite selects a corpus of significant texts in accordance with tradition and formulates practices that ensure the transmission of those texts for future generations. Therefore, canon formation turns to be a strategy based on complex relations of evaluation, cognition and actions that aims to conserve this selected knowledge and transmit it to future generations. The structure of the canon is directly related to the notion of literature and literariness; a society (or its group) defines its canon by considering what they recognize as valuable.Unlike religious canons, which can only be constructed by theologians, there are a lot of canonizing institutions (schools, universities, literary criticism, theatre repertoire, book market, libraries, etc.) involved in the formation of literary canons. They do not create any well-balanced system of the canon but rather conduct diverse practices of canonization. We can distinguish a micro and macro level in the process of canon formation. The micro level contains a lot of separate actions of canonization that propel the canonization process which enables the canon formation at macro level. Origin, stabilization and transformation of literary canon are multidimensional processes, thus it is essential not to lose sight of the interaction of separate dimensions.Straipsnyje lietuvių auditorijai pristatomos svarbiausių šiuolaikinių anglakalbių ir vokiečiakalbių literatūrinio kanono tyrimų teorinės prielaidos, terminija ir analizės metodai. Nors įvade glaustai atpasakojamos kanono tyrimų ištakos, straipsnyje iš principo atsiribojama nuo preskriptyvinių kanono debatų problemikos (t. y. nėra sprendžiamas klausimas, koks turėtų būti kanonas) ir susitelkiama į teorinius kanono tyrimų aspektus. Iš gausios teorinės ir empirinės medžiagos stengtasi atrankos ir sisteminimo būdu rekonstruoti bendruosius šiuolaikinių kanono tyrimų metodologinius principus. Atsirenkant straipsnyje pristatomas literatūrinio kanono teoretikų įžvalgas, paisyta jų mokslinio naujumo ir konceptualumo, taip pat perimamumo ir cituojamumo vėlesniuose tyrimuose.Pirmame dėstomosios dalies skyriuje aptariama literatūrinio kanono specifika, palyginti su bibliniu kanonu, taip pat literatūrinių kanonų tipologija, vidinė struktūra, kanonų formavimo(si) principai ir kanonizacinės institucijos. Antrame skyriuje nagrinėjamos kultūrinės kanono funkcijos ir socializacija

Mandating International Experience: A Policy Analysis of The State University of New York (SUNY) At Geneseo Requirement for all International Relations Degree Seeking Students to Study Abroad

The prioritization of international education is gaining momentum among higher education institutions. One specific testament to this fact is the steady growth in study abroad participation. As the overall percentage of students studying abroad for credit during their undergraduate career rises, policies are being created in a variety of contexts to promote international education experiences (Open Doors). Amidst these fledgling policies, a 22-year-old major-specific study abroad requirement has thrived and continues to evolve in today’s global state. This capstone is an analysis of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo’s International Relations (IR) policy requiring all undergraduate degree seeking students to participate in a for-credit international experience in order to graduate. The policy outlines a number of options for the required international experience, including an internship and a special project, yet places the greatest emphasis on study abroad for academic credit. Using supplemental data and resources, both the history and the future of this unique policy will be examined, taking into consideration SUNY Geneseo’s Internationalization campaign. There will also be a literature review presented, which will look at various policies mandating study abroad and the way different campuses work toward increasing participation and maintaining best practices. In addition, the perspectives of key stakeholders will be presented using interview responses and day-to-day observations. With the completion of the analysis, recommendations and consistent themes will be presented on SUNY Geneseo’s IR policy, assessing the impact it has had to date as well as potential options to promote sustainability in the years ahead. Recommendations include documenting formal goals and objectives, standardizing pre-departure and re-entry processes, and conducting comprehensive assessment and evaluation

