8,457 research outputs found
The Application of the Montage Image Mosaic Engine To The Visualization Of Astronomical Images
The Montage Image Mosaic Engine was designed as a scalable toolkit, written
in C for performance and portability across *nix platforms, that assembles FITS
images into mosaics. The code is freely available and has been widely used in
the astronomy and IT communities for research, product generation and for
developing next-generation cyber-infrastructure. Recently, it has begun to
finding applicability in the field of visualization. This has come about
because the toolkit design allows easy integration into scalable systems that
process data for subsequent visualization in a browser or client. And it
includes a visualization tool suitable for automation and for integration into
Python: mViewer creates, with a single command, complex multi-color images
overlaid with coordinate displays, labels, and observation footprints, and
includes an adaptive image histogram equalization method that preserves the
structure of a stretched image over its dynamic range. The Montage toolkit
contains functionality originally developed to support the creation and
management of mosaics but which also offers value to visualization: a
background rectification algorithm that reveals the faint structure in an
image; and tools for creating cutout and down-sampled versions of large images.
Version 5 of Montage offers support for visualizing data written in HEALPix
sky-tessellation scheme, and functionality for processing and organizing images
to comply with the TOAST sky-tessellation scheme required for consumption by
the World Wide Telescope (WWT). Four online tutorials enable readers to
reproduce and extend all the visualizations presented in this paper.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures; accepted for publication in the PASP Special
Focus Issue: Techniques and Methods for Astrophysical Data Visualizatio
The sustainable delivery of sexual violence prevention education in schools
Sexual violence is a crime that cannot be ignored: it causes our communities significant
consequences including heavy economic costs, and evidence of its effects can be seen in our
criminal justice system, public health system, Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC),
and education system, particularly in our schools. Many agencies throughout New Zealand
work to end sexual violence. Auckland-based Rape Prevention Education: Whakatu Mauri
(RPE) is one such agency, and is committed to preventing sexual violence by providing a
range of programmes and initiatives, information, education, and advocacy to a broad range
of audiences.
Up until early 2014 RPE employed one or two full-time positions dedicated to co-ordinating
and training a large pool (up to 15) of educators on casual contracts to deliver their main
school-based programmes, BodySafe – approximately 450 modules per year, delivered to
some 20 high schools. Each year several of the contract educators, many of whom were
tertiary students, found secure full time employment elsewhere. To retain sufficient
contract educators to deliver its BodySafe contract meant that RPE had to recruit, induct
and train new educators two to three times every year. This model was expensive, resource
intense, and ultimately untenable. The Executive Director and core staff at RPE wanted to
develop a more efficient and stable model of delivery that fitted its scarce resources.
To enable RPE to know what the most efficient model was nationally and internationally,
with Ministry of Justice funding, RPE commissioned Massey University to undertake this
report reviewing national and international research on sexual violence prevention
education (SVPE). [Background from Executive Summary.]Rape Prevention Education: Whakatu Maur
A Cost-Benefit Study of Doing Astrophysics On The Cloud: Production of Image Mosaics
Utility grids such as the Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 clouds offer computational and storage resources that can be used on-demand for a fee by compute- and data-intensive applications. The cost of running an application on such a cloud depends on the compute, storage and communication resources it will provision and consume. Different execution plans of the same application may result in significantly different costs. We studied via simulation the cost performance trade-offs of different execution and resource provisioning plans by creating, under the Amazon cloud fee structure, mosaics with the Montage image mosaic engine, a widely used data- and compute-intensive application. Specifically, we studied the cost of building mosaics of 2MASS data that have sizes of 1, 2 and 4 square degrees, and a 2MASS all-sky mosaic. These are examples of mosaics commonly generated by astronomers. We also study these trade-offs in the context of the storage and communication fees of Amazon S3 when used for long-term application data archiving. Our results show that by provisioning the right amount of storage and compute resources cost can be significantly reduced with no significant impact on application performance
Influences on the fraction of hydrophobic and hydrophilic black carbon in the atmosphere
Black carbon (BC) is a short term climate forcer that directly warms the atmosphere, slows convection, and hinders quantification of the effect of greenhouse gases on climate change. The atmospheric lifetime of BC particles with respect to nucleation scavenging in clouds is controlled by their ability to serve as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). To serve as CCN under typical conditions, hydrophobic BC particles must acquire hygroscopic coatings. However, the quantitative relationship between coatings and hygroscopic properties for ambient BC particles is not known nor is the time scale for hydrophobic-to-hydrophilic conversion. Here we introduce a method for measuring the hygroscopicity of externally and internally mixed BC particles by coupling a single particle soot photometer with a humidified tandem differential mobility analyzer. We test this technique using uncoated and coated laboratory generated model BC compounds and apply it to characterize the hygroscopicity distribution of ambient BC particles. From these data we derive that the observed number fraction of BC that is CCN active at 0.2% supersaturation is generally low in an urban area near sources and that it varies with the trajectory of the airmass. We anticipate that our method can be combined with measures of air parcel physical and photochemical age to provide the first quantitative estimates for characterizing hydrophobic-to-hydrophilic conversion rates in the atmosphere.Peer reviewe
Simulating Ability: Representing Skills in Games
Throughout the history of games, representing the abilities of the various
agents acting on behalf of the players has been a central concern. With
increasingly sophisticated games emerging, these simulations have become more
realistic, but the underlying mechanisms are still, to a large extent, of an ad
hoc nature. This paper proposes using a logistic model from psychometrics as a
unified mechanism for task resolution in simulation-oriented games
The Montage Image Mosaic Service: Custom Image Mosaics On-Demand
The Montage software suite has proven extremely useful as a general engine for reprojecting, background matching, and mosaicking astronomical image data from a wide variety of sources. The processing algorithms support all common World Coordinate System (WCS) projections and have been shown to be both astrometrically accurate and flux conserving. The background ‘matching’ algorithm does not remove background flux but rather finds the best compromise background based on all the input and matches the individual images to that. The Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech, has now wrapped the Montage software as a CGI service and provided a compute and request management infrastructure capable of producing approximately 2 TBytes / day of image mosaic output (e.g. from 2MASS and SDSS data). Besides the basic Montage engine, this service makes use of a 16-node LINUX cluster (dual processor, dual core) and the ROME request management software developed by the National Virtual Observatory (NVO). ROME uses EJB/database technology to manage user requests, queue processing and load balance between users, and managing job monitoring and user notification. The Montage service will be extended to process userdefined data collections, including private data uploads
Alien Registration- Good, George G. (New Limerick, Aroostook County)
https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/34417/thumbnail.jp
Information filtering via biased heat conduction
Heat conduction process has recently found its application in personalized
recommendation [T. Zhou \emph{et al.}, PNAS 107, 4511 (2010)], which is of high
diversity but low accuracy. By decreasing the temperatures of small-degree
objects, we present an improved algorithm, called biased heat conduction (BHC),
which could simultaneously enhance the accuracy and diversity. Extensive
experimental analyses demonstrate that the accuracy on MovieLens, Netflix and
Delicious datasets could be improved by 43.5%, 55.4% and 19.2% compared with
the standard heat conduction algorithm, and the diversity is also increased or
approximately unchanged. Further statistical analyses suggest that the present
algorithm could simultaneously identify users' mainstream and special tastes,
resulting in better performance than the standard heat conduction algorithm.
This work provides a creditable way for highly efficient information filtering.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
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