Progress report on the ultra heavy cosmic ray experiment (AO178)

The Ultra Heavy Cosmic Ray Experiment (UHCRE) is based on a modular array of 192 side-viewing solid state nuclear track detector stacks. These stacks were mounted in sets of four in 48 pressure vessels employing sixteen peripheral Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) trays. The extended duration of the LDEF mission has resulted in a greatly enhanced scientific yield from the UHCRE. The geometry factor for high energy cosmic ray nuclei, allowing for Earth shadowing, was 30 sq m-sr, giving a total exposure factor of 170 sq m-sr-y at an orbital inclination of 28.4 degrees. Scanning results indicate that about 3000 cosmic ray nuclei in the charge region with Z greater than 65 were collected. This sample is more than ten times the current world data in the field (taken to be the data set from the HEAO-3 mission plus that from the Ariel-6 mission) and is sufficient to provide the world's first statistically significant sample of actinide (Z greater than 88) cosmic rays. Results to date are presented including details of ultra-heavy cosmic ray nuclei, analysis of pre-flight and post-flight calibration events and details of track response in the context of detector temperature history. The integrated effect of all temperature and age related latent track variations cause a maximum charge shift of +/- 0.8 e for uranium and +/- 0.6 e for the platinum-lead group. The precision of charge assignment as a function of energy is derived and evidence for remarkably good charge resolution achieved in the UHCRE is considered. Astrophysical implications of the UHCRE charge spectrum are discussed

When loanwords are not lone words: Using networks and hypergraphs to explore Māori loanwords in New Zealand English

Networks are being used to model an increasingly diverse range of realworld phenomena. This paper introduces an exploratory approach to studying loanwords in relation to one another, using networks of co-occurrence. While traditional studies treat individual loanwords as discrete items, we show that insights can be gained by focusing on the various loanwords that co-occur within each text in a corpus, especially when leveraging the notion of a hypergraph. Our research involves a case-study of New Zealand English (NZE), which borrows Indigenous Māori words on a large scale. We use a topic-constrained corpus to show that: (i) Māori loanword types tend not to occur by themselves in a text; (ii) infrequent loanwords are nearly always accompanied by frequent loanwords; and (iii) it is not uncommon for texts to contain a mixture of listed and unlisted loanwords, suggesting that NZE is still riding a wave of borrowing importation from Māori

A New Smartphone-Based Optic Nerve Head Biometric for Verification and Change Detection

Purpose: Lens adapted smartphones are being used regularly instead of ophthalmoscopes. The most common causes of preventable blindness in the world, which are glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy, can develop asymptomatic changes to the optic nerve head (ONH) especially in the developing world where there is a dire shortage of ophthalmologists but ubiquitous mobile phones. We developed a proof-of-concept ONH biometric (application [APP]) to use as a routine biometric on a mobile phone. The unique blood vessel pattern is verified if it maps on to a previously enrolled image. Methods: The iKey APP platform comprises three deep neural networks (DNNs) developed from anonymous ONH images: the graticule blood vessel (GBV) and the blood vessel specific feature (BVSF) DNNs were trained on unique blood vessel vectors. A non-feature specific (NFS) baseline ResNet50 DNN was trained for comparison. Results: Verification reached an accuracy of 97.06% with BVSF, 87.24% with GBV and 79.8% using NFS. Conclusions: A new ONH biometric was developed with a hybrid platform of ONH algorithms for use as a verification biometric on a smartphone. Failure to verify will alert the user to possible changes to the image, so that silent changes may be observed before sight threatening disease progresses. The APP retains a history of all ONH images. Future longitudinal analysis will explore the impact of ONH changes to the iKey biometric platform. Translational Relevance: Phones with iKey will host ONH images for biometric protection of both health and financial data. The ONH may be used for automatic screening by new disease detection DNNs

Early results from the ultra heavy cosmic ray experiment

Data extraction and analysis of the LDEF Ultra Heavy Cosmic Ray Experiment is continuing. Almost twice the pre LDEF world sample has been investigated and some details of the charge spectrum in the region from Z approximately 70 up to and including the actinides are presented. The early results indicate r process enhancement over solar system source abundances

Constituting monetary conservatives via the 'savings habit': New Labour and the British housing market bubble

