Radio Planetary Nebulae in the Magellanic Clouds

We present preliminary results of our deep Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) radio-continuum survey of the Magellanic Clouds Planetary Nebulae.Comment: 2 pages 1 figure, to appear in Planetary Nebulae an Eye to the Future Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 28

Left ventricular false tendons: echocardiographic characteristics in the Polish population

Background: False tendon (FT) is described in a wide range (40% to 62%) of the examined hearts depending on age and additional heart abnormalities. On echocardiography, the range is even wider (1.6–78%), depending on study design and inclusion criteria. Ultrasonographic characteristics of left ventricular FTs in the Polish population are not well known. Materials and methods: Echocardiographic examinations of 1,679 consecutive patients were evaluated. All cases were classified according to American Society of Echocardiography Committee of Nomenclature and Standards Document on Identification of the Segments of the Heart Muscle. Results: In our study, fibrous structures in the lumen of the left ventricle were detected in 100 (6%) subjects of the study group. The age of the subjects ranged from 16 to 87 years (mean age 47.9), 50 were males and 50 were females. In 94% of the subjects, FT was a single structure. No patient had clinically evident arrhythmia. Conclusions: In the Polish population, FT can be identified in all age groups, and the prevalence is similar to that reported in the literature

Zero-Cost Proxies Meet Differentiable Architecture Search

Differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its ability to quickly discover promising architectures of deep neural networks even in very large search spaces. Despite its success, DARTS lacks robustness in certain cases, e.g. it may degenerate to trivial architectures with excessive parametric-free operations such as skip connection or random noise, leading to inferior performance. In particular, operation selection based on the magnitude of architectural parameters was recently proven to be fundamentally wrong showcasing the need to rethink this aspect. On the other hand, zero-cost proxies have been recently studied in the context of sample-based NAS showing promising results -- speeding up the search process drastically in some cases but also failing on some of the large search spaces typical for differentiable NAS. In this work we propose a novel operation selection paradigm in the context of differentiable NAS which utilises zero-cost proxies. Our perturbation-based zero-cost operation selection (Zero-Cost-PT) improves searching time and, in many cases, accuracy compared to the best available differentiable architecture search, regardless of the search space size. Specifically, we are able to find comparable architectures to DARTS-PT on the DARTS CNN search space while being over 40x faster (total searching time 25 minutes on a single GPU)

Semi-Automatic Cell Correspondence Analysis Using Iterative Point Cloud Registration

In the field of biophysics, deformation of in-vitro model tissues is an experimental technique to explore the response of tissue to a mechanical stimulus. However, automated registration before and after deformation is an ongoing obstacle for measuring the tissue response on the cellular level. Here, we propose to use an iterative point cloud registration (IPCR) method, for this problem. We apply the registration method on point clouds representing the cellular centers of mass, which are evaluated with aWatershed based segmentation of phase-contrast images of living tissue, acquired before and after deformation. Preliminary evaluation of this method on three data sets shows high accuracy, with 82% - 92% correctly registered cells, which outperforms coherent point drift (CPD). Hence, we propose the application of the IPCR method on the problem of cell correspondence analysis

High-temperature performance of ferritic steels in fireside corrosion regimes: temperature and deposits

The paper reports high temperature resistance of ferritic steels in fireside corrosion regime in terms of temperature and deposits aggressiveness. Four candidate power plant steels: 15Mo3, T22, T23 and T91 were exposed under simulated air-fired combustion environment for 1000 h. The tests were conducted at 600, 650 and 700 °C according to deposit-recoat test method. Post-exposed samples were examined via dimensional metrology (the main route to quantify metal loss), and mass change data were recorded to perform the study of kinetic behavior at elevated temperatures. Microstructural investigations using ESEM-EDX were performed in order to investigate corrosion degradation and thickness of the scales. The ranking of the steels from most to the least damage was 15Mo3 > T22 > T23 > T91 in all three temperatures. The highest rate of corrosion in all temperatures occurred under the screening deposit

Chemical Abundances of Planetary Nebulae in the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy

Spectrophotometry and imaging of the two planetary nebulae He2-436 and Wray16-423, recently discovered to be in the Sagittarius dwarf elliptical galaxy, are presented. Wray16-423 is a high excitation planetary nebula (PN) with a hot central star. In contrast He2-436 is a high density PN with a cooler central star and evidence of local dust, the extinction exceeding that for Wray16-423 by E(B-V)=0.28. The extinction to Wray16-423, (E(B-V)=0.14), is consistent with the extinction to the Sagittarius (Sgr) Dwarf. Both PN show Wolf-Rayet features in their spectra, although the lines are weak in Wray16-423. Images in [O III] and H-alpha+[N II], although affected by poor seeing, yield a diameter of 1.2'' for Wray16-423 after deconvolution; He~2-436 was unresolved. He2-436 has a luminosity about twice that of Wray16-423 and its size and high density suggest a younger PN. In order to reconcile the differing luminosity and nebular properties of the two PN with similar age progenitor stars, it is suggested that they are on He burning tracks The abundance pattern is very similar in both nebulae and shows an oxygen depletion of -0.4 dex with respect to the mean O abundance of Galactic PN and [O/H] = -0.6. The Sgr PN progenitor stars are representative of the higher metallicity tail of the Sgr population. The pattern of abundance depletion is similar to that in the only other PN in a dwarf galaxy companion of the Milky Way, that in Fornax, for which new spectra are presented. However the abundances are larger than for Galactic halo PN suggesting a later formation age. The O abundance of the Sgr galaxy deduced from its PN, shows similarities with that of dwarf ellipticals around M31, suggesting that this galaxy was a dwarf elliptical before its interaction with the Milky Way.Comment: 24 pages, Latex (aas2pp4.sty) including 5 postscript figures. To appear in Ap

BLOX : macro neural architecture search benchmark and algorithms

Neural architecture search (NAS) has been successfully used to design numerous high-performance neural networks. However, NAS is typically compute-intensive, so most existing approaches restrict the search to decide the operations and topological structure of a single block only, then the same block is stacked repeatedly to form an end-to-end model. Although such an approach reduces the size of search space, recent studies show that a macro search space, which allows blocks in a model to be different, can lead to better performance. To provide a systematic study of the performance of NAS algorithms on a macro search space, we release Blox – a benchmark that consists of 91k unique models trained on the CIFAR-100 dataset. The dataset also includes runtime measurements of all the models on a diverse set of hardware platforms. We perform extensive experiments to compare existing algorithms that are well studied on cell-based search spaces, with the emerging blockwise approaches that aim to make NAS scalable to much larger macro search spaces. The Blox benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/blox