The stratigraphy of the Sperati Point Quadrangle, McKenzie County, North Dakota

The Sperati Point Quadrangle is in McKenzie County, northwestern North Dakota, about 30 miles south-southwest of Watford City, North Dakota. The quadrangle is bounded by Ts. 146-148 N., Rs. 100- 101 W., and encompasses an area of about: 54 square miles. The topography consists of weakly dissected upland plains and, adjacent to the Little Missouri River and tributaries, well dissected, well drained, badland areas characterized by extensive slumping. About 570 feet of the Sentinel Butte Member of the Tongue River Formation of Paleocene age is exposed in the quadrangle. The lower 200 to 250 feet is dominantly grayish, fine to medium-grained greywacke sandstone and siltstone. The remainder of the section is dominantly gray, yellow, and brownish claystone, siltstone, shale and lignite. Characteristic sedimentary structures are cannonball and log-lL-e siltstone and c aystone concretions. A blue bentonitic claystone, the blue bed , which occurs about 200 feet below the top of the member, and a yellow clayey siltstone, the yellow bed , 45to 60 feet above the blue bed , were correlated in measured sections of the member. Fresh-water pelecypods and gastropods occur throughout the member, but most of these mollusks are found in the yellow bed . Plant fossils occur in benconitic claystones, siltstones, lignitic shales and lignites. The Sentinel Butte Memb2r is comprised of alluvial, fluviatile, and lacustrine sediments deposited on a vast alluvial or coastal plain. Major source areas for these sediments were presumably in the Rocky Mountains to the west and the Black Hills to the south. Conformably overlying the Sentinel Butte Member is about 100 to 160 feet of yellow silty clay and micaceous sandstone of the Golden Valley Formation of Eocene age. Wisconsinan (?) glacial outwash deposits and preglacial Wiota Gravel (?) are also present in the quadrangle

Density Matrix Renormalization Group in the Heisenberg Picture

In some cases the state of a quantum system with a large number of subsystems can be approximated efficiently by the density matrix renormalization group, which makes use of redundancies in the description of the state. Here we show that the achievable efficiency can be much better when performing density matrix renormalization group calculations in the Heisenberg picture, as only the observable of interest but not the entire state is considered. In some non-trivial cases, this approach can even be exact for finite bond dimensions.Comment: version to appear in PRL, acronyms in title and abstract expanded, new improved numerical example

UR-369 Classifying Chest X-Rays of Pneumonia Using Transfer Learning

Convolutional neural networks are a powerful tool in machine vision when it comes to identifying patterns. Considering the importance of identifying patterns in medical imaging, there is a great opportunity to develop effective CNN models to analyze medical imagery. Furthermore, the introduction of transfer learning has introduced the opportunity to develop models which are more accurate and better generalize to other datasets. Therefore, we explore the efficacy of different CNN models with respect to a dataset regarding X-ray imaging for pneumonia. We do this through using transfer learning models and demonstrate that pretrained models outperform models which are trained only on the dataset available. We also highlight additional methods which could be expanded upon in future research and hope to develop a state-of-the-art model for this particular dataset in the final version of this paper

Why Study Islamic Legal Professionals?

In many countries today, including the Southeast Asian nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, governments regulate some aspects of Muslim life according to Islamic law. The administration of Islamic law in these states is carried out by modern courts that are structured differently and staffed by different types of figures than were earlier institutions for the implementation of Islamic law. Prior to the modern era, courts tasked with the job of resolving cases according to Shari‛a were staffed by judges with a particular type of training, and litigants appearing before these judges were generally not represented by a specialized class of lawyers. In the modern era, Shari‛a courts have undergone radical changes in many countries. Modern Shari‛a court judges are trained to find Islamic rules of a decision in ways that differ significantly from that of classical jurists. To varying degrees, these judges are also taught to apply Shari‛a law in a manner similar to that of judges who apply non-religious law outside the Islamic court system. At the same time decisions are rendered in an environment in which litigants who appear before these judges are increasingly coming to be represented by lawyers who advise on questions of law and procedure, advocate for them and appeal cases. These differences in both training and professional practice affect the way in which the court engages with the Islamic tradition and thus affects the way that Islamic law is interpreted and applied. This article argues for new attention to be paid to the educational backgrounds and professional practice of the judges and lawyers who work in Shari‛a courts to further our understanding of the practice of Islamic law in contemporary societies

