The Digital Life of Walkable Streets

Walkability has many health, environmental, and economic benefits. That is why web and mobile services have been offering ways of computing walkability scores of individual street segments. Those scores are generally computed from survey data and manual counting (of even trees). However, that is costly, owing to the high time, effort, and financial costs. To partly automate the computation of those scores, we explore the possibility of using the social media data of Flickr and Foursquare to automatically identify safe and walkable streets. We find that unsafe streets tend to be photographed during the day, while walkable streets are tagged with walkability-related keywords. These results open up practical opportunities (for, e.g., room booking services, urban route recommenders, and real-estate sites) and have theoretical implications for researchers who might resort to the use social media data to tackle previously unanswered questions in the area of walkability.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015

The ATLAS EventIndex: Full chain deployment and first operation

AbstractThe Event Index project consists in the development and deployment of a complete catalogue of events for experiments with large amounts of data, such as the ATLAS experiment at the LHC accelerator at CERN. Data to be stored in the EventIndex are produced by all production jobs that run at CERN or the GRID; for every permanent output file, a snippet of information, containing the file unique identifier and the relevant attributes for each event, is sent to the central catalogue. The estimated insertion rate during the LHC Run 2 is about 80 Hz of file records containing ∼15 kHz of event records. This contribution describes the system design, the initial performance tests of the full data collection and cataloguing chain, and the project evolution towards the full deployment and operation by the end of 2014

In-situ characterization of the Hamamatsu R5912-HQE photomultiplier tubes used in the DEAP-3600 experiment

The Hamamatsu R5912-HQE photomultiplier-tube (PMT) is a novel high-quantum efficiency PMT. It is currently used in the DEAP-3600 dark matter detector and is of significant interest for future dark matter and neutrino experiments where high signal yields are needed. We report on the methods developed for in-situ characterization and monitoring of DEAP's 255 R5912-HQE PMTs. This includes a detailed discussion of typical measured single-photoelectron charge distributions, correlated noise (afterpulsing), dark noise, double, and late pulsing characteristics. The characterization is performed during the detector commissioning phase using laser light injected through a light diffusing sphere and during normal detector operation using LED light injected through optical fibres

Spin Structure of the Proton from Polarized Inclusive Deep-Inelastic Muon-Proton Scattering

We have measured the spin-dependent structure function $g_1^p$ in inclusive deep-inelastic scattering of polarized muons off polarized protons, in the kinematic range $0.003 < x < 0.7$ and $1 GeV^2 < Q^2 < 60 GeV^2$. A next-to-leading order QCD analysis is used to evolve the measured $g_1^p(x,Q^2)$ to a fixed $Q^2_0$. The first moment of $g_1^p$ at $Q^2_0 = 10 GeV^2$ is $\Gamma^p = 0.136\pm 0.013(stat.) \pm 0.009(syst.)\pm 0.005(evol.)$. This result is below the prediction of the Ellis-Jaffe sum rule by more than two standard deviations. The singlet axial charge $a_0$ is found to be $0.28 \pm 0.16$. In the Adler-Bardeen factorization scheme, $\Delta g \simeq 2$ is required to bring $\Delta \Sigma$ in agreement with the Quark-Parton Model. A combined analysis of all available proton and deuteron data confirms the Bjorken sum rule.Comment: 33 pages, 22 figures, uses ReVTex and smc.sty. submitted to Physical Review

Measurement of the scintillation time spectra and pulse-shape discrimination of low-energy beta and nuclear recoils in liquid argon with DEAP-1

