UNLV New Horizons Band & The Las Vegas Flute Ensemble & The UNLV Community Band

Program listing performers and works performed

How does reviewing the evidence change veterinary surgeons' beliefs regarding the treatment of ovine footrot? A quantitative and qualitative study

Footrot is a widespread, infectious cause of lameness in sheep, with major economic and welfare costs. The aims of this research were: (i) to quantify how veterinary surgeons’ beliefs regarding the efficacy of two treatments for footrot changed following a review of the evidence (ii) to obtain a consensus opinion following group discussions (iii) to capture complementary qualitative data to place their beliefs within a broader clinical context. Grounded in a Bayesian statistical framework, probabilistic elicitation (roulette method) was used to quantify the beliefs of eleven veterinary surgeons during two one-day workshops. There was considerable heterogeneity in veterinary surgeons’ beliefs before they listened to a review of the evidence. After hearing the evidence, seven participants quantifiably changed their beliefs. In particular, two participants who initially believed that foot trimming with topical oxytetracycline was the better treatment, changed to entirely favour systemic and topical oxytetracycline instead. The results suggest that a substantial amount of the variation in beliefs related to differences in veterinary surgeons’ knowledge of the evidence. Although considerable differences in opinion still remained after the evidence review, with several participants having non-overlapping 95% credible intervals, both groups did achieve a consensus opinion. Two key findings from the qualitative data were: (i) veterinary surgeons believed that farmers are unlikely to actively seek advice on lameness, suggesting a proactive veterinary approach is required (ii) more attention could be given to improving the way in which veterinary advice is delivered to farmers. In summary this study has: (i) demonstrated a practical method for probabilistically quantifying how veterinary surgeons’ beliefs change (ii) revealed that the evidence that currently exists is capable of changing veterinary opinion (iii) suggested that improved transfer of research knowledge into veterinary practice is needed (iv) identified some potential obstacles to the implementation of veterinary advice by farmers

Examining the Connections within the Startup Ecosystem: A Case Study of St. Louis

This paper documents the resurgence of entrepreneurial activity in St. Louis by reporting on the collaboration and local learning within the startup community. This activity is happening both between entrepreneurs and between organizations that provide support, such as mentoring and funding, to entrepreneurs. As these connections deepen, the strength of the entrepreneurial ecosystem grows. Another finding from the research is that activity-based events, where entrepreneurs have the chance to use and practice the skills needed to grow their businesses, are most useful. St. Louis provides a multitude of these activities, such as Startup Weekend, 1 Million Cups, Code Until Dawn, StartLouis, and GlobalHack. Some of these are St. Louis specific, but others have nationwide or global operations, providing important implications for other cities

The linearization of the Kodama state

We study the question of whether the linearization of the Kodama state around classical deSitter spacetime is normalizable in the inner product of the theory of linearized gravitons on deSitter spacetime. We find the answer is no in the Lorentzian theory. However, in the Euclidean theory the corresponding linearized Kodama state is delta-functional normalizable. We discuss whether this result invalidates the conjecture that the full Kodama state is a good physical state for quantum gravity with positive cosmological constant.Comment: 14 pages, statement on the corresponding Yang-Mills case correcte

Improved performance of the LHCb Outer Tracker in LHC Run 2

The LHCb Outer Tracker is a gaseous detector covering an area of $5\times 6 m^2$ with 12 double layers of straw tubes. The performance of the detector is presented based on data of the LHC Run 2 running period from 2015 and 2016. Occupancies and operational experience for data collected in $p p$, pPb and PbPb collisions are described. An updated study of the ageing effects is presented showing no signs of gain deterioration or other radiation damage effects. In addition several improvements with respect to LHC Run 1 data taking are introduced. A novel real-time calibration of the time-alignment of the detector and the alignment of the single monolayers composing detector modules are presented, improving the drift-time and position resolution of the detector by 20\%. Finally, a potential use of the improved resolution for the timing of charged tracks is described, showing the possibility to identify low-momentum hadrons with their time-of-flight.Comment: 29 pages, 20 figures, minor changes to match the published versio

The ATLAS SCT grounding and shielding concept and implementation

This paper presents a complete description of Virgo, the French-Italian gravitational wave detector. The detector, built at Cascina, near Pisa (Italy), is a very large Michelson interferometer, with 3 km-long arms. In this paper, following a presentation of the physics requirements, leading to the specifications for the construction of the detector, a detailed description of all its different elements is given. These include civil engineering infrastructures, a huge ultra-high vacuum (UHV) chamber (about 6000 cubic metres), all of the optical components, including high quality mirrors and their seismic isolating suspensions, all of the electronics required to control the interferometer and for signal detection. The expected performances of these different elements are given, leading to an overall sensitivity curve as a function of the incoming gravitational wave frequency. This description represents the detector as built and used in the first data-taking runs. Improvements in different parts have been and continue to be performed, leading to better sensitivities. These will be detailed in a forthcoming paper

Presentation by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas: College of Fine Arts

Program listing performers and works performe

Chaos in an Exact Relativistic 3-body Self-Gravitating System

We consider the problem of three body motion for a relativistic one-dimensional self-gravitating system. After describing the canonical decomposition of the action, we find an exact expression for the 3-body Hamiltonian, implicitly determined in terms of the four coordinate and momentum degrees of freedom in the system. Non-relativistically these degrees of freedom can be rewritten in terms of a single particle moving in a two-dimensional hexagonal well. We find the exact relativistic generalization of this potential, along with its post-Newtonian approximation. We then specialize to the equal mass case and numerically solve the equations of motion that follow from the Hamiltonian. Working in hexagonal-well coordinates, we obtaining orbits in both the hexagonal and 3-body representations of the system, and plot the Poincare sections as a function of the relativistic energy parameter $\eta$. We find two broad categories of periodic and quasi-periodic motions that we refer to as the annulus and pretzel patterns, as well as a set of chaotic motions that appear in the region of phase-space between these two types. Despite the high degree of non-linearity in the relativistic system, we find that the the global structure of its phase space remains qualitatively the same as its non-relativisitic counterpart for all values of $\eta$ that we could study. However the relativistic system has a weaker symmetry and so its Poincare section develops an asymmetric distortion that increases with increasing $\eta$. For the post-Newtonian system we find that it experiences a KAM breakdown for $\eta \simeq 0.26$: above which the near integrable regions degenerate into chaos.Comment: latex, 65 pages, 36 figures, high-resolution figures available upon reques