Forest disturbance and recovery: A general review in the context of spaceborne remote sensing of impacts on aboveground biomass and canopy structure

Abrupt forest disturbances generating gaps \u3e0.001 km2 impact roughly 0.4–0.7 million km2a−1. Fire, windstorms, logging, and shifting cultivation are dominant disturbances; minor contributors are land conversion, flooding, landslides, and avalanches. All can have substantial impacts on canopy biomass and structure. Quantifying disturbance location, extent, severity, and the fate of disturbed biomass will improve carbon budget estimates and lead to better initialization, parameterization, and/or testing of forest carbon cycle models. Spaceborne remote sensing maps large-scale forest disturbance occurrence, location, and extent, particularly with moderate- and fine-scale resolution passive optical/near-infrared (NIR) instruments. High-resolution remote sensing (e.g., ∼1 m passive optical/NIR, or small footprint lidar) can map crown geometry and gaps, but has rarely been systematically applied to study small-scale disturbance and natural mortality gap dynamics over large regions. Reducing uncertainty in disturbance and recovery impacts on global forest carbon balance requires quantification of (1) predisturbance forest biomass; (2) disturbance impact on standing biomass and its fate; and (3) rate of biomass accumulation during recovery. Active remote sensing data (e.g., lidar, radar) are more directly indicative of canopy biomass and many structural properties than passive instrument data; a new generation of instruments designed to generate global coverage/sampling of canopy biomass and structure can improve our ability to quantify the carbon balance of Earth\u27s forests. Generating a high-quality quantitative assessment of disturbance impacts on canopy biomass and structure with spaceborne remote sensing requires comprehensive, well designed, and well coordinated field programs collecting high-quality ground-based data and linkages to dynamical models that can use this information

Screening effects in the electron-optical phonon interaction

We show that recently reported unusual hardening of optical phonons renormalized by the electron-phonon interaction is due to the neglect of screening effects. When the electron-ion interaction is properly screened optical phonons soften in three dimension. It is important that for short-wavelength optical phonons screening is static while for long-wavelength optical phonons screening is dynamic. In two-dimensional and one-dimensional cases due to crossing of the nonperturbed optical mode with gapless plasmons the spectrum of renormalized optical phonon-plasmon mode shows split momentum dependence.Comment: 7 page

Introduction by Guest Editors

This book grew out of conversations among the three guest editors, Mark Cammack, Michael Feener, and Clark Lombardi, in the summer of 2008 about the general lack of attention among scholars of Southeast Asian Islam on important questions about the foundations of the region’s Islamic legal structures. First, despite its evident importance, there has been little research on the process by which legislators and judges decide which interpretation of Islamic law will be formally applied by the state apparatus. Another important question that has been largely ignored by scholars concerns the qualifications of Islamic legal professionals. The three Southeast Asian states treated in this volume—Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore—have separate systems of Islamic courts. Although the educational background of those who staff these courts will clearly inform the way they understand, interpret, and apply the law, to date little research has been done on the educational processes by which judges who serve on Islamic courts are trained to think about Islamic law. Studies on the means by which judges are appointed and regulated have also been lacking—even though the decision to favor one type of candidate surely affects the interpretation and application of Islamic law in the courts. Finally, lawyers who practice before Islamic courts play a crucial role in framing and presenting the issues for decision and in mediating between the courts that apply Islamic law and the public who have recourse to the state’s official Islamic legal institutions, but research on the professional training and governance of these lawyers is almost entirely lackin

