Analog to digital conversion and processing of MSS data using a hybrid computer

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

On the distribution of career longevity and the evolution of home run prowess in professional baseball

Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long career. Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and establishing their historical legacy. However, the concept of records and benchmarks assumes that the level of competition in baseball is stationary in time. Here we show that power-law probability density functions, a hallmark of many complex systems that are driven by competition, govern career longevity in baseball. We also find similar power laws in the density functions of all major performance metrics for pitchers and batters. The use of performance-enhancing drugs has a dark history, emerging as a problem for both amateur and professional sports. We find statistical evidence consistent with performance-enhancing drugs in the analysis of home runs hit by players in the last 25 years. This is corroborated by the findings of the Mitchell Report [1], a two-year investigation into the use of illegal steroids in major league baseball, which recently revealed that over 5 percent of major league baseball players tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in an anonymous 2003 survey.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 2-column revtex4 format. Revision has change of title, a figure added, and minor changes in response to referee comment

Photointerpretation of Skylab photography

The author has identified the following significant results. In terms of film grain texture and object definition, the S190B color positive film is distinctly superior to the S190A films, when both are compared in the 9 x 9 inch format. Within the six S190A films, the panchromatic black and white films are superior to the infrared black and white, and the color positive film is superior to the color infrared. Minimum relief differences on the order of 500 to 100 feet could be detected by stereoscopic study, however, it is not possible to determine to what extent vegetation and cultural practices assist in such delineations. Water and wind gaps through major ridges were easily seen. Streams of third order and larger were clearly visible and easy to trace; second order streams were not identified with consistency. Differences in color, tone, and textural patterns rarely supplied clues for differentiating soils or bedrock. The separation of naturally forested areas from areas of cultivation and pasture was effective and a valuable clue to the underlying geology. Suburban and industrial developments were clearly differentiated from urban areas and surrounding agricultural fields. Soil associations could be identified on a regional basis, but no sharp boundary could be drawn separating soil associations

Self-Supervised Learning for Cardiac MR Image Segmentation by Anatomical Position Prediction

In the recent years, convolutional neural networks have transformed the field of medical image analysis due to their capacity to learn discriminative image features for a variety of classification and regression tasks. However, successfully learning these features requires a large amount of manually annotated data, which is expensive to acquire and limited by the available resources of expert image analysts. Therefore, unsupervised, weakly-supervised and self-supervised feature learning techniques receive a lot of attention, which aim to utilise the vast amount of available data, while at the same time avoid or substantially reduce the effort of manual annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel way for training a cardiac MR image segmentation network, in which features are learnt in a self-supervised manner by predicting anatomical positions. The anatomical positions serve as a supervisory signal and do not require extra manual annotation. We demonstrate that this seemingly simple task provides a strong signal for feature learning and with self-supervised learning, we achieve a high segmentation accuracy that is better than or comparable to a U-net trained from scratch, especially at a small data setting. When only five annotated subjects are available, the proposed method improves the mean Dice metric from 0.811 to 0.852 for short-axis image segmentation, compared to the baseline U-net

Regional coherence evaluation in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease based on adaptively extracted magnetoencephalogram rhythms

This study assesses the connectivity alterations caused by Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in magnetoencephalogram (MEG) background activity. Moreover, a novel methodology to adaptively extract brain rhythms from the MEG is introduced. This methodology relies on the ability of empirical mode decomposition to isolate local signal oscillations and constrained blind source separation to extract the activity that jointly represents a subset of channels. Inter-regional MEG connectivity was analysed for 36 AD, 18 MCI and 26 control subjects in δ, θ, α and β bands over left and right central, anterior, lateral and posterior regions with magnitude squared coherence—c(f). For the sake of comparison, c(f) was calculated from the original MEG channels and from the adaptively extracted rhythms. The results indicated that AD and MCI cause slight alterations in the MEG connectivity. Computed from the extracted rhythms, c(f) distinguished AD and MCI subjects from controls with 69.4% and 77.3% accuracies, respectively, in a full leave-one-out cross-validation evaluation. These values were higher than those obtained without the proposed extraction methodology