The DEAP-1 low-background liquid argon detector was used to measure scintillation pulse shapes of electron and nuclear recoil events and to demonstrate the feasibility of pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) down to an electron-equivalent energy of 20 keV. In the surface dataset using a triple-coincidence tag we found the fraction of beta events that are misidentified as nuclear recoils to be $<1.4\times 10^{-7}$ (90% C.L.) for energies between 43-86 keVee and for a nuclear recoil acceptance of at least 90%, with 4% systematic uncertainty on the absolute energy scale. The discrimination measurement on surface was limited by nuclear recoils induced by cosmic-ray generated neutrons. This was improved by moving the detector to the SNOLAB underground laboratory, where the reduced background rate allowed the same measurement with only a double-coincidence tag. The combined data set contains $1.23\times10^8$ events. One of those, in the underground data set, is in the nuclear-recoil region of interest. Taking into account the expected background of 0.48 events coming from random pileup, the resulting upper limit on the electronic recoil contamination is $<2.7\times10^{-8}$ (90% C.L.) between 44-89 keVee and for a nuclear recoil acceptance of at least 90%, with 6% systematic uncertainty on the absolute energy scale. We developed a general mathematical framework to describe PSD parameter distributions and used it to build an analytical model of the distributions observed in DEAP-1. Using this model, we project a misidentification fraction of approx. $10^{-10}$ for an electron-equivalent energy threshold of 15 keV for a detector with 8 PE/keVee light yield. This reduction enables a search for spin-independent scattering of WIMPs from 1000 kg of liquid argon with a WIMP-nucleon cross-section sensitivity of $10^{-46}$ cm$^2$, assuming negligible contribution from nuclear recoil backgrounds.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic

Inclusive Search for Anomalous Production of High-pT Like-Sign Lepton Pairs in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at sqrt{s}=1.8 TeV

We report on a search for anomalous production of events with at least two charged, isolated, like-sign leptons with pT > 11 GeV/c using a 107 pb^-1 sample of 1.8 TeV ppbar collisions collected by the CDF detector. We define a signal region containing low background from Standard Model processes. To avoid bias, we fix the final cuts before examining the event yield in the signal region using control regions to test the Monte Carlo predictions. We observe no events in the signal region, consistent with an expectation of 0.63^(+0.84)_(-0.07) events. We present 95% confidence level limits on new physics processes in both a signature-based context as well as within a representative minimal supergravity (tanbeta = 3) model.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. Minor textual changes, cosmetic improvements to figures and updated and expanded reference

Measurement of the Decay Amplitudes of B0 --> J/psi K* and B0s --> J/psi phi Decays

A full angular analysis has been performed for the pseudo-scalar to vector-vector decays, B0 --> J/psi K* and B_s --> J/psi phi, to determine the amplitudes for decays with parity-even longitudinal and transverse polarization and parity-odd transverse polarization. The measurements are based on 190 B0 candidates and 40 B_s candidates collected from a data set corresponding to 89 inverse pb of pbarp collisions at root(s) = 1.8 TeV at the Fermilab Tevatron. In both decays the decay amplitude for longitudinal polarization dominates and the parity-odd amplitude is found to be small.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Measurement of the ttˉproductioncrosssectionint\bar{t} production cross section in p\bar{p}collisionsat collisions at \sqrt{s}$ = 1.8 TeV

We update the measurement of the top production cross section using the CDF detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. This measurement uses $t\bar{t}$ decays to the final states $e+\nu$+jets and $\mu+\nu$+jets. We search for $b$ quarks from $t$ decays via secondary-vertex identification or the identification of semileptonic decays of the $b$ and cascade $c$ quarks. The background to the $t\bar{t}$ production is determined primarily through a Monte Carlo simulation. However, we calibrate the simulation and evaluate its uncertainty using several independent data samples. For a top mass of 175 $GeV/c^2$, we measure $\sigma_{t\bar{t}}=5.1 \pm 1.5$ pb and $\sigma_{t\bar{t}}=9.2 \pm 4.3$ pb using the secondary vertex and the lepton tagging algorithms, respectively. Finally, we combine these results with those from other $t\bar{t}$ decay channels and obtain $\sigma_{t\bar{t}} = 6.5^{+1.7}_{-1.4}$ pb.Comment: The manuscript consists of 130 pages, 35 figures and 42 tables in RevTex. The manuscript is submitted to Physical Review D. Fixed typo in author lis

Measurement of J/Psi and Psi(2S) Polarization in ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV

We have measured the polarization of J/Psi and Psi(2S) mesons produced in p\bar{p} collisions at \sqrt{s} = 1.8 TeV, using data collected at CDF during 1992-95. The polarization of promptly produced J/Psi [Psi(2S)] mesons is isolated from those produced in B-hadron decay, and measured over the kinematic range 4[5.5] < P_T < 20 GeV/c and |y| < 0.6. For P_T \gessim 12 GeV/c we do not observe significant polarization in the prompt component.Comment: Revised version, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter