Clicks and Cliques. Exploring the Soul of the Community

In the paper we analyze 26 communities across the United States with the objective to understand what attaches people to their community and how this attachment differs among communities. How different are attached people from unattached? What attaches people to their community? How different are the communities? What are key drivers behind emotional attachment? To address these questions, graphical, supervised and unsupervised learning tools were used and information from the Census Bureau and the Knight Foundation were combined. Using the same pre-processed variables as Knight (2010) most likely will drive the results towards the same conclusions than the Knight foundation, so this paper does not use those variables

New records and geographic distribution map of Bothropoides diporus Cope, 1862 (Reptilia: Viperidae)

We provide two new records of Bothropoides diporus for Neuquén province, northern Patagonia, Argentina. Both records are the second and third for this species in this province. One of these records, from the northern slope of Auca Mahuida Mountain, extends approximately 120 km to the north the present known geographic distribution of this species in Neuquén province.Fil: Minoli, Ignacio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Nacional Patagónico; ArgentinaFil: Janis Alvarez, Diego. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; BrasilFil: Avila, Luciano Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Nacional Patagónico; Argentin

Top-antitop resonance searches beyond 1 TeV

We perform a general parton level analysis for the search of heavy resonant states in the production of top-antitop pairs at the LHC with an integrated luminosity of 30 fb^-1. We assume the existence of resonances that only couple to quarks and propose kinematic cuts in order to increase the amount of events produced through quark-annihilation. We study the interplay between different variables and their impact on the purity of the selected sample. We make focus on the longitudinal ($\beta$) and transverse ($p_T$) momentum of the top-antitop pair, and the scattering angle ($\theta$) in the center of mass reference frame. We observe that $\beta$ is replaced by $\theta$ as a suitable discriminating variable of quark-annihilation processes for invariant masses above 1 TeV. Finally, we illustrate the analysis with a gluon resonance of 1.5 TeV and show the improvement in the sensitivity of the signal when cuts on $\theta$ are imposed.Comment: 19 pages and 6 figure

Bayesian analysis of high-dimensional count data

This thesis describes my research work in past years in the Statistic Department of Iowa State University. There are several key statistical features common to the whole thesis. In the first place, all the statistical methods are developed taking a Bayesian perspective to conduct the statistical inference. A second common feature of the two main parts is that both correspond to high-dimensional problems. In the first case, because a large amount of information for a few individuals is available, and in the second part due to model space is really large which brings computational intractability issues. Finally, the response variable in all data used here is a positive count, in the first part, it is associated with the gene expression while in the second part it represents a number of automobile crashes

See-and-avoid quadcopter using fuzzy control optimized by cross-entropy

In this work we present an optimized fuzzy visual servoing system for obstacle avoidance using an unmanned aerial vehicle. The cross-entropy theory is used to optimise the gains of our controllers. The optimization process was made using the ROS-Gazebo 3D simulation with purposeful extensions developed for our experiments. Visual servoing is achieved through an image processing front-end that uses the Camshift algorithm to detect and track objects in the scene. Experimental flight trials using a small quadrotor were performed to validate the parameters estimated from simulation. The integration of cross- entropy methods is a straightforward way to estimate optimal gains achieving excellent results when tested in real flights