Erratum: Luminosity function, sizes and FR dichotomy of radio-loud AGN

This erratum corrects a number of formulae containing mistakes in the paper 'Luminosity function, sizes and FR dichotomy of radio-loud AGN', 2007, MNRAS, v. 381, p.1548. The corrections do not alter any of the conclusions in the original paper.Comment: single page, no figures, erratum to MNRAS, 2007, v. 381, p. 154

Can taste be ergogenic?

Taste is a homeostatic function that conveys valuable information, such as energy density, readiness to eat, or toxicity of foodstuffs. Taste is not limited to the oral cavity but affects multiple physiological systems. In this review, we outline the ergogenic potential of substances that impart bitter, sweet, hot and cold tastes administered prior to and during exercise performance and whether the ergogenic benefits of taste are attributable to the placebo effect. Carbohydrate mouth rinsing seemingly improves endurance performance, along with a potentially ergogenic effect of oral exposure to both bitter tastants and caffeine although subsequent ingestion of bitter mouth rinses is likely required to enhance performance. Hot and cold tastes may prove beneficial in circumstances where athletes’ thermal state may be challenged. Efficacy is not limited to taste, but extends to the stimulation of targeted receptors in the oral cavity and throughout the digestive tract, relaying signals pertaining to energy availability and temperature to appropriate neural centres. Dose, frequency and timing of tastant application likely require personalisation to be most effective, and can be enhanced or confounded by factors that relate to the placebo effect, highlighting taste as a critical factor in designing and administering applied sports science interventions

Lessons learned in promoting evidence-based public health: Perspectives from managers in state public health departments

Evidence-based public health (EBPH) practice, also called evidence-informed public health, can improve population health and reduce disease burden in populations. Organizational structures and processes can facilitate capacity-building for EBPH in public health agencies. This study involved 51 structured interviews with leaders and program managers in 12 state health department chronic disease prevention units to identify factors that facilitate the implementation of EBPH. Verbatim transcripts of the de-identified interviews were consensus coded in NVIVO qualitative software. Content analyses of coded texts were used to identify themes and illustrative quotes. Facilitator themes included leadership support within the chronic disease prevention unit and division, unit processes to enhance information sharing across program areas and recruitment and retention of qualified personnel, training and technical assistance to build skills, and the ability to provide support to external partners. Chronic disease prevention leaders\u27 role modeling of EBPH processes and expectations for staff to justify proposed plans and approaches were key aspects of leadership support. Leaders protected staff time in order to identify and digest evidence to address the common barrier of lack of time for EBPH. Funding uncertainties or budget cuts, lack of political will for EBPH, and staff turnover remained challenges. In conclusion, leadership support is a key facilitator of EBPH capacity building and practice. Section and division leaders in public health agencies with authority and skills can institute management practices to help staff learn and apply EBPH processes and spread EBPH with partners

Environmental dependence of AGN activity in the supercluster A901/2

We present XMM data for the supercluster A901/2, at z ~ 0.17, which is combined with deep imaging and 17-band photometric redshifts (from the COMBO-17 survey), 2dF spectra and Spitzer 24um data, to identify AGN in the supercluster. The 90ksec XMM image contains 139 point sources, of which 11 are identified as supercluster AGN with L_X(0.5-7.5keV) > 1.7x10^41 erg/cm2/s. The host galaxies have M_R < -20 and only 2 of 8 sources with spectra could have been identified as AGN by the detected optical emission lines. Using a large sample of 795 supercluster galaxies we define control samples of massive galaxies with no detected AGN. The local environments of the AGN and control samples differ at >98 per cent significance. The AGN host galaxies lie predominantly in areas of moderate projected galaxy density and with more local blue galaxies than the control sample, with the exception of one very bright Type I AGN very near the centre of a cluster. These environments are similar to, but not limited to, cluster outskirts and blue groups. Despite the large number of potential host galaxies, no AGN are found in regions with the highest galaxy density (excluding some cluster cores where emission from the ICM obscures moderate luminosity AGN). AGN are also absent from the areas with lowest galaxy density. We conclude that the prevalence of cluster AGN is linked to their environment.Comment: 20 pages, 15 figures. MNRAS accepted. Version with full resolution figures, including Figure 14, is available at http://www.sc.eso.org/~rgilmour

