Magnetic Field Uniformity Across the GF 9-2 YSO, L1082C Dense Core, and GF 9 Filamentary Dark Cloud

The orientation of the magnetic field (B-field) in the filamentary dark cloud GF 9 was traced from the periphery of the cloud into the L1082C dense core that contains the low-mass, low-luminosity Class 0 young stellar object (YSO) GF 9-2 (IRAS 20503+6006). This was done using SOFIA HAWC+ dust thermal emission polarimetry (TEP) at 216 um in combination with Mimir near-infrared background starlight polarimetry (BSP) conducted at H-band (1.6 um) and K-band (2.2 um). These observations were augmented with published I-band (0.77 um) BSP and Planck 850 um TEP to probe B-field orientations with offset from the YSO in a range spanning 6000 AU to 3 pc. No strong B-field orientation change with offset was found, indicating remarkable uniformity of the B-field from the cloud edge to the YSO environs. This finding disagrees with weak-field models of cloud core and YSO formation. The continuity of inferred B-field orientations for both TEP and BSP probes is strong evidence that both are sampling a common B-field that uniformly threads the cloud, core, and YSO region. Bayesian analysis of Gaia DR2 stars matched to the Mimir BSP stars finds a distance to GF 9 of 270 +/- 10 pc. No strong wavelength dependence of B-field orientation angle was found, contrary to previous claims.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures ApJ, accepte

Proper Motion of the Faint Star near KIC 8462852 (Boyajian's Star) - Not a Binary System

A faint star located 2 arcsec from KIC 8462852 was discovered in Keck 10 m adaptive optics imaging in the $JHK$ near-infrared (NIR) in 2014 by Boyajian et al. (2016). The closeness of the star to KIC 8462852 suggested the two could constitute a binary, which might have implications for the cause of the brightness dips seen by {\it Kepler} (Boyajian et al. (2016) and in ground-based optical studies Boyajian et al. (2018). Here, NIR imaging in 2017 using the Mimir instrument resolved the pair and enabled measuring their separation. The faint star had moved $67 \pm 7$ milliarcsec (mas) relative to KIC 8462852 since 2014. The relative proper motion of the faint star is $23.9 \pm 2.6$ mas yr$^{-1}$, for a tangential velocity of $45 \pm 5$ km s$^{-1}$ if it is at the same 390 pc distance as KIC 8462852. Circular velocity at the 750 AU current projected separation is $1.5$ km s$^{-1}$, hence the star pair cannot be bound.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Motif-Motif Perilaku Manusia dalam Perspektif Al-Qur’an (Kajian atas Kasus Fisiologis dan Spiritual)

Artikel ini bertujuan untuk melakukan analisis terhadap pembicaraan Al-Qur’an tekrait dengan aspek psikologis manusia sebagai pengetahuan yang meliputi berbagai motif perilakunya. Artikel ini berkesimpulan bahwa dalam Al-Qur’an membicarakan dua macam motif perilaku manusia; motif fisiologis dan motif mental spiritual. Motif fisiologis adalah motif yang berhubungan dengan kebutuhan fisiologis manusia. Sedangkan motif mental spiritual adalah motif yang berhubungan dengan kebutuhan psikologis dan spiritual manusia. Motif fisiologis dibagi menjadi dua bagian; motif menjadi diri dan motif menjaga kelangsungan keturunan. Sedangkan motif mental spiritual dibagi menjadi empat bagian; motif kepemilikan, motif persaingan, motif permusuhan dan motif beragama. Penellitian ini mengggunakan metode tematik berbasis kepustakaan dengan cara menelusuri ayat-ayat Al-Qur’an yang mengisyaratkan tentang berbagai motif perilaku manusia berdasarkan temuan ilmu psikologi. Penulis juga menghubungkan penafsiran ayat-ayat tersebut dengan pendapat para mufasir klasik dan kontemporer. Artikel ini sependapat dengan temuan Arifin yang melihat bahwa Al-Qur’an jauh lebih dahulu berbicara soal pengetahuan psikologis dibanding ketika ilmu tersebut baru pertama kali ditemukan

