Fitness for fans: professional football and public health

The benefits of an active life – such as improved mental health and lowered risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some cancers – are well known amongst sports and exercise medicine professionals. But in the broader population, not everyone is able to realise these benefits. As part of this year’s joint BASEM/FSEM conference in Liverpool, delegates had a lively discussion about how professional football (and other sporting) clubs can help to get the population moving more. This article offers a summary and some reflections on the discussion

Efficient decomposition of cosmic microwave background polarization maps into pure E, pure B, and ambiguous components

Separation of the B component of a cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization map from the much larger E component is an essential step in CMB polarimetry. For a map with incomplete sky coverage, this separation is necessarily hampered by the presence of "ambiguous" modes which could be either E or B modes. I present an efficient pixel-space algorithm for removing the ambiguous modes and separating the map into "pure" E and B components. The method, which works for arbitrary geometries, does not involve generating a complete basis of such modes and scales the cube of the number of pixels on the boundary of the map.Comment: Minor changes to previous version. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Maximum likelihood analysis of systematic errors in interferometric observations of the cosmic microwave background

We investigate the impact of instrumental systematic errors in interferometric measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization power spectra. We simulate interferometric CMB observations to generate mock visibilities and estimate power spectra using the statistically optimal maximum likelihood technique. We define a quadratic error measure to determine allowable levels of systematic error that do not induce power spectrum errors beyond a given tolerance. As an example, in this study we focus on differential pointing errors. The effects of other systematics can be simulated by this pipeline in a straightforward manner. We find that, in order to accurately recover the underlying B-modes for r=0.01 at 28<l<384, Gaussian-distributed pointing errors must be controlled to 0.7^\circ rms for an interferometer with an antenna configuration similar to QUBIC, in agreement with analytical estimates. Only the statistical uncertainty for 28<l<88 would be changed at ~10% level. With the same instrumental configuration, we find the pointing errors would slightly bias the 2-\sigma upper limit of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r by ~10%. We also show that the impact of pointing errors on the TB and EB measurements is negligibly small.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJS. Includes improvements in clarity of presentation and Fig.4 added, in response to refere

A First Map of the CMB at 0.5Deg Resolution

We use a Maximum Entropy technique to reconstruct a map of the microwave sky near the star Gamma Ursae Minoris, based on data from flights 2, 3 and 4 of the Millimeter-wave Anisotropy eXperiment (MAX).Comment: 5 pages plus 3 postscript figures, uuencoded compressed postscript, CfPA-94-TH-5