Article Segmentation in Digitised Newspapers

Digitisation projects preserve and make available vast quantities of historical text. Among these, newspapers are an invaluable resource for the study of human culture and history. Article segmentation identifies each region in a digitised newspaper page that contains an article. Digital humanities, information retrieval (IR), and natural language processing (NLP) applications over digitised archives improve access to text and allow automatic information extraction. The lack of article segmentation impedes these applications. We contribute a thorough review of the existing approaches to article segmentation. Our analysis reveals divergent interpretations of the task, and inconsistent and often ambiguously defined evaluation metrics, making comparisons between systems challenging. We solve these issues by contributing a detailed task definition that examines the nuances and intricacies of article segmentation that are not immediately apparent. We provide practical guidelines on handling borderline cases and devise a new evaluation framework that allows insightful comparison of existing and future approaches. Our review also reveals that the lack of large datasets hinders meaningful evaluation and limits machine learning approaches. We solve these problems by contributing a distant supervision method for generating large datasets for article segmentation. We manually annotate a portion of our dataset and show that our method produces article segmentations over characters nearly as well as costly human annotators. We reimplement the seminal textual approach to article segmentation (Aiello and Pegoretti, 2006) and show that it does not generalise well when evaluated on a large dataset. We contribute a framework for textual article segmentation that divides the task into two distinct phases: block representation and clustering. We propose several techniques for block representation and contribute a novel highly-compressed semantic representation called similarity embeddings. We evaluate and compare different clustering techniques, and innovatively apply label propagation (Zhu and Ghahramani, 2002) to spread headline labels to similar blocks. Our similarity embeddings and label propagation approach substantially outperforms Aiello and Pegoretti but still falls short of human performance. Exploring visual approaches to article segmentation, we reimplement and analyse the state-of-the-art Bansal et al. (2014) approach. We contribute an innovative 2D Markov model approach that captures reading order dependencies and reduces the structured labelling problem to a Markov chain that we decode with Viterbi (1967). Our approach substantially outperforms Bansal et al., achieves accuracy as good as human annotators, and establishes a new state of the art in article segmentation. Our task definition, evaluation framework, and distant supervision dataset will encourage progress in the task of article segmentation. Our state-of-the-art textual and visual approaches will allow sophisticated IR and NLP applications over digitised newspaper archives, supporting research in the digital humanities

Meeting of the MINDS: an information retrieval research agenda

Since its inception in the late 1950s, the field of Information Retrieval (IR) has developed tools that help people find, organize, and analyze information. The key early influences on the field are well-known. Among them are H. P. Luhn's pioneering work, the development of the vector space retrieval model by Salton and his students, Cleverdon's development of the Cranfield experimental methodology, Spärck Jones' development of idf, and a series of probabilistic retrieval models by Robertson and Croft. Until the development of the WorldWideWeb (Web), IR was of greatest interest to professional information analysts such as librarians, intelligence analysts, the legal community, and the pharmaceutical industry

Overview of the personalized and collaborative information retrieval (PIR) track at FIRE-2011

The Personalized and collaborative Information Retrieval (PIR) track at FIRE 2011 was organized with an aim to extend standard information retrieval (IR) ad-hoc test collection design to facilitate research on personalized and collaborative IR by collecting additional meta-information during the topic (query) development process. A controlled query generation process through task-based activities with activity logging was used for each topic developer to construct the final list of topics. The standard ad-hoc collection is thus accompanied by a new set of thematically related topics and the associated log information. We believe this can better simulate a real-world search scenario and encourage mining user information from the logs to improve IR effectiveness. A set of 25 TREC formatted topics and the associated metadata of activity logs were released for the participants to use. In this paper we illustrate the data construction phase in detail and also outline two simple ways of using the additional information from the logs to improve retrieval effectiveness

Towards evaluation of personalized and collaborative information retrieval

We propose to extend standard information retrieval (IR) ad-hoc test collection design to facilitate research on personalized and collaborative IR by gathering additional meta-information during the topic (query) development process. We propose a controlled query generation process with activity logging for each topic developer. The standard ad-hoc collection will thus be accompanied by a new set of thematically related topics and the associated log information, and has the potential to simulate a real-world search scenario to encourage retrieval systems to mine user information from the logs to improve IR effectiveness. The proposed methodology described in this paper will be applied in a pilot task which is scheduled to run in the FIRE 2011 evaluation campaign. The task aims at investigating the research question of whether personalized and collaborative IR retrieval experiments and evaluation can be pursued by enriching a standard ad-hoc collection with such meta-information