Object-oriented construction of a multigrid electronic-structure code with Fortran 90

We describe the object-oriented implementation of a higher-order finite-difference density-functional code in Fortran 90. Object-oriented models of grid and related objects are constructed and employed for the implementation of an efficient one-way multigrid method we have recently proposed for the density-functional electronic-structure calculations. Detailed analysis of performance and strategy of the one-way multigrid scheme will be presented.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Comput. Phys. Com

Trust your instincts:The relationship between intuitive decision making and happiness

Epstein (1994; 2003) proposed that there are two cognitive information processing systems that operate in parallel: the intuitive thinking style and the rational thinking style. Decisional fit occurs when the preferred thinking style is applied to making a decision and research has shown that this fit increases the value of the outcome of a decision. Additionally, decisional fit leads to less regret, even when post hoc evaluations show the decision to be incorrect. It has not yet been determined whether decisional fit correlates with greater happiness and hence, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the difference between styles of thinking, styles of decision making and the impact of decisional fit on happiness scores. Individual differences in thinking and decision style were measured using an online interactive questionnaire (N = 100), and an ANOVA, hierarchical multiple regression, and a series of t-tests, were used to investigate the relationship between thinking style, decision style, decisional fit, and happiness, thereby addressing a gap in the existing literature. The major findings from the current study show that intuitive thinking has a strong positive correlation with happiness; that intuitive thinkers are more likely to utilize intuitive decisional style, than rational thinkers; and that when both rational and intuitive thinkers experienced decisional fit, higher ratings of happiness were reported. Explanations and recommendations for future studies are outlined in the discussion

Anisotropic Acoustic Plasmons in Black Phosphorus

Recently, it was demonstrated that a graphene/dielectric/metal configuration can support acoustic plasmons, which exhibit extreme plasmon confinement an order of magnitude higher than that of conventional graphene plasmons. Here, we investigate acoustic plasmons supported in a monolayer and multilayers of black phosphorus (BP) placed just a few nanometers above a conducting plate. In the presence of a conducting plate, the acoustic plasmon dispersion for the armchair direction is found to exhibit the characteristic linear scaling in the mid- and far-infrared regime while it largely deviates from that in the long wavelength limit and near-infrared regime. For the zigzag direction, such scaling behavior is not evident due to relatively tighter plasmon confinement. Further, we demonstrate a new design for an acoustic plasmon resonator that exhibits higher plasmon confinement and resonance efficiency than BP ribbon resonators in the mid-infrared and longer wavelength regime. Theoretical framework and new resonator design studied here provide a practical route toward the experimental verification of the acoustic plasmons in BP and open up the possibility to develop novel plasmonic and optoelectronic devices that can leverage its strong in-plane anisotropy and thickness-dependent band gap

Transduktion und Zellzyklusregulation durch das rekombinante Tat-p27(KIP1)-Fusionsprotein in Neuroblastomzellen

Das Neuroblastom ist eine der häufigsten Tumorerkrankung im Kindesalter. Das Tumorsuppressorprotein, p27(KIP1), ist ein prognostischer Faktor bei Neuroblastomerkrankungen und korreliert positiv mit einer guten Prognose der Erkrankung. Das Tat-Fusionsprotein ist ein erst kürzlich beschriebenes Konstrukt für die Proteintransduktion und stellt eine Alternative zur konventionellen Gentherapie dar. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde das Tat-p27(KIP1)-Fusionsprotein hergestellt und dieses in die Neuroblastomzellen substituiert und die darausfolgende Konsequenz bezüglich des Zellzyklus untersucht, um so die prognosebestimmende Wirkung des p27(KIP1)-Proteins bei Neuroblastomen besser verstehen zu können

Crossing Boundaries and Valuing Diversity

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

EJN in the digital age: introducing the ‘EJN blog’

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88053/1/j.1460-9568.2011.07945.x.pd

Remote teaching of Ume Sámi to young learners in Sweden

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Environmental enteric dysfunction and the fecal microbiota in malawian children

Environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) is often measured with a dual sugar absorption test and implicated as a causative factor in childhood stunting. Disturbances in the gut microbiota are hypothesized to be a mechanism by which EED is exacerbated, although this supposition lacks support. We performed 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing of fecal samples from 81 rural Malawian children with varying degrees of EED to determine which bacterial taxa were associated with EED. At the phyla level, Proteobacteria abundance is reduced with severe EED. Among bacterial genera, Megasphaera, Mitsuokella, and Sutterella were higher in EED and Succinivibrio, Klebsiella, and Clostridium_XI were lower in EED. Bacterial diversity did not vary with the extent of EED. Though EED is a condition that is typically believed to affect the proximal small bowel, and our focus was on stool, our data do suggest that there are intraluminal microbial differences that reflect, or plausibly lead to, EED

RGBD-Dog: Predicting Canine Pose from RGBD Sensors

The automatic extraction of animal 3D pose from images without markers is of interest in a range of scientific fields. Most work to date predicts animal pose from RGB images, based on 2D labelling of joint positions. However, due to the difficult nature of obtaining training data, no ground truth dataset of 3D animal motion is available to quantitatively evaluate these approaches. In addition, a lack of 3D animal pose data also makes it difficult to train 3D pose-prediction methods in a similar manner to the popular field of body-pose prediction. In our work, we focus on the problem of 3D canine pose estimation from RGBD images, recording a diverse range of dog breeds with several Microsoft Kinect v2s, simultaneously obtaining the 3D ground truth skeleton via a motion capture system. We generate a dataset of synthetic RGBD images from this data. A stacked hourglass network is trained to predict 3D joint locations, which is then constrained using prior models of shape and pose. We evaluate our model on both synthetic and real RGBD images and compare our results to previously published work fitting canine models to images. Finally, despite our training set consisting only of dog data, visual inspection implies that our network can produce good predictions for images of other quadrupeds – e.g. horses or cats – when their pose is similar to that contained in our training set