A deconvolution map-making method for experiments with circular scanning strategies

Aims. To investigate the performance of a deconvolution map-making algorithm for an experiment with a circular scanning strategy, specifically in this case for the analysis of Planck data, and to quantify the effects of making maps using simplified approximations to the true beams. Methods. We present an implementation of a map-making algorithm which allows the combined treatment of temperature and polarisation data, and removal of instrumental effects, such as detector time constants and finite sampling intervals, as well as the deconvolution of arbitrarily complex beams from the maps. This method may be applied to any experiment with a circular scanning-strategy. Results. Low-resolution experiments were used to demonstrate the ability of this method to remove the effects of arbitrary beams from the maps and to demonstrate the effects on the maps of ignoring beam asymmetries. Additionally, results are presented of an analysis of a realistic full-scale simulated data-set for the Planck LFI 30 GHz channel. Conclusions. Our method successfully removes the effects of the beams from the maps, and although it is computationally expensive, the analysis of the Planck LFI data should be feasible with this approach.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, accepte

Exploring the acceptability of two self-sampling devices for human papillomavirus testing in the cervical screening context: a qualitative study of Muslim women in London

Objectives We explored Muslim women's attitudes to self-sampling for human papillomavirus (HPV) in the context of cervical cancer screening and their responses to two self-sampling devices.Setting A Muslim community centre in north-east London.Methods Following a talk given on the subject of cervical cancer and HPV at the community centre, 28 women were recruited to take part in three focus group discussions. The discussion covered cervical screening, self-sampling and HPV testing. Women were also asked for their responses to a swab self-sampling kit and a cervico-vaginal lavage device. Discussions were recorded and transcribed verbatim and the qualitative data were analysed using Framework Analysis.Results Participants were generally positive about cervical screening but acknowledged that some women in their community were reluctant to offend because of embarrassment, language difficulties, fear or because they were unmarried and did not want to communicate implicit messages about being sexually active. Self-sampling met a mixed response - women were concerned about not doing the test correctly, but thought that it might overcome barriers to screening for some women. HPV testing itself was thought to raise potentially difficult issues relating to trust and fidelity within marriages. Although most women said they would prefer to continue to have screening by a health professional, if they were to perform self-sampling, there was overwhelming preference for the swab over the lavage kit.Conclusions There was limited enthusiasm for self-sampling in this group of Muslim women who had mostly attended for cervical screening, but a clear preference for a swab rather than a cervico-vaginal lavage

Complete clinical responses to cancer therapy caused by multiple divergent approaches: a repeating theme lost in translation

Over 50 years of cancer therapy history reveals complete clinical responses (CRs) from remarkably divergent forms of therapies (eg, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, vaccines, autologous cell transfers, cytokines, monoclonal antibodies) for advanced solid malignancies occur with an approximately similar frequency of 5%–10%. This has remained frustratingly almost static. However, CRs usually underpin strong durable 5-year patient survival. How can this apparent paradox be explained? Over some 20 years, realization that (1) chronic inflammation is intricately associated with cancer, and (2) the immune system is delicately balanced between responsiveness and tolerance of cancer, provides a greatly significant insight into ways cancer might be more effectively treated. In this review, divergent aspects from the largely segmented literature and recent conferences are drawn together to provide observations revealing some emerging reasoning, in terms of “final common pathways” of cancer cell damage, immune stimulation, and auto-vaccination events, ultimately leading to cancer cell destruction. Created from this is a unifying overarching concept to explain why multiple approaches to cancer therapy can provide complete responses at almost equivalent rates. This “missing” aspect provides a reasoned explanation for what has, and is being, increasingly reported in the mainstream literature – that inflammatory and immune responses appear intricately associated with, if not causative of, complete responses induced by divergent forms of cancer therapy. Curiously, whether by chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, or other means, therapy-induced cell injury results, leaving inflammation and immune system stimulation as a final common denominator across all of these mechanisms of cancer therapy. This aspect has been somewhat obscured and has been “lost in translation” to date