The ongoing world credit crunch might well kill off the most recent bubble dynamics in the British housing market by driving prices systematically downwards from their 2007 peak. Nonetheless, the experience of that bubble still warrants analytical attention. The Labour Government might not have been responsible for consciously creating it, but it has certainly grasped the opportunities the bubble has provided in an attempt to enforce a process of agential change at the heart of the British economy. The key issue in this respect is the way in which the Government has challenged the legitimacy of passive welfare receipts in favour of establishing a welfare system based on incorporating the individual into an active asset-holding society. The housing market has taken on new political significance as a means for individuals first to acquire assets and then to accumulate wealth on the back of asset ownership. The ensuing integration of the housing market into an increasingly reconfigured welfare system has permeated into the politics of everyday life. It has been consistent with individuals remaking their political subjectivities in line with preferences for the type of conservative monetary policies that typically keep house price bubbles inflated

Deep De-Aliasing for Fast Compressive Sensing MRI

Fast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is highly in demand for many clinical applications in order to reduce the scanning cost and improve the patient experience. This can also potentially increase the image quality by reducing the motion artefacts and contrast washout. However, once an image field of view and the desired resolution are chosen, the minimum scanning time is normally determined by the requirement of acquiring sufficient raw data to meet the Nyquist-Shannon sampling criteria. Compressive Sensing (CS) theory has been perfectly matched to the MRI scanning sequence design with much less required raw data for the image reconstruction. Inspired by recent advances in deep learning for solving various inverse problems, we propose a conditional Generative Adversarial Networks-based deep learning framework for de-aliasing and reconstructing MRI images from highly undersampled data with great promise to accelerate the data acquisition process. By coupling an innovative content loss with the adversarial loss our de-aliasing results are more realistic. Furthermore, we propose a refinement learning procedure for training the generator network, which can stabilise the training with fast convergence and less parameter tuning. We demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art CS-MRI methods, in terms of reconstruction error and perceptual image quality. In addition, our method can reconstruct each image in 0.22ms--0.37ms, which is promising for real-time applications

Empleo de un modelo unidimensional para estimar el factor de efectividad en monolitos con recubrimiento catalitico no uniforme

En este trabajo se propone un modelo unidimensional (1D) para estimar el factor de efectividad en monolitos con depósito no uniforme (genéricamente bidimensionales 2D), denominado Modelo de dos Cuerpos (1D-2C)

Distance Education as socio-material assemblage: Place, distribution and aggregation

This paper outlines some of the material assemblages that are formed in international distance education (DE) in Africa. It offers a first exploratory study of materialities in DE and how they potentially distribute and aggregate to form a network to provide education. Through the use of interviews, students lived experiences are explored to unpack the multiplicity of networks needed to overcome the de‐aggregated and distributed institution. The multiplicity of networks that form in DE brings challenges that question how spaces become connected and disconnected and how different materialities shape DE. The materialities in DE produce forces and effects, such as translocal and transmobilites that are more than just the human actor, but extrude materials, networks, and connectives that transform continuously. The interconnectivities of the university and home or institution and students are brought together through enabling technology, but infrastructure does not always have the ability for the facilitation of aggregation

T-systems and Y-systems in integrable systems

The T and Y-systems are ubiquitous structures in classical and quantum integrable systems. They are difference equations having a variety of aspects related to commuting transfer matrices in solvable lattice models, q-characters of Kirillov-Reshetikhin modules of quantum affine algebras, cluster algebras with coefficients, periodicity conjectures of Zamolodchikov and others, dilogarithm identities in conformal field theory, difference analogue of L-operators in KP hierarchy, Stokes phenomena in 1d Schr\"odinger problem, AdS/CFT correspondence, Toda field equations on discrete space-time, Laplace sequence in discrete geometry, Fermionic character formulas and combinatorial completeness of Bethe ansatz, Q-system and ideal gas with exclusion statistics, analytic and thermodynamic Bethe ans\"atze, quantum transfer matrix method and so forth. This review article is a collection of short reviews on these topics which can be read more or less independently.Comment: 156 pages. Minor corrections including the last paragraph of sec.3.5, eqs.(4.1), (5.28), (9.37) and (13.54). The published version (JPA topical review) also needs these correction