Quantum Metallicity on the High-Field Side of the Superconductor-Insulator Transition

We investigate ultrathin superconducting TiN films, which are very close to the localization threshold. Perpendicular magnetic field drives the films from the superconducting to an insulating state, with very high resistance. Further increase of the magnetic field leads to an exponential decay of the resistance towards a finite value. In the limit of low temperatures, the saturation value can be very accurately extrapolated to the universal quantum resistance h/e^2. Our analysis suggests that at high magnetic fields a new ground state, distinct from the normal metallic state occurring above the superconducting transition temperature, is formed. A comparison with other studies on different materials indicates that the quantum metallic phase following the magnetic-field-induced insulating phase is a generic property of systems close to the disorder-driven superconductor-insulator transition.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, published versio

Improved Vote Aggregation Techniques for the Geo-Wiki Cropland Capture Crowdsourcing Game

Crowdsourcing is a new approach for solving data processing problems for which conventional methods appear to be inaccurate, expensive, or time-consuming. Nowadays, the development of new crowdsourcing techniques is mostly motivated by so called Big Data problems, including problems of assessment and clustering for large datasets obtained in aerospace imaging, remote sensing, and even in social network analysis. By involving volunteers from all over the world, the Geo-Wiki project tackles problems of environmental monitoring with applications to flood resilience, biomass data analysis and classification of land cover. For example, the Cropland Capture Game, which is a gamified version of Geo-Wiki, was developed to aid in the mapping of cultivated land, and was used to gather 4.5 million image classifications from the Earth’s surface. More recently, the Picture Pile game, which is a more generalized version of Cropland Capture, aims to identify tree loss over time from pairs of very high resolution satellite images. Despite recent progress in image analysis, the solution to these problems is hard to automate since human experts still outperform the majority of machine learning algorithms and artificial systems in this field on certain image recognition tasks. The replacement of rare and expensive experts by a team of distributed volunteers seems to be promising, but this approach leads to challenging questions such as: how can individual opinions be aggregated optimally, how can confidence bounds be obtained, and how can the unreliability of volunteers be dealt with? In this paper, on the basis of several known machine learning techniques, we propose a technical approach to improve the overall performance of the majority voting decision rule used in the Cropland Capture Game. The proposed approach increases the estimated consistency with expert opinion from 77% to 86%

Potential Impact of Atmospheric Releases at Russian Far East Nuclear Submarine Complexes

An ''Assessment of the Impact of Russian Nuclear Fleet Operations on Far Eastern Coastal Regions'' is being performed as part of the Radiation Safety of the Biosphere Project (RAD) of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) of Laxenburg, Austria. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive unclassified analysis of the potential impact of accidents at the Russian Far East nuclear submarine sites near Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk. We have defined the situation there based upon available information and studies commissioned by RAD in collaboration with Russian research institutes including Russian Research Center-''Kurchatov Institute'', Institute of Northern Environmental Problems and Lazurit Central Design Bureau. Further, in our original work, some in collaboration with the staff of the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) and members of the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, we have calculated the nuclide trajectories from these sites in the atmospheric boundary layer, less than 1.5 kilometers high, and determined their probability of crossing any of the nearby countries as well as Asiatic Russia. We have further determined the concentrations in each of these crossings as well as the total, dry and wet depositions of nuclides on these areas. Finally, we have calculated the doses to the Japanese Island population from typical winter airflow patterns (those most likely to cross the Islands in the minimum times), strong north winds, weak north winds and cyclonic winds for conditions similar to the Chazhma Bay criticality accident (fresh fuel) and for a criticality accident for the same type of reactor with fuel being withdrawn (spent fuel). The maximum individual committed dosages were less than 2 x 10-7 and 2 x 10-3 mSv, respectively. The long-term external doses by radionuclides deposited on the ground and the internal doses by consumption of foods were not evaluated as it is believed that such doses can be avoided by social controls. In other calculations taking these longer term doses into account and determining the sum of the maximum individual committed dosages (SMICD), we found for each of the surrounding countries to be less than 1 mSv. In that part of Russia the (SMICD) is less than 6 mSv. For releases from the Petropavlovsk sites the (SMICD) for each of the surrounding countries is less than 0.3 mSv. In that part of Russia the (SMICD) is less than 6 mSv