An Extensible Timing Infrastructure for Adaptive Large-scale Applications

Real-time access to accurate and reliable timing information is necessary to profile scientific applications, and crucial as simulations become increasingly complex, adaptive, and large-scale. The Cactus Framework provides flexible and extensible capabilities for timing information through a well designed infrastructure and timing API. Applications built with Cactus automatically gain access to built-in timers, such as gettimeofday and getrusage, system-specific hardware clocks, and high-level interfaces such as PAPI. We describe the Cactus timer interface, its motivation, and its implementation. We then demonstrate how this timing information can be used by an example scientific application to profile itself, and to dynamically adapt itself to a changing environment at run time

The ignition hazard to urban interiors during nuclear attack due to burning curtain fragments transported by blast

There exists some uncertainty at present, in the formulation of civil defense doctrine, as to whether it is advisable for window curtains to be closed or open during nuclear attack. Closed curtains would be in position to intercept some major portion, or all, of the thermal radiation pulse that would otherwise enter through the window and ignite kindling fuels within the room. But because they did so they would probably ignite and the flaming curtains, propelled into the room by the blast wave, could represent an even more serious ignition hazard than would occur if the window remained uncovered, and the curtains uninvolved. Because of this uncertainty, limited investigation, was undertaken to gain information concerning the ignition hazard represented by burning curtain fragments carried on a blast wave into typical urban interiors. The specific objective of the research described in this report was to investigate the propensity of burning curtains, carried into typical urban interiors by blast waves, to cause ignitions within the interiors capable of leading to flashover. The situation simulated in the experiments was one in which the closed curtains, having been ignited by thermal radiation from a nuclear weapon explosion, were carried, still burning, into a room in which none of the kindling fuels had been ignited owing to interception of most of the thermal pulse by the curtains. The blast wave, transporting the burning curtain fragments, was assumed to originate from the same weapon producing the thermal pulse, so that an appropriate delay time intervened, in each experiment, between curtain ignition and blast arrival

Differential Effects of Viewpoint on Object-Driven Activation in Dorsal and Ventral Streams

AbstractUsing fMRI, we showed that an area in the ventral temporo-occipital cortex (area vTO), which is part of the human homolog of the ventral stream of visual processing, exhibited priming for both identical and depth-rotated images of objects. This pattern of activation in area vTO corresponded to performance in a behavioral matching task. An area in the caudal part of the intraparietal sulcus (area cIPS) also showed priming, but only with identical images of objects. This dorsal-stream area treated rotated images as new objects. The difference in the pattern of priming-related activation in the two areas may reflect the respective roles of the ventral and dorsal streams in object recognition and object-directed action

Regulating mobility in the Peruvian Andes: road safety, social hierarchies and governmentality in Cusco's rural provinces

Significant developments in road safety regulation have taken place in Peru during recent years, reflecting international efforts to reduce worldwide fatalities and injuries. A series of measures has sought to bring about transformations in governmentality among passengers on public transport. Seen ethnographically, these have had uneven success on the ground. In rural provinces of Cusco, situated histories and sociologies of mobility have sometimes led to ambivalence, unobtrusive resistance or reinforcement of discriminatory attitudes. This article explores how reception of the regulations has been refracted through class, ethnic and geographical divisions within Peruvian society, and argues for both the applied and theoretical utility of anthropological study of road safety governance

Black hole hair formation in shift-symmetric generalised scalar-tensor gravity

A linear coupling between a scalar field and the Gauss–Bonnet invariant is the only known interaction term between a scalar and the metric that: respects shift symmetry; does not lead to higher order equations; inevitably introduces black hole hair in asymptotically flat, 4-dimensional spacetimes. Here we focus on the simplest theory that includes such a term and we explore the dynamical formation of scalar hair. In particular, we work in the decoupling limit that neglects the backreaction of the scalar onto the metric and evolve the scalar configuration numerically in the background of a Schwarzschild black hole and a collapsing dust star described by the Oppenheimer–Snyder solution. For all types of initial data that we consider, the scalar relaxes at late times to the known, static, analytic configuration that is associated with a hairy, spherically symmetric black hole. This suggests that the corresponding black hole solutions are indeed endpoints of collapse

Science, Property, And Kinship In Repatriation Debates

A striking feature of debates concerning the disposition of N ative A merican human remains is their invocation of the conventional domains of science, property, and kinship. Strong political claims about repatriation tend to assert the primacy of one domain over the others. Yet in contemporary North A merican social contexts, these domains have heterarchical relations in which no single perspective dominates, rather than hierarchical relations organized by a fixed ranking system. Resolving disputes in heterarchical systems requires negotiation across domains rather than privileging one domain. This comment examines how the relationships between these domains influence debates on repatriation. It also sheds light on how A mericans make political claims.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98136/1/muan1110.pd

Investigation of the use of a sensor bracelet for the presymptomatic detection of changes in physiological parameters related to COVID-19: an interim analysis of a prospective cohort study (COVI-GAPP).