Field dynamics and kink-antikink production in rapidly expanding systems

Field dynamics in a rapidly expanding system is investigated by transforming from space-time to the rapidity - proper-time frame. The proper-time dependence of different contributions to the total energy is established. For systems characterized by a finite momentum cut-off, a freeze-out time can be defined after which the field propagation in rapidity space ends and the system decays into decoupled solitons, antisolitons and local vacuum fluctuations. Numerical simulations of field evolutions on a lattice for the (1+1)-dimensional $\Phi^4$ model illustrate the general results and show that the freeze-out time and average multiplicities of kinks (plus antikinks) produced in this 'phase transition' can be obtained from simple averages over the initial ensemble of field configurations. An extension to explicitly include additional dissipation is discussed. The validity of an adiabatic approximation for the case of an overdamped system is investigated. The (3+1)-dimensional generalization may serve as model for baryon-antibaryon production after heavy-ion collisions.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures. Two references added. New subsection III.E added. Final version accepted for publication in PR

Study of molecular spin-crossover complex Fe(phen)2(NCS)2 thin films

We report on the growth by evaporation under high vacuum of high-quality thin films of Fe(phen)2(NCS)2 (phen=1,10-phenanthroline) that maintain the expected electronic structure down to a thickness of 10 nm and that exhibit a temperature-driven spin transition. We have investigated the current-voltage characteristics of a device based on such films. From the space charge-limited current regime, we deduce a mobility of 6.5x10-6 cm2/V?s that is similar to the low-range mobility measured on the widely studied tris(8-hydroxyquinoline)aluminium organic semiconductor. This work paves the way for multifunctional molecular devices based on spin-crossover complexes

A multi-color and Fourier study of RR Lyrae variables in the globular cluster NGC 5272 (M3)

We have performed a detailed study of the pulsational and evolutionary characteristics of 133 RR Lyrae stars in the globular cluster NGC5272 (M3) using highly accurate BVI data taken on 5 separate epochs. M3 seems to contain no less than ~32% of Blazhko stars, and the occurrence and characteristics of the Blazhko effect have been analyzed in detail. We have identified a good number (~ 14%) of overluminous RR Lyrae stars that are likely in a more advanced evolutionary stage off the Zero Age Horizontal Branch (ZAHB). Physical parameters (i.e. temperature, luminosity, mass) have been derived from (B--V) colors and accurate color-temperature calibration, and compared with Horizontal Branch evolutionary models and with the requirements of stellar pulsation theory. Additional analysis by means of Fourier decomposition of the V light curves confirms, as expected, that no metallicity spread is present in M3. Evolution off the ZAHB does not affect [Fe/H] determinations, whereas Blazhko stars at low amplitude phase do affect [Fe/H] distributions as they appear more metal-rich. Absolute magnitudes derived from Fourier coefficients might provide useful average estimates for groups of stars, if applicable, but do not give reliable {\em individual} values. Intrinsic colors derived from Fourier coefficients show significant discrepancies with the observed ones, hence the resulting temperatures and temperature-related parameters are unreliable.Comment: 86 pages, 19 figures, 13 tables, in press A

Consumer credit information systems: A critical review of the literature. Too little attention paid by lawyers?

This paper reviews the existing literature on consumer credit reporting, the most extensively used instrument to overcome information asymmetry and adverse selection problems in credit markets. Despite the copious literature in economics and some research in regulatory policy, the legal community has paid almost no attention to the legal framework of consumer credit information systems, especially within the context of the European Union. Studies on the topic, however, seem particularly relevant in view of the establishment of a single market for consumer credit. This article ultimately calls for further legal research to address consumer protection concerns and inform future legislation

Particlization in hybrid models

In hybrid models, which combine hydrodynamical and transport approaches to describe different stages of heavy-ion collisions, conversion of fluid to individual particles, particlization, is a non-trivial technical problem. We describe in detail how to find the particlization hypersurface in a 3+1 dimensional model, and how to sample the particle distributions evaluated using the Cooper-Frye procedure to create an ensemble of particles as an initial state for the transport stage. We also discuss the role and magnitude of the negative contributions in the Cooper-Frye procedure.Comment: 18 pages, 28 figures, EPJA: Topical issue on "Relativistic Hydro- and Thermodynamics"; version accepted for publication, typos and error in Eq.(1) corrected, the purpose of sampling and change from UrQMD to fluid clarified, added discussion why attempts to cancel negative contributions of Cooper-Frye are not applicable her