An Automated Meeting Assistant: A Tangible Mixed Reality Interface for the AMIDA Automatic Content Linking Device

We describe our approach to support ongoing meetings with an automated meeting assistant. The system based on the AMIDA Content Linking Device aims at providing relevant documents used in previous meetings for the ongoing meeting based on automatic speech recognition. Once the content linking device finds documents linked to a discussion about a similar subject in a previous meeting, it assumes they may be relevant for the current discussion as well. We believe that the way these documents are offered to the meeting participants is equally important as the way they are found. We developed a mixed reality, projection based user interface that lets the documents appear on the table tops in front of the meeting participants. They can hand them over to others or bring them onto the shared projection screen easily if they consider them relevant. Yet, irrelevant documents don't draw too much attention from the discussion. In this paper we describe the concept and implementation of this user interface and provide some preliminary results

Embracing virtual outpatient clinics in the era of COVID-19

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has raised the profile and level of interest in the use, acceptability, safety and effectiveness of virtual outpatient consultations and telemedicine. These models of care are not new but a number of challenges have so far hindered widespread take up and endorsement of these ways of working. With the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, remote and virtual working and consultation have become the default. This paper explores our experience of and learning from virtual and remote consultation and questions how this experience can be retained and developed for the future

‘Mind Your Business and Leave My Rolls Alone’: A Case Study of Fat Black Women Runners’ Decolonial Resistance

Data Availability Statement: Data is available: for Mirna Valerio at https://twitter.com/themirnavator (accessed on 14 July 2021) and https://www.instagram.com/themirnavator/ (accessed on 14 July 2021) and for Latoya Shauntay Snell at https://twitter.com/latoyashauntay (accessed on 14 July 2021) and https://www.instagram.com/iamlshauntay/ (accessed on 14 July 2021).Copyright © 2021 by the authors. .The Black female body has been vilified, surveilled, and viewed as ‘obese’ and irresponsible for centuries in Western societies. For just as long, some Black women have resisted their mischaracterizations. Instead they have embraced a ‘fat’ identity. But little research has demonstrated how Black fat women participate in sport. The purpose of this study is to show how Black fat women who run use social media to unapologetically celebrate Blackness and fatness. This research uses a case-study approach to illuminate a broader phenomenon of decolonial resistance through running. In addition to analysis of websites, blogs, and news articles devoted to Black women’s running, we discuss the (social) media content of two specific runners: Mirna Valerio and Latoya Shauntay Snell. We performed a critical discourse analysis on 14 media offerings from the two runners, including websites, Twitter pages, and blogs collected over a five-month period from September 2020–January 2021. The analysis examined how they represent themselves and their communities and how they comment on issues of anti-fat bias, neoliberal capitalism, ableist sexism, and white supremacy, some of the pillars of colonialism. Whereas running is often positioned as a weight-loss-focused and white-dominated colonial project, through their very presence and use of strategic communication to amplify their experiences and build community, these runners show how being a Black fat female athlete is an act of decolonial resistance. This study offers a unique sporting example of how fat women challenge obesity discourses and cultural invisibility and how Black athletes communicate anti-racist, decolonial principles.G.A.F. is supported by Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funding. 201810GSD-422091-288088

Quadratic Lagrangians and Topology in Gauge Theory Gravity

We consider topological contributions to the action integral in a gauge theory formulation of gravity. Two topological invariants are found and are shown to arise from the scalar and pseudoscalar parts of a single integral. Neither of these action integrals contribute to the classical field equations. An identity is found for the invariants that is valid for non-symmetric Riemann tensors, generalizing the usual GR expression for the topological invariants. The link with Yang-Mills instantons in Euclidean gravity is also explored. Ten independent quadratic terms are constructed from the Riemann tensor, and the topological invariants reduce these to eight possible independent terms for a quadratic Lagrangian. The resulting field equations for the parity non-violating terms are presented. Our derivations of these results are considerably simpler that those found in the literature

