The Common Cold, Influenza and Immunity in Post-Pandemic Times: Lay representations of Self and Other among older people in Sweden

The need for new knowledge about lay representations of contagions, immunity, vaccination, common colds, and influenza has become clear after the A(H1N1) pandemic and the resulting challenges regarding pandemic preparedness. This article analyses written responses from 67 persons, mostly women, to a semi-structured questionnaire about colds and the flu. Three themes are discussed: “Common cold and flus as ritualized experiences”, “Me, my body, and my immune defense”, and “Regulations of space, place, and behaviors.” Overall, the narratives were about trust, value, and respect in the body, in lived experiences, and in the capacity to ‘help’ and ‘nurture’ the immune system, but also about the feeling of powerlessness when perceiving inadequacies in other people’s parallel interpretations and actions. Pandemic preparedness policies need to acknowledge the multiple ‘immunity talk’ in the responses to create productive, ongoing relations with the ‘Other’, that rely on people’s trust and resilience, rather than on people´s fear

Finite Mirror Effects in Advanced Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors

Thermal noise is expected to be the dominant source of noise in the most sensitive frequency band of second generation ground based gravitational wave detectors. Reshaping the beam to a flatter wider profile which probes more of the mirror surface reduces this noise. The "Mesa" beam shape has been proposed for this purpose and was subsequently generalized to a family of hyperboloidal beams with two parameters: twist angle alpha and beam width D. Varying alpha allows a continuous transition from the nearly-flat to the nearly-concentric Mesa beam configurations. We analytically prove that in the limit of infinite D hyperboloidal beams become Gaussians. The Advanced LIGO diffraction loss design constraint is 1 ppm per bounce. In the past the diffraction loss has often been calculated using the clipping approximation that, in general, underestimates the diffraction loss. We develop a code using pseudo-spectral methods to compute the diffraction loss directly from the propagator. We find that the diffraction loss is not a strictly monotonic function of beam width, but has local minima that occur due to finite mirror effects and leads to natural choices of D. For the Mesa beam a local minimum occurs at D = 10.67 cm and leads to a diffraction loss of 1.4 ppm. We find that if one requires a diffraction loss of strictly 1 ppm, the alpha = 0.91 pi hyperboloidal beam is optimal, leading to the coating thermal noise being lower by about 10% than for a Mesa beam while other types of thermal noise decrease as well. We then develop an iterative process that reconstructs the mirror to specifically account for finite mirror effects. This allows us to increase the D parameter and lower the coating noise by about 30% compared to the original Mesa configuration.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables. Referee input included and typos fixed. Accepted by Phys. Rev.

Self-Renormalization of the Classical Quasilocal Energy

Pointlike objects cause many of the divergences that afflict physical theories. For instance, the gravitational binding energy of a point particle in Newtonian mechanics is infinite. In general relativity, the analog of a point particle is a black hole and the notion of binding energy must be replaced by quasilocal energy. The quasilocal energy (QLE) derived by York, and elaborated by Brown and York, is finite outside the horizon but it was not considered how to evaluate it inside the horizon. We present a prescription for finding the QLE inside a horizon, and show that it is finite at the singularity for a variety of types of black hole. The energy is typically concentrated just inside the horizon, not at the central singularity.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

The Discrete Frenet Frame, Inflection Point Solitons And Curve Visualization with Applications to Folded Proteins

We develop a transfer matrix formalism to visualize the framing of discrete piecewise linear curves in three dimensional space. Our approach is based on the concept of an intrinsically discrete curve, which enables us to more effectively describe curves that in the limit where the length of line segments vanishes approach fractal structures in lieu of continuous curves. We verify that in the case of differentiable curves the continuum limit of our discrete equation does reproduce the generalized Frenet equation. As an application we consider folded proteins, their Hausdorff dimension is known to be fractal. We explain how to employ the orientation of $C_\beta$ carbons of amino acids along a protein backbone to introduce a preferred framing along the backbone. By analyzing the experimentally resolved fold geometries in the Protein Data Bank we observe that this $C_\beta$ framing relates intimately to the discrete Frenet framing. We also explain how inflection points can be located in the loops, and clarify their distinctive r\^ole in determining the loop structure of foldel proteins.Comment: 14 pages 12 figure

Fundamental bounds on transmission through periodically perforated metal screens with experimental validation

This paper presents a study of transmission through arrays of periodic sub-wavelength apertures. Fundamental limitations for this phenomenon are formulated as a sum rule, relating the transmission coefficient over a bandwidth to the static polarizability. The sum rule is rigorously derived for arbitrary periodic apertures in thin screens. By this sum rule we establish a physical bound on the transmission bandwidth which is verified numerically for a number of aperture array designs. We utilize the sum rule to design and optimize sub-wavelength frequency selective surfaces with a bandwidth close to the physically attainable. Finally, we verify the sum rule and simulations by measurements of an array of horseshoe-shaped slots milled in aluminum foil.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures. Updated Introduction and Conclusion

Analysis on Aging in the Generalized Random Energy Model

A new dynamics more natural than that proposed by Bouchaud and Dean is introduced to the Generalized Random Energy Model, and the master equation for the dynamics is solved exactly to calculate the time correlation function. Although our results are very similar to those obtained by Bouchaud and Dean qualitatively, the exponents for power law relaxation are different. The Zero-Field-Cooled magnetization is also calculated with a relation between the correlation function and the response function which holds even if the relaxation is non-equilibrium. The validity of these analytic results are confirmed by numerical simulations.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, submitted to J. Phys. Sci. Jp

Statistical and systematic errors for gravitational-wave inspiral signals: A principal component analysis

Identifying the source parameters from a gravitational-wave measurement alone is limited by our ability to discriminate signals from different sources and the accuracy of the waveform family employed in the search. Here we address both issues in the framework of an adapted coordinate system that allows for linear Fisher-matrix type calculations of waveform differences that are both accurate and computationally very efficient. We investigate statistical errors by using principal component analysis of the post-Newtonian (PN) expansion coefficients, which is well conditioned despite the Fisher matrix becoming ill conditioned for larger numbers of parameters. We identify which combinations of physical parameters are most effectively measured by gravitational-wave detectors for systems of neutron stars and black holes with aligned spin. We confirm the expectation that the dominant parameter of the inspiral waveform is the chirp mass. The next dominant parameter depends on a combination of the spin and the symmetric mass ratio. In addition, we can study the systematic effect of various spin contributions to the PN phasing within the same parametrization, showing that the inclusion of spin-orbit corrections up to next-to-leading order, but not necessarily of spin-spin contributions, is crucial for an accurate inspiral waveform model. This understanding of the waveform structure throughout the parameter space is important to set up an efficient search strategy and correctly interpret future gravitational-wave observations.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, pdfLaTeX, improved presentation, matches published versio

Atlas of interpreted photography of southern Africa from TIROS satellites I to VIII

Surface features of southern Africa based on interpreted photographs taken by TIROS SATELLITE