Interview with Harold Bower

Harold Bower discusses his Native American heritage, the history of various tribes, conditions on reservations, and the discrimination he faces for identifying his Seneca ancestors. He explains why he moved to Knox County and why many members of the community who could identify as Native American choose not to.https://digital.kenyon.edu/lt_interviews/1018/thumbnail.jp

Distinct EEG amplitude suppression to facial gestures as evidence for a mirror mechanism in newborn monkeys

At birth, human infants and newborns of other primate species demonstrate the capacity to attend and to respond to facial stimuli provided by a caregiver. Newborn infants are also capable of exhibiting a range of facial expressions. Identification of the neural underpinnings of these capacities represents a formidable challenge in understanding social development. One possible neuronal substrate is the mirror-neuron system assumed to activate shared motor cortical representations for both observation and production of actions. We tested this hypothesis by recording scalp EEG from 1- to 7-day-old newborn rhesus macaques who were observing and producing facial gestures. We found that 5–6 Hz EEG activity was suppressed both when the infants produced facial gestures and while they were observing facial gestures of a human experimenter, but not when they were observing nonbiological stimuli. These findings demonstrate the presence of neural reactivity for biological, communicatively relevant stimuli, which may be a likely signature of neuronal mirroring. The basic elements of the mirror-neuron system appear to operate from the very first days of life and contribute to the encoding of socially relevant stimuli

The ACS Fornax Cluster Survey. VI. The Nuclei of Early-Type Galaxies in the Fornax Cluster

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) Fornax Cluster Survey is a Hubble Space Telescope program to image 43 early-type galaxies in the Fornax cluster, using the F475W and F850LP bandpasses of the ACS. We employ both 1D and 2D techniques to characterize the properties of the stellar nuclei in these galaxies, defined as the central "luminosity excesses" relative to a Sersic model fitted to the underlying host. We find 72+/-13% of our sample (31 galaxies) to be nucleated, with only three of the nuclei offset by more than 0.5" from their galaxy photocenter, and with the majority of nuclei having colors bluer than their hosts. The nuclei are observed to be larger, and brighter, than typical Fornax globular clusters, and to follow different structural scaling relations. A comparison of our results to those from the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey reveals striking similarities in the properties of the nuclei belonging to these different environments. We briefly review a variety of proposed formation models and conclude that, for the low-mass galaxies in our sample, the most important mechanism for nucleus growth is probably infall of star clusters through dynamical friction, while for higher mass galaxies, gas accretion triggered by mergers, accretions and tidal torques is likely to dominate, with the relative importance of these two processes varying smoothly as a function of galaxy mass. Some intermediate-mass galaxies in our sample show a complexity in their inner structure that may be the signature of "hybrid nuclei" that arose through parallel formation channels.Comment: 34 pages, 27 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

A census of X-ray nuclear activity in nearby galaxies

We have studied the X-ray nuclear activity of 187 nearby (distance < 15 Mpc) galaxies observed with Chandra/ACIS. We found that 86 of them have a point-like X-ray core, consistent with an accreting black hole (BH). We argue that the majority of them are nuclear BHs, rather than X-ray binaries. The fraction of galaxies with an X-ray detected nuclear BH is higher (~60 per cent) for ellipticals and early-type spirals (E to Sb), and lower (~30 per cent) for late-type spirals (Sc to Sm). There is no preferential association of X-ray cores with a large-scale bar; in fact, strongly barred galaxies appear to have slightly lower detection fraction and luminosity for their nuclear X-ray sources, compared with non-barred or weakly barred galaxies of similar Hubble types. The cumulative luminosity distribution of the nuclear sources in the 0.3-8 keV band is a power-law with slope ~-0.5, from ~2 x 10^{38} erg/s to ~10^{42} erg/s. The Eddington ratio is lower for ellipticals (L_{X}/L_{Edd} ~ 10^{-8}) and higher for late-type spirals (up to L_{X}/L_{Edd} ~ 10^{-4}), but in all cases, the accretion rate is low enough to be in the radiatively-inefficient regime. The intrinsic NH is generally low, especially for the less luminous sources: there appear to be no Type-2 nuclear BHs at luminosities <~ 10^{39} erg/s. The lack of a dusty torus or of other sources of intrinsic absorption (e.g., an optically-thick disk wind) may be directly related to the lack of a standard accretion disk around those faint nuclear BHs. The fraction of obscured sources increases with the nuclear BH luminosity: 2/3 of the sources with L_{X} > 10^{40} erg/s have a fitted NH > 10^{22} cm^{-2}. This is contrary to the declining trend of the obscured fraction with increasing luminosities, observed in more luminous AGN and quasars.Comment: 27 pages, 353 kB, accepted by Ap

The Allen Telescope Array Pi GHz Sky Survey I. Survey Description and Static Catalog Results for the Bootes Field