Exploring a search for long-duration transient gravitational waves associated with magnetar bursts

Soft gamma repeaters and anomalous X-ray pulsars are thought to be magnetars, neutron stars with strong magnetic fields of order $\mathord{\sim} 10^{13}$--$10^{15} \, \mathrm{gauss}$. These objects emit intermittent bursts of hard X-rays and soft gamma rays. Quasiperiodic oscillations in the X-ray tails of giant flares imply the existence of neutron star oscillation modes which could emit gravitational waves powered by the magnetar's magnetic energy reservoir. We describe a method to search for transient gravitational-wave signals associated with magnetar bursts with durations of 10s to 1000s of seconds. The sensitivity of this method is estimated by adding simulated waveforms to data from the sixth science run of Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). We find a search sensitivity in terms of the root sum square strain amplitude of $h_{\mathrm{rss}} = 1.3 \times 10^{-21} \, \mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$ for a half sine-Gaussian waveform with a central frequency $f_0 = 150 \, \mathrm{Hz}$ and a characteristic time $\tau = 400 \, \mathrm{s}$. This corresponds to a gravitational wave energy of $E_{\mathrm{GW}} = 4.3 \times 10^{46} \, \mathrm{erg}$, the same order of magnitude as the 2004 giant flare which had an estimated electromagnetic energy of $E_{\mathrm{EM}} = \mathord{\sim} 1.7 \times 10^{46} (d/ 8.7 \, \mathrm{kpc})^2 \, \mathrm{erg}$, where $d$ is the distance to SGR 1806-20. We present an extrapolation of these results to Advanced LIGO, estimating a sensitivity to a gravitational wave energy of $E_{\mathrm{GW}} = 3.2 \times 10^{43} \, \mathrm{erg}$ for a magnetar at a distance of $1.6 \, \mathrm{kpc}$. These results suggest this search method can probe significantly below the energy budgets for magnetar burst emission mechanisms such as crust cracking and hydrodynamic deformation

De Novo Occurrence of a Variant in ARL3 and Apparent Autosomal Dominant Transmission of Retinitis Pigmentosa.

BackgroundRetinitis pigmentosa is a phenotype with diverse genetic causes. Due to this genetic heterogeneity, genome-wide identification and analysis of protein-altering DNA variants by exome sequencing is a powerful tool for novel variant and disease gene discovery. In this study, exome sequencing analysis was used to search for potentially causal DNA variants in a two-generation pedigree with apparent dominant retinitis pigmentosa.MethodsVariant identification and analysis of three affected members (mother and two affected offspring) was performed via exome sequencing. Parental samples of the index case were used to establish inheritance. Follow-up testing of 94 additional retinitis pigmentosa pedigrees was performed via retrospective analysis or Sanger sequencing.Results and conclusionsA total of 136 high quality coding variants in 123 genes were identified which are consistent with autosomal dominant disease. Of these, one of the strongest genetic and functional candidates is a c.269A>G (p.Tyr90Cys) variant in ARL3. Follow-up testing established that this variant occurred de novo in the index case. No additional putative causal variants in ARL3 were identified in the follow-up cohort, suggesting that if ARL3 variants can cause adRP it is an extremely rare phenomenon

Growth, processing, and optical properties of epitaxial Er_2O_3 on silicon

Erbium-doped materials have been investigated for generating and amplifying light in low-power chip-scale optical networks on silicon, but several effects limit their performance in dense microphotonic applications. Stoichiometric ionic crystals are a potential alternative that achieve an Er^(3+) density 100× greater. We report the growth, processing, material characterization, and optical properties of single-crystal Er_2O_3 epitaxially grown on silicon. A peak Er^(3+) resonant absorption of 364 dB/cm at 1535nm with minimal background loss places a high limit on potential gain. Using high-quality microdisk resonators, we conduct thorough C/L-band radiative efficiency and lifetime measurements and observe strong upconverted luminescence near 550 and 670 nm