Spectral cues are necessary to encode azimuthal auditory space in the mouse superior colliculus.

Sound localization plays a critical role in animal survival. Three cues can be used to compute sound direction: interaural timing differences (ITDs), interaural level differences (ILDs) and the direction-dependent spectral filtering by the head and pinnae (spectral cues). Little is known about how spectral cues contribute to the neural encoding of auditory space. Here we report on auditory space encoding in the mouse superior colliculus (SC). We show that the mouse SC contains neurons with spatially-restricted receptive fields (RFs) that form an azimuthal topographic map. We found that frontal RFs require spectral cues and lateral RFs require ILDs. The neurons with frontal RFs have frequency tunings that match the spectral structure of the specific head and pinna filter for sound coming from the front. These results demonstrate that patterned spectral cues in combination with ILDs give rise to the topographic map of azimuthal auditory space

Historical Water-Quality Data for the High Plains Regional Ground-Water Study Area in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, 1930–98

The High Plains aquifer underlies 174,000 square miles in parts of eight States and includes eight primary hydrogeologic units, including the well-known Ogallala Formation. The High Plains aquifer is an important resource, providing water for 27 percent of the Nation’s irrigated agricul¬tural lands in an otherwise dry landscape. Since the 1980’s there has been concern over the sustainability of the aquifer due to water-level declines caused by substantial pumping. Water quality of the aquifer is a more recent concern. As part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water-Quality Assessment Program, historical water-quality data have been gathered for the High Plains Regional Ground-Water Study Area into a retrospective data base, which can be used to evaluate the occurrence and distribution of water-quality constituents of concern. Data from the retrospective data base verify that nitrate, pesticides, and dissolved solids (salinity) are important water-quality concerns in the High Plains study area. Sixteen percent of all measured nitrate concentrations were larger than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency drinking-water standard of 10 milligrams per liter. In about 70 percent of the counties within the High Plains study area, nitrate concentrations for 1980–98 were significantly larger than for 1930–69. While nitrate concentrations are largest where depth to water is shallow, concentrations also have increased in the Ogallala Formation where depth to water is large. Pesticide data primarily are available only in the northern half of the study area. About 50 pesticides were detected in the High Plains study area, but only four pesticides (atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and simazine) had concentrations exceeding a drinking-water stan-dard. The occasional detection of pesticides in deeper parts of the Ogallala Formation indicates that contamination pathways exist. Dissolved solids, which are a direct measure of salinity, had 29 percent of measured concentrations in excess of the secondary drinking-water standard of 500 milligrams per liter. Comparison of dissolved-solids concentrations prior to 1980 to concentra¬tions after 1980 indicates dissolved-solids concentrations have increased in the alluvial valleys of the Platte, the Republican, and the Arkansas Rivers, as well as in the Ogallala Formation–South hydrogeologic unit. Water-quality results indicate that human activities are affecting the water of the High Plains aquifer. Because there is a potential for water quality to become impaired relative to the historical uses of the aquifer, water quality needs to be considered when evaluating the sustain¬ability of the High Plains aquifer. Data collected as part of the High Plains Regional Ground-Water Study will help to fill in gaps in water-quality information and provide additional information for understanding the factors that govern ambient water quality

Examining High and Low Value-Added Mathematics Instruction: Can Expert Observers Tell the Difference

The question of how to measure effective teachers and teaching has long been of interest to policymakers and school leaders. While recent policy initiatives have focused on the use of value-added measures (VAM) to assess teacher quality, there is a much longer tradition of using observations of practice to make such determinations. However, empirical evidence suggests these two indicators often identify different sets of teachers as effective. For example, the Measures of Effective Teaching project finds low correlations between teachers’ VAM scores and their quality of instruction as measured by observational metrics. Studies with the explicit intent of identifying differences in instruction between teachers with high and low VAM scores also have generally failed to uncover substantial differences across classrooms. In this study, we take advantage of a dataset containing both videotaped lessons and value-added scores to mount an exploratory study of the instruction of teachers with high- and low-value-added rankings. Specifically, we seek to answer two questions: First, what is the degree of convergence between observers’ impressions of mathematics instruction and teachers’ mathematics value-added scores? Second, are there a set of instructional practices that consistently characterize high but not low-value-added ranked teachers’ classrooms, and vice versa

Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms: Why Counseling Psychologists Should Care About Them

Medically unexplained symptoms and/or syndromes (MUS) affect the health of 20% to 30% of patients seen in primary care. Optimally, treatment for these patients requires an interdisciplinary team consisting of both primary care and mental health providers. We propose that counseling psychologists may develop expertise to improve the care of patients with MUS who are already in their practice, expand the number of patients they help, and enhance the integration of counseling psychology into the broader medical community. Additionally, counseling psychologists’ expertise in culture, attunement to therapeutic processes, and focus on prioritizing patients’ perspectives and quality of life can fill the gap in research on MUS. By focusing on MUS, counseling psychologists can provide unique contributions to health service delivery

Chaotic and Clumpy Galaxy Formation in an Extremely Massive Reionization-era Halo

© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Abstract: The SPT 0311–58 system at z = 6.900 is an extremely massive structure within the reionization epoch and offers a chance to understand the formation of galaxies at an extreme peak in the primordial density field. We present 70 mas Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observations of the dust continuum and [C ii] 158 μm emission in the central pair of galaxies and reach physical resolutions of ∼100–350 pc, among the most detailed views of any reionization-era system to date. The observations resolve the source into at least a dozen kiloparsec-size clumps. The global kinematics and high turbulent velocity dispersion within the galaxies present a striking contrast to recent claims of dynamically cold thin-disk kinematics in some dusty galaxies just 800 Myr later at z ∼ 4. We speculate that both gravitational interactions and fragmentation from massive parent disks have likely played a role in the overall dynamics and formation of clumps in the system. Each clump individually is comparable in mass to other 6 < z < 8 galaxies identified in rest-UV/optical deep field surveys, but with star formation rates elevated by a factor of ~3-5. Internally, the clumps themselves bear close resemblance to greatly scaled-up versions of virialized cloud-scale structures identified in low-redshift galaxies. Our observations are qualitatively similar to the chaotic and clumpy assembly within massive halos seen in simulations of high-redshift galaxies.Peer reviewe

Search for CP Violation in the Decay Z -> b (b bar) g

About three million hadronic decays of the Z collected by ALEPH in the years 1991-1994 are used to search for anomalous CP violation beyond the Standard Model in the decay Z -> b \bar{b} g. The study is performed by analyzing angular correlations between the two quarks and the gluon in three-jet events and by measuring the differential two-jet rate. No signal of CP violation is found. For the combinations of anomalous CP violating couplings, ${\hat{h}}_b = {\hat{h}}_{Ab}g_{Vb}-{\hat{h}}_{Vb}g_{Ab}$ and $h^{\ast}_b = \sqrt{\hat{h}_{Vb}^{2}+\hat{h}_{Ab}^{2}}$, limits of \hat{h}_b < 0.59$and$h^{\ast}_{b} < 3.02$ are given at 95\% CL.Comment: 8 pages, 1 postscript figure, uses here.sty, epsfig.st

Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents measurements of the $W^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu$ and $W^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu$ cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13