Randomised positive control trial of NSAID and antimicrobial treatment for calf fever caused by pneumonia

One hundred and fifty-four preweaning calves were followed between May and October 2015. Calves were fitted with continuous monitoring temperature probes (TempVerified FeverTag), programmed so a flashing light emitting diode (LED) light was triggered following six hours of a sustained ear canal temperature of ≥39.7°C. A total of 83 calves (61.9 per cent) developed undifferentiated fever, with a presumptive diagnosis of pneumonia through exclusion of other calf diseases. Once fever was detected, calves were randomly allocated to treatment groups. Calves in group 1 (NSAID) received 2 mg/kg flunixin meglumine (Allevinix, Merial) for three consecutive days and group 2 (antimicrobial) received 6 mg/kg gamithromycin (Zactran, Merial). If fever persisted for 72 hours after the initial treatment, calves were given further treatment (group 1 received antimicrobial and group 2 received NSAID). Calves in group 1 (NSAID) were five times more likely (P=0.002) to require a second treatment (the antimicrobial) after 72 hours to resolve the fever compared with the need to give group 2 (antimicrobial) calves a second treatment (NSAID). This demonstrates the importance of ongoing monitoring and follow-up of calves with respiratory disease. However, of calves with fever in group 1 (NSAID), 25.7 per cent showed resolution following NSAID-only treatment with no detrimental effect on the development of repeated fever or daily live weight gain. This suggests that NSAID alone may be a useful first-line treatment, provided adequate attention is given to ongoing monitoring to identify those cases that require additional antimicrobial treatment

Horizon energy and angular momentum from a Hamiltonian perspective

Classical black holes and event horizons are highly non-local objects, defined in terms of the causal past of future null infinity. Alternative, (quasi)local definitions are often used in mathematical, quantum, and numerical relativity. These include apparent, trapping, isolated, and dynamical horizons, all of which are closely associated to two-surfaces of zero outward null expansion. In this paper we show that three-surfaces which can be foliated with such two-surfaces are suitable boundaries in both a quasilocal action and a phase space formulation of general relativity. The resulting formalism provides expressions for the quasilocal energy and angular momentum associated with the horizon. The values of the energy and angular momentum are in agreement with those derived from the isolated and dynamical horizon frameworks.Comment: 39 pages, 3 figures, Final Version : content essentially unchanged but many small improvements made in response to referees, a few references adde

Fundamental properties and applications of quasi-local black hole horizons

The traditional description of black holes in terms of event horizons is inadequate for many physical applications, especially when studying black holes in non-stationary spacetimes. In these cases, it is often more useful to use the quasi-local notions of trapped and marginally trapped surfaces, which lead naturally to the framework of trapping, isolated, and dynamical horizons. This framework allows us to analyze diverse facets of black holes in a unified manner and to significantly generalize several results in black hole physics. It also leads to a number of applications in mathematical general relativity, numerical relativity, astrophysics, and quantum gravity. In this review, I will discuss the basic ideas and recent developments in this framework, and summarize some of its applications with an emphasis on numerical relativity.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. Based on a talk presented at the 18th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, 8-13 July 2007, Sydney, Australi

Stellar and Molecular Radii of a Mira Star: First Observations with the Keck Interferometer Grism

Using a new grism at the Keck Interferometer, we obtained spectrally dispersed (R ~ 230) interferometric measurements of the Mira star R Vir. These data show that the measured radius of the emission varies substantially from 2.0-2.4 microns. Simple models can reproduce these wavelength-dependent variations using extended molecular layers, which absorb stellar radiation and re-emit it at longer wavelengths. Because we observe spectral regions with and without substantial molecular opacity, we determine the stellar photospheric radius, uncontaminated by molecular emission. We infer that most of the molecular opacity arises at approximately twice the radius of the stellar photosphere.Comment: 12 pages, including 3 figures. Accepted by ApJ