SANEPIC: A Map-Making Method for Timestream Data From Large Arrays

We describe a map-making method which we have developed for the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) experiment, but which should have general application to data from other submillimeter arrays. Our method uses a Maximum Likelihood based approach, with several approximations, which allows images to be constructed using large amounts of data with fairly modest computer memory and processing requirements. This new approach, Signal And Noise Estimation Procedure Including Correlations (SANEPIC), builds upon several previous methods, but focuses specifically on the regime where there is a large number of detectors sampling the same map of the sky, and explicitly allowing for the the possibility of strong correlations between the detector timestreams. We provide real and simulated examples of how well this method performs compared with more simplistic map-makers based on filtering. We discuss two separate implementations of SANEPIC: a brute-force approach, in which the inverse pixel-pixel covariance matrix is computed; and an iterative approach, which is much more efficient for large maps. SANEPIC has been successfully used to produce maps using data from the 2005 BLAST flight.Comment: 27 Pages, 15 figures; Submitted to the Astrophysical Journal; related results available at http://blastexperiment.info/ [the BLAST Webpage

Fast and precise map-making for massively multi-detector CMB experiments

Future cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarisation experiments aim to measure an unprecedentedly small signal - the primordial gravity wave component of the polarisation field B-mode. To achieve this, they will analyse huge datasets, involving years worth of time-ordered data (TOD) from massively multi-detector focal planes. This creates the need for fast and precise methods to complement the M-L approach in analysis pipelines. In this paper, we investigate fast map-making methods as applied to long duration, massively multi-detector, ground-based experiments, in the context of the search for B-modes. We focus on two alternative map-making approaches: destriping and TOD filtering, comparing their performance on simulated multi-detector polarisation data. We have written an optimised, parallel destriping code, the DEStriping CARTographer DESCART, that is generalised for massive focal planes, including the potential effect of cross-correlated TOD 1/f noise. We also determine the scaling of computing time for destriping as applied to a simulated full-season data-set for a realistic experiment. We find that destriping can out-perform filtering in estimating both the large-scale E and B-mode angular power spectra. In particular, filtering can produce significant spurious B-mode power via EB mixing. Whilst this can be removed, it contributes to the variance of B-mode bandpower estimates at scales near the primordial B-mode peak. For the experimental configuration we simulate, this has an effect on the possible detection significance for primordial B-modes. Destriping is a viable alternative fast method to the full M-L approach that does not cause the problems associated with filtering, and is flexible enough to fit into both M-L and Monte-Carlo pseudo-Cl pipelines.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures. MNRAS accepted. Typos corrected and computing time/memory requirement orders-of-magnitude numbers in section 4 replaced by precise number

Categorizing Fetal Heart Rate Variability With and Without Visual Aids

Objective This study examined the ability of clinicians to correctly categorize images of fetal heart rate (FHR) variability with and without the use of exemplars. Study Design A sample of 33 labor and delivery clinicians inspected static FHR images and categorized them into one of four categories defined by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) based on the amount of variability within absent, minimal, moderate, or marked ranges. Participants took part in three conditions: two in which they used exemplars representing FHR variability near the center or near the boundaries of each range, and a third control condition with no exemplars. The data gathered from clinicians were compared with those from a previous study using novices. Results Clinicians correctly categorized more images when the FHR variability fell near the center rather than the boundaries of each range, F (1,32) = 71.69, p \u3c 0.001, partial η2 = 0.69. They also correctly categorized more images when exemplars were available, F (2,64) = 5.44, p = 0.007, partial η2 = 0.15. Compared with the novices, the clinicians were more accurate and quicker in their category judgments, but this difference was limited to the condition without exemplars. Conclusion The results suggest that categorizing FHR variability is more difficult when the examples fall near the boundaries of each NICHD-defined range. Thus, clinicians could benefit from training with visual aids to improve judgments about FHR variability and potentially enhance safety in labor and delivery