The Pi GHz Sky Survey (PiGSS) is a key project of the Allen Telescope Array. PiGSS is a 3.1 GHz survey of radio continuum emission in the extragalactic sky with an emphasis on synoptic observations that measure the static and time-variable properties of the sky. During the 2.5-year campaign, PiGSS will twice observe ~250,000 radio sources in the 10,000 deg^2 region of the sky with b > 30 deg to an rms sensitivity of ~1 mJy. Additionally, sub-regions of the sky will be observed multiple times to characterize variability on time scales of days to years. We present here observations of a 10 deg^2 region in the Bootes constellation overlapping the NOAO Deep Wide Field Survey field. The PiGSS image was constructed from 75 daily observations distributed over a 4-month period and has an rms flux density between 200 and 250 microJy. This represents a deeper image by a factor of 4 to 8 than we will achieve over the entire 10,000 deg^2. We provide flux densities, source sizes, and spectral indices for the 425 sources detected in the image. We identify ~100$ new flat spectrum radio sources; we project that when completed PiGSS will identify 10^4 flat spectrum sources. We identify one source that is a possible transient radio source. This survey provides new limits on faint radio transients and variables with characteristic durations of months.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; revision submitted with extraneous figure remove

A Wirelessly Controlled Smart Bandage with 3D-Printed Miniaturized Needle Arrays

PUBLIC ACCES

The Allen Telescope Array Twenty-centimeter Survey - A 690-Square-Degree, 12-Epoch Radio Dataset - I: Catalog and Long-Duration Transient Statistics

We present the Allen Telescope Array Twenty-centimeter Survey (ATATS), a multi-epoch (12 visits), 690 square degree radio image and catalog at 1.4GHz. The survey is designed to detect rare, very bright transients as well as to verify the capabilities of the ATA to form large mosaics. The combined image using data from all 12 ATATS epochs has RMS noise sigma = 3.94mJy / beam and dynamic range 180, with a circular beam of 150 arcsec FWHM. It contains 4408 sources to a limiting sensitivity of S = 20 mJy / beam. We compare the catalog generated from this 12-epoch combined image to the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS), a legacy survey at the same frequency, and find that we can measure source positions to better than ~20 arcsec. For sources above the ATATS completeness limit, the median flux density is 97% of the median value for matched NVSS sources, indicative of an accurate overall flux calibration. We examine the effects of source confusion due to the effects of differing resolution between ATATS and NVSS on our ability to compare flux densities. We detect no transients at flux densities greater than 40 mJy in comparison with NVSS, and place a 2-sigma upper limit on the transient rate for such sources of 0.004 per square degree. These results suggest that the > 1 Jy transients reported by Matsumura et al. (2009) may not be true transients, but rather variable sources at their flux density threshold.Comment: 41 pages, 19 figures, ApJ accepted; corrected minor typo in Table

What’s in a Name? Use of Brand versus Generic Drug Names in United States Outpatient Practice

BACKGROUND: The use of brand rather than generic names for medications can increase health care costs. However, little is known at a national level about how often physicians refer to drugs using their brand or generic names. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate how often physicians refer to drugs using brand or generic terminology. DESIGN AND PARTICIPANTS: We used data from the 2003 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS), a nationally representative survey of 25,288 community-based outpatient visits in the United States. After each visit, patient medications were recorded on a survey encounter form by the treating physician or transcribed from office notes. MEASUREMENTS: Our main outcome measure was the frequency with which medications were recorded on the encounter form using their brand or generic names. RESULTS: For 20 commonly used drugs, the median frequency of brand name use was 98% (interquartile range, 81–100%). Among 12 medications with no generic competition at the time of the survey, the median frequency of brand name use was 100% (range 92–100%). Among 8 medications with generic competition at the time of the survey (“multisource” drugs), the median frequency of brand name use was 79% (range 0–98%; P < .001 for difference between drugs with and without generic competition). CONCLUSIONS: Physicians refer to most medications by their brand names, including drugs with generic formulations. This may lead to higher health care costs by promoting the use of brand-name products when generic alternatives are available

The Allen Telescope Array: The First Widefield, Panchromatic, Snapshot Radio Camera for Radio Astronomy and SETI

The first 42 elements of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA-42) are beginning to deliver data at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California. Scientists and engineers are actively exploiting all of the flexibility designed into this innovative instrument for simultaneously conducting surveys of the astrophysical sky and conducting searches for distant technological civilizations. This paper summarizes the design elements of the ATA, the cost savings made possible by the use of COTS components, and the cost/performance trades that eventually enabled this first snapshot radio camera. The fundamental scientific program of this new telescope is varied and exciting; some of the first astronomical results will be discussed.Comment: Special Issue of Proceedings of the IEEE: "Advances in Radio Telescopes", Baars,J. Thompson,R., D'Addario, L., eds, 2009, in pres

A GMBCG Galaxy Cluster Catalog of 55,424 Rich Clusters from SDSS DR7

We present a large catalog of optically selected galaxy clusters from the application of a new Gaussian Mixture Brightest Cluster Galaxy (GMBCG) algorithm to SDSS Data Release 7 data. The algorithm detects clusters by identifying the red sequence plus Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG) feature, which is unique for galaxy clusters and does not exist among field galaxies. Red sequence clustering in color space is detected using an Error Corrected Gaussian Mixture Model. We run GMBCG on 8240 square degrees of photometric data from SDSS DR7 to assemble the largest ever optical galaxy cluster catalog, consisting of over 55,000 rich clusters across the redshift range from 0.1 < z < 0.55. We present Monte Carlo tests of completeness and purity and perform cross-matching with X-ray clusters and with the maxBCG sample at low redshift. These tests indicate high completeness and purity across the full redshift range for clusters with 15 or more members.Comment: Updated to match the published version. The catalog can be accessed from: http://home.fnal.gov/~jghao/gmbcg_sdss_catalog.htm