Finding Person Relations in Image Data of the Internet Archive

The multimedia content in the World Wide Web is rapidly growing and contains valuable information for many applications in different domains. For this reason, the Internet Archive initiative has been gathering billions of time-versioned web pages since the mid-nineties. However, the huge amount of data is rarely labeled with appropriate metadata and automatic approaches are required to enable semantic search. Normally, the textual content of the Internet Archive is used to extract entities and their possible relations across domains such as politics and entertainment, whereas image and video content is usually neglected. In this paper, we introduce a system for person recognition in image content of web news stored in the Internet Archive. Thus, the system complements entity recognition in text and allows researchers and analysts to track media coverage and relations of persons more precisely. Based on a deep learning face recognition approach, we suggest a system that automatically detects persons of interest and gathers sample material, which is subsequently used to identify them in the image data of the Internet Archive. We evaluate the performance of the face recognition system on an appropriate standard benchmark dataset and demonstrate the feasibility of the approach with two use cases

Deep radio observations of 3C324 and 3C368: evidence for jet-cloud interactions

High resolution, deep radio images are presented for two distant radio galaxies, 3C324 (z=1.206) and 3C368 (z=1.132), which are both prime examples of the radio-optical alignment effect seen in powerful radio galaxies with redshifts z > 0.6. Radio observations were made using the Very Large Array in A-array configuration at 5 and 8 GHz, and using the MERLIN array at 1.4 and 1.65 GHz. Radio spectral index, radio polarisation, and rotation measure maps are presented for both sources. Radio core candidates are detected in each source, and by aligning these with the centroid of the infrared emission the radio and the optical/infrared images can be related astrometrically with 0.1 arcsec accuracy. In each source the radio core is located at a minimum of the optical emission, probably associated with a central dust lane. Both sources also exhibit radio jets which lie along the directions of the bright strings of optical knots seen in high resolution Hubble Space Telescope images. The northern arm of 3C368 shows a close correlation between the radio and optical emission, whilst along the jet direction of 3C324 the bright radio and optical knots are co-linear but not co-spatial. These indicate that interactions between the radio jet and its environment play a key role in producing the excess ultraviolet emission of these sources, but that the detailed mechanisms vary from source to source. 3C368 is strongly depolarised and has an average rest-frame rotation measure of a few hundred rad/m^2, reaching about 1000 rad/m^2 close to the most depolarised regions. 3C324 has weaker depolarisation, and an average rest-frame rotation measure of between 100 and 200 rad/m^2. Both sources show large gradients in their rotation measure structures, with variations of up to 1000 rad/m^2 over distances of about 10 kpc.Comment: 15 pages including 4 figures. LaTeX. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Transfer Function Approximations for Large Highly Coupled Elastic Boosters with Fuel Slosh

Transfer function approximations for large highly coupled flexible body launch vehicles with liquid fuel slos

Multi-robot region-of-interest reconstruction with Dec-MCTS

© 2019 IEEE. We consider the problem of reconstructing regions of interest of a scene using multiple robot arms and RGB-D sensors. This problem is motivated by a variety of applications, such as precision agriculture and infrastructure inspection. A viewpoint evaluation function is presented that exploits predicted observations and the geometry of the scene. A recently proposed non-myopic planning algorithm, Decentralised Monte Carlo tree search, is used to coordinate the actions of the robot arms. Motion planning is performed over a navigation graph that considers the high-dimensional configuration space of the robot arms. Extensive simulated experiments are carried out using real sensor data and then validated on hardware with two robot arms. Our proposed targeted information gain planner is compared to state-of-the-art baselines and outperforms them in every measured metric. The robots quickly observe and accurately detect fruit in a trellis structure, demonstrating the viability of the approach for real-world applications

Measurement of 25Mg(p; gamma)26Al resonance strengths via gamma spectrometry

The COMPTEL instrument performed the first mapping of the 1.809 MeV photons in the Galaxy, triggering considerable interest in determing the sources of interstellar 26Al. The predicted 26Al is too low compared to the observation, for a better understanding more accurate rates for the 25Mg(p; gamma)26Al reaction are required. The 25Mg(p;gamma)26Al reaction has been investigated at the resonances at Er= 745; 418; 374; 304 keV at Ruhr-Universitat-Bochum using a Tandem accelerator and a 4piNaI detector. In addition the resonance at Er = 189 keV has been measured deep underground laboratory at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, exploiting the strong suppression of cosmic background. This low resonance has been studied with the 400 kV LUNA accelerator and a HPGe detector. The preliminary results of the resonance strengths will be reported.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Physics