Organizational Chart Inference

Nowadays, to facilitate the communication and cooperation among employees, a new family of online social networks has been adopted in many companies, which are called the "enterprise social networks" (ESNs). ESNs can provide employees with various professional services to help them deal with daily work issues. Meanwhile, employees in companies are usually organized into different hierarchies according to the relative ranks of their positions. The company internal management structure can be outlined with the organizational chart visually, which is normally confidential to the public out of the privacy and security concerns. In this paper, we want to study the IOC (Inference of Organizational Chart) problem to identify company internal organizational chart based on the heterogeneous online ESN launched in it. IOC is very challenging to address as, to guarantee smooth operations, the internal organizational charts of companies need to meet certain structural requirements (about its depth and width). To solve the IOC problem, a novel unsupervised method Create (ChArT REcovEr) is proposed in this paper, which consists of 3 steps: (1) social stratification of ESN users into different social classes, (2) supervision link inference from managers to subordinates, and (3) consecutive social classes matching to prune the redundant supervision links. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world online ESN dataset demonstrate that Create can perform very well in addressing the IOC problem.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. The paper is accepted by KDD 201

Quantifying structural damage from self-irradiation in a plutonium superconductor

The 18.5 K superconductor PuCoGa5 has many unusual properties, including those due to damage induced by self-irradiation. The superconducting transition temperature decreases sharply with time, suggesting a radiation-induced Frenkel defect concentration much larger than predicted by current radiation damage theories. Extended x-ray absorption fine-structure measurements demonstrate that while the local crystal structure in fresh material is well ordered, aged material is disordered much more strongly than expected from simple defects, consistent with strong disorder throughout the damage cascade region. These data highlight the potential impact of local lattice distortions relative to defects on the properties of irradiated materials and underscore the need for more atomic-resolution structural comparisons between radiation damage experiments and theory.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, to be published in PR

Optimized Coplanar Waveguide Resonators for a Superconductor-Atom Interface

We describe the design and characterization of superconducting coplanar waveguide cavities tailored to facilitate strong coupling between superconducting quantum circuits and single trapped Rydberg atoms. For initial superconductor-atom experiments at 4.2 K, we show that resonator quality factors above $10^4$ can be readily achieved. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the incorporation of thick-film copper electrodes at a voltage antinode of the resonator provides a route to enhance the zero-point electric fields of the resonator in a trapping region that is 40 $\mu$m above the chip surface, thereby minimizing chip heating from scattered trap light. The combination of high resonator quality factor and strong electric dipole coupling between the resonator and the atom should make it possible to achieve the strong coupling limit of cavity quantum electrodynamics with this system.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

X-ray Absorption Fine Structure in Embedded Atoms

Oscillatory structure is found in the atomic background absorption in x-ray-absorption fine structure (XAFS). This atomic-XAFS or AXAFS arises from scattering within an embedded atom, and is analogous to the Ramsauer-Townsend effect. Calculations and measurements confirm the existence of AXAFS and show that it can dominate contributions such as multi-electron excitations. The structure is sensitive to chemical effects and thus provides a new probe of bonding and exchange effects on the scattering potential.Comment: 4 pages plus 2 postscript figures, REVTEX 3.

Marginally trapped tubes and dynamical horizons

We investigate the generic behaviour of marginally trapped tubes (roughly time-evolved apparent horizons) using simple, spherically symmetric examples of dust and scalar field collapse/accretion onto pre-existing black holes. We find that given appropriate physical conditions the evolution of the marginally trapped tube may be either null, timelike, or spacelike and further that the marginally trapped two-sphere cross-sections may either expand or contract in area. Spacelike expansions occur when the matter falling into a black hole satisfies $\rho - P \leq 1/A$, where $A$ is the area of the horizon while $\rho$ and $P$ are respectively the density and pressure of the matter. Timelike evolutions occur when $(\rho - P)$ is greater than this cut-off and so would be expected to be more common for large black holes. Physically they correspond to horizon "jumps" as extreme conditions force the formation of new horizons outside of the old.Comment: 31 pages, many figures. Final Version to appear in CQG: improvements include more complete references, a discussion of those references, Penrose-Carter diagrams for several of the spacetimes, and improved numerics for the scalar field