7,370 research outputs found
Prevalence and diagnostic characteristics of non-clinical mitral regurgitation murmurs in North American Whippets
Continuous Forest Fire Propagation in a Local Small World Network Model
This paper presents the development of a new continuous forest fire model
implemented as a weighted local small-world network approach. This new approach
was designed to simulate fire patterns in real, heterogeneous landscapes. The
wildland fire spread is simulated on a square lattice in which each cell
represents an area of the land's surface. The interaction between burning and
non-burning cells, in the present work induced by flame radiation, may be
extended well beyond nearest neighbors. It depends on local conditions of
topography and vegetation types. An approach based on a solid flame model is
used to predict the radiative heat flux from the flame generated by the burning
of each site towards its neighbors. The weighting procedure takes into account
the self-degradation of the tree and the ignition processes of a combustible
cell through time. The model is tested on a field presenting a range of slopes
and with data collected from a real wildfire scenario. The critical behavior of
the spreading process is investigated
Quantile regression for mixed models with an application to examine blood pressure trends in China
Cardiometabolic diseases have substantially increased in China in the past 20
years and blood pressure is a primary modifiable risk factor. Using data from
the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we examine blood pressure trends in
China from 1991 to 2009, with a concentration on age cohorts and urbanicity.
Very large values of blood pressure are of interest, so we model the
conditional quantile functions of systolic and diastolic blood pressure. This
allows the covariate effects in the middle of the distribution to vary from
those in the upper tail, the focal point of our analysis. We join the
distributions of systolic and diastolic blood pressure using a copula, which
permits the relationships between the covariates and the two responses to share
information and enables probabilistic statements about systolic and diastolic
blood pressure jointly. Our copula maintains the marginal distributions of the
group quantile effects while accounting for within-subject dependence, enabling
inference at the population and subject levels. Our population-level regression
effects change across quantile level, year and blood pressure type, providing a
rich environment for inference. To our knowledge, this is the first quantile
function model to explicitly model within-subject autocorrelation and is the
first quantile function approach that simultaneously models multivariate
conditional response. We find that the association between high blood pressure
and living in an urban area has evolved from positive to negative, with the
strongest changes occurring in the upper tail. The increase in urbanization
over the last twenty years coupled with the transition from the positive
association between urbanization and blood pressure in earlier years to a more
uniform association with urbanization suggests increasing blood pressure over
time throughout China, even in less urbanized areas. Our methods are available
in the R package BSquare.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS841 in the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
The glitch activity of neutron stars
We present a statistical study of the glitch population and the behaviour of
the glitch activity across the known population of neutron stars. An unbiased
glitch database was put together based on systematic searches of radio timing
data of 898 rotation-powered pulsars obtained with the Jodrell Bank and Parkes
observatories. Glitches identified in similar searches of 5 magnetars were also
included. The database contains 384 glitches found in the rotation of 141 of
these neutron stars. We confirm that the glitch size distribution is at least
bimodal, with one sharp peak at approximately , which we
call large glitches, and a broader distribution of smaller glitches. We also
explored how the glitch activity , defined as the mean
frequency increment per unit of time due to glitches, correlates with the spin
frequency , spin-down rate , and various combinations of
these, such as energy loss rate, magnetic field, and spin-down age. It is found
that the activity is insensitive to the magnetic field and that it correlates
strongly with the energy loss rate, though magnetars deviate from the trend
defined by the rotation-powered pulsars. However, we find that a constant ratio
is consistent with the behaviour
of all rotation-powered pulsars and magnetars. This relation is dominated by
large glitches, which occur at a rate directly proportional to .
The only exception are the rotation-powered pulsars with the highest values of
, such as the Crab pulsar and PSR B054069, which exhibit a much
smaller glitch activity, intrinsically different from each other and from the
rest of the population. The activity due to small glitches also shows an
increasing trend with , but this relation is biased by selection
effects.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&
Berry Phase Quantum Thermometer
We show how Berry phase can be used to construct an ultra-high precision
quantum thermometer. An important advantage of our scheme is that there is no
need for the thermometer to acquire thermal equilibrium with the sample. This
reduces measurement times and avoids precision limitations.Comment: Updated to published version. I. Fuentes previously published as I.
Fuentes-Guridi and I. Fuentes-Schulle
Criterios generales de intervención en monumentos de piedra
La piedra ha sido utilizada desde antiguo como material de construcción por su durabilidad y resistencia. En la actualidad, la contaminación ha producido graves alteraciones en la misma, poniendo en peligro la integridad de nuestro patrimonio histórico-artÃstico. El proceso de intervención deberá incluir los tratamientos adecuados que devuelvan al material su resistencia original y la cohesión entre sus partÃculas teniendo en cuenta que cada obra presenta una problemática diferente, sin olvidar la importancia de un adecuado y continuo mantenimiento.Stone has been used since remote ages as a construction material due to its durability and resistance. Nowadays, pollution is introducing severe damage in stone works and is al so harming the artistic legacy of our cities. This paper proposes a restoration process that includes adequate treatment to restore the original resistance and cohesion of the material. It al so stresses the importance of an adequate maintenance process
Entanglement of Dirac fields in an expanding spacetime
We study the entanglement generated between Dirac modes in a 2-dimensional
conformally flat Robertson-Walker universe. We find radical qualitative
differences between the bosonic and fermionic entanglement generated by the
expansion. The particular way in which fermionic fields get entangled encodes
more information about the underlying space-time than the bosonic case, thereby
allowing us to reconstruct the parameters of the history of the expansion. This
highlights the importance of bosonic/fermionic statistics to account for
relativistic effects on the entanglement of quantum fields.Comment: revtex4, 7 figures, I.F. previously published as Fuentes-Guridi and
Fuentes-Schuller. Journal reference update
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