DIALOG ARGUMENTATIF NABI IBRAHIM DAN RAJA NAMRUD DALAM PERSPEKTIF AL-QUR’AN

Artikel ini bertujuan untuk meneliti model dialog argumentatif yang menitik beratkan pada proses adu argumentasi dari kedua belah pihak antara Ibrahim dan Raja Namrud sebagaimana diungkap dalam Al-Qur’an, di antaranya dapat ditemukan pada surah al Baqarah ayat 258 yang menceritakan secara singkat pertemuan Nabi Ibrahim dan Raja Namrud. Saat mereka bertemu,terjadilah dialog argumentatif yang pada akhirnya dimenangkan oleh Nabi Ibrahim. Temuan tersebut sekaligus mendukung teori Dawam Raharjo yang menyebutkan, ada beberapa cirikeistimewaan nabi Ibrahim. Pertama, ia memperoleh pengertian tentang Tuhan melalui proses perjuangan berpikir sejak usia muda dengan cara observasi dan pengamatan. Kedua, iamenyebarkan dan memperjuangkan keyakinannya tersebut kepada berbagai bangsa. Ketiga, ia adalah orang yang teruji dengan berbagai perintah dan larangan Allah, dan karena itu ia dipilihsebagai pemimpin umat manusia. Penelitian ini adalah penelitian pustaka (library research) dengan menggunakan pendekatan analisis semantik yang dikembangkan oleh al-Jurjani. Hasil dari riset ini mengatakan bahwa dialog yang dilakukan oleh Nabi Ibrahim menggunakan bahasa yang santun dan persuasif sebagai metode dakwah yang mencirikan agama tauhid

miRNAs as Regulators of Antidiabetic Effects of Fucoidans

open access articleDiabetes mellitus is a metabolic disease with a high mortality rate worldwide. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), and other small noncoding RNAs, serve as endogenous gene regulators through binding to specific sequences in RNA and modifying gene expression toward up- or down-regulation. miRNAs have become compelling therapeutic targets and play crucial roles in regulating the process of insulin resistance. Fucoidan has shown potential function as an a-amylase inhibitor, which may be beneficial in the management of type 2 diabetes mellitus. In recent years, many studies on fucoidan focused on the decrease in blood glucose levels caused by ingesting low-glucose food or glucose-lowering components. However, the importance of miRNAs as regulators of antidiabetic effects was rarely recognized. Hence, this review emphasizes the antidiabetic mechanisms of fucoidan through regulation of miRNAs. Fucoidan exerts a vital antidiabetic effect by regulation of miRNA expression and thus provides a novel biological target for future research

Genuinely Distributed Byzantine Machine Learning

Machine Learning (ML) solutions are nowadays distributed, according to the so-called server/worker architecture. One server holds the model parameters while several workers train the model. Clearly, such architecture is prone to various types of component failures, which can be all encompassed within the spectrum of a Byzantine behavior. Several approaches have been proposed recently to tolerate Byzantine workers. Yet all require trusting a central parameter server. We initiate in this paper the study of the ``general'' Byzantine-resilient distributed machine learning problem where no individual component is trusted. We show that this problem can be solved in an asynchronous system, despite the presence of $\frac{1}{3}$ Byzantine parameter servers and $\frac{1}{3}$ Byzantine workers (which is optimal). We present a new algorithm, ByzSGD, which solves the general Byzantine-resilient distributed machine learning problem by relying on three major schemes. The first, Scatter/Gather, is a communication scheme whose goal is to bound the maximum drift among models on correct servers. The second, Distributed Median Contraction (DMC), leverages the geometric properties of the median in high dimensional spaces to bring parameters within the correct servers back close to each other, ensuring learning convergence. The third, Minimum-Diameter Averaging (MDA), is a statistically-robust gradient aggregation rule whose goal is to tolerate Byzantine workers. MDA requires loose bound on the variance of non-Byzantine gradient estimates, compared to existing alternatives (e.g., Krum). Interestingly, ByzSGD ensures Byzantine resilience without adding communication rounds (on a normal path), compared to vanilla non-Byzantine alternatives. ByzSGD requires, however, a larger number of messages which, we show, can be reduced if we assume synchrony.Comment: This is a merge of arXiv:1905.03853 and arXiv:1911.07537; arXiv:1911.07537 will be retracte

Exploring Improvisational Approaches to Social Knowledge Acquisition

To build agents that can engage user in more open-ended social contexts, more and more attention has been focused on data-driven approaches to reduce the requirement of extensive, hand-authored behavioral content creation. However, one fundamental challenge of data-driven approaches, is acquiring human social interaction data with sufficient variety to capture more open-ended social interactions, as well as their coherency. Previous work has attempted to extract such social knowledge using crowdsourced narratives. This paper proposes an approach to acquire the knowledge of social interaction by integrating an improvisational theatre training technique into a crowdsourcing task aimed at collecting social narratives. The approach emphasizes theory of mind concepts, through an iterative prompting process about the mental states of characters in the narrative and paired writing, in order to encourage the authoring of diverse social interactions. To assess the effectiveness of integrating prompting and two-worker improvisation to the knowledge acquisition process, we systematically compare alternative ways to design the crowdsourcing task, including a) single worker vs. two workers authoring interaction between different characters in a given social context, and b) with or without prompts. Findings from 175 participants across two different social contexts show that the prompts and two-workers collaboration could significantly improve the diversity and the objective coherency of the narratives. The results presented in this paper can provide a rich set of diverse and coherent action sequences to inform the design of socially intelligent agents