OBJECTIVES We investigated machinelearningbased identification of presymptomatic COVID-19 and detection of infection-related changes in physiology using a wearable device. DESIGN Interim analysis of a prospective cohort study. SETTING, PARTICIPANTS AND INTERVENTIONS Participants from a national cohort study in Liechtenstein were included. Nightly they wore the Ava-bracelet that measured respiratory rate (RR), heart rate (HR), HR variability (HRV), wrist-skin temperature (WST) and skin perfusion. SARS-CoV-2 infection was diagnosed by molecular and/or serological assays. RESULTS A total of 1.5 million hours of physiological data were recorded from 1163 participants (mean age 44±5.5 years). COVID-19 was confirmed in 127 participants of which, 66 (52%) had worn their device from baseline to symptom onset (SO) and were included in this analysis. Multi-level modelling revealed significant changes in five (RR, HR, HRV, HRV ratio and WST) device-measured physiological parameters during the incubation, presymptomatic, symptomatic and recovery periods of COVID-19 compared with baseline. The training set represented an 8-day long instance extracted from day 10 to day 2 before SO. The training set consisted of 40 days measurements from 66 participants. Based on a random split, the test set included 30% of participants and 70% were selected for the training set. The developed long short-term memory (LSTM) based recurrent neural network (RNN) algorithm had a recall (sensitivity) of 0.73 in the training set and 0.68 in the testing set when detecting COVID-19 up to 2 days prior to SO. CONCLUSION Wearable sensor technology can enable COVID-19 detection during the presymptomatic period. Our proposed RNN algorithm identified 68% of COVID-19 positive participants 2 days prior to SO and will be further trained and validated in a randomised, single-blinded, two-period, two-sequence crossover trial. Trial registration number ISRCTN51255782; Pre-results

Decadal fates and impacts of nitrogen additions on temperate forest carbon storage: a data-model comparison

To accurately capture the impacts of nitrogen (N) on the land carbon (C) sink in Earth system models, model responses to both N limitation and ecosystem N additions (e.g., from atmospheric N deposition and fertilizer) need to be evaluated. The response of the land C sink to N additions depends on the fate of these additions: that is, how much of the added N is lost from the ecosystem through N loss pathways or recovered and used to increase C storage in plants and soils. Here, we evaluate the C&ndash;N dynamics of the latest version of a global land model, the Community Land Model version 5 (CLM5), and how they vary when ecosystems have large N inputs and losses (i.e., an open N cycle) or small N inputs and losses (i.e., a closed N cycle). This comparison allows us to identify potential improvements to CLM5 that would apply to simulated N cycles along the open-to-closed spectrum. We also compare the short- (&lt;&thinsp;3 years) and longer-term (5&ndash;17 years) N fates in CLM5 against observations from 13 long-term 15N tracer addition experiments at eight temperate forest sites. Simulations using both open and closed N cycles overestimated plant N recovery following N additions. In particular, the model configuration with a closed N cycle simulated that plants acquired more than twice the amount of added N recovered in 15N tracer studies on short timescales (CLM5: 46&plusmn;12&thinsp;%; observations: 18&plusmn;12&thinsp;%; mean across sites &plusmn;1 standard deviation) and almost twice as much on longer timescales (CLM5: 23&plusmn;6&thinsp;%; observations: 13&plusmn;5&thinsp;%). Soil N recoveries in simulations with closed N cycles were closer to observations in the short term (CLM5: 40&plusmn;10&thinsp;%; observations: 54&plusmn;22&thinsp;%) but smaller than observations in the long term (CLM5: 59&plusmn;15&thinsp;%; observations: 69&plusmn;18&thinsp;%). Simulations with open N cycles estimated similar patterns in plant and soil N recovery, except that soil N recovery was also smaller than observations in the short term. In both open and closed sets of simulations, soil N recoveries in CLM5 occurred from the cycling of N through plants rather than through direct immobilization in the soil, as is often indicated by tracer studies. Although CLM5 greatly overestimated plant N recovery, the simulated increase in C stocks to recovered N was not much larger than estimated by observations, largely because the model's assumed C:N ratio for wood was nearly half that suggested by measurements at the field sites. Overall, results suggest that simulating accurate ecosystem responses to changes in N additions requires increasing soil competition for N relative to plants and examining model assumptions of C:N stoichiometry, which should also improve model estimates of other terrestrial C&ndash;N processes and interactions.</p