Integrated Circuit Design in US High-Energy Physics

This whitepaper summarizes the status, plans, and challenges in the area of integrated circuit design in the United States for future High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments. It has been submitted to CPAD (Coordinating Panel for Advanced Detectors) and the HEP Community Summer Study 2013(Snowmass on the Mississippi) held in Minnesota July 29 to August 6, 2013. A workshop titled: US Workshop on IC Design for High Energy Physics, HEPIC2013 was held May 30 to June 1, 2013 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). A draft of the whitepaper was distributed to the attendees before the workshop, the content was discussed at the meeting, and this document is the resulting final product. The scope of the whitepaper includes the following topics: Needs for IC technologies to enable future experiments in the three HEP frontiers Energy, Cosmic and Intensity Frontiers; Challenges in the different technology and circuit design areas and the related R&D needs; Motivation for using different fabrication technologies; Outlook of future technologies including 2.5D and 3D; Survey of ICs used in current experiments and ICs targeted for approved or proposed experiments; IC design at US institutes and recommendations for collaboration in the future

Human-mediated dispersal of seeds by the airflow of vehicles

Human-mediated dispersal is known as an important driver of long-distance dispersal for plants but underlying mechanisms have rarely been assessed. Road corridors function as routes of secondary dispersal for many plant species but the extent to which vehicles support this process remains unclear. In this paper we quantify dispersal distances and seed deposition of plant species moved over the ground by the slipstream of passing cars. We exposed marked seeds of four species on a section of road and drove a car along the road at a speed of 48 km/h. By tracking seeds we quantified movement parallel as well as lateral to the road, resulting dispersal kernels, and the effect of repeated vehicle passes. Median distances travelled by seeds along the road were about eight meters for species with wind dispersal morphologies and one meter for species without such adaptations. Airflow created by the car lifted seeds and resulted in longitudinal dispersal. Single seeds reached our maximum measuring distance of 45 m and for some species exceeded distances under primary dispersal. Mathematical models were fit to dispersal kernels. The incremental effect of passing vehicles on longitudinal dispersal decreased with increasing number of passes as seeds accumulated at road verges. We conclude that dispersal by vehicle airflow facilitates seed movement along roads and accumulation of seeds in roadside habitats. Dispersal by vehicle airflow can aid the spread of plant species and thus has wide implications for roadside ecology, invasion biology and nature conservation

A multidimensional framework for measuring biotic novelty: How novel is a community?

Anthropogenic changes in climate, land use, and disturbance regimes, as well as introductions of non‐native species can lead to the transformation of many ecosystems. The resulting novel ecosystems are usually characterized by species assemblages that have not occurred previously in a given area. Quantifying the ecological novelty of communities (i.e., biotic novelty) would enhance the understanding of environmental change. However, quantification remains challenging since current novelty metrics, such as the number and/or proportion of non‐native species in a community, fall short of considering both functional and evolutionary aspects of biotic novelty. Here, we propose the Biotic Novelty Index (BNI), an intuitive and flexible multidimensional measure that combines (a) functional differences between native and non‐native introduced species with (b) temporal dynamics of species introductions. We show that the BNI is an additive partition of Rao's quadratic entropy, capturing the novel interaction component of the community's functional diversity. Simulations show that the index varies predictably with the relative amount of functional novelty added by recently arrived species, and they illustrate the need to provide an additional standardized version of the index. We present a detailed R code and two applications of the BNI by (a) measuring changes of biotic novelty of dry grassland plant communities along an urbanization gradient in a metropolitan region and (b) determining the biotic novelty of plant species assemblages at a national scale. The results illustrate the applicability of the index across scales and its flexibility in the use of data of different quality. Both case studies revealed strong connections between biotic novelty and increasing urbanization, a measure of abiotic novelty. We conclude that the BNI framework may help building a basis for better understanding the ecological and evolutionary consequences of global change

The Biological Standard of Living in the two Germanies.

Physical stature is used as a proxy for the biological standard of living in the two Germanies before and after unification in an analysis of a cross-sectional sample (1998) of adult heights, as well as among military recruits of the 1990s. West Germans tended to be taller than East Germans throughout the period under consideration. Contrary to official proclamations of a classless society, there were substantial social differences in physical stature in East-Germany. Social differences in height were greater in the East among females, and less among males than in the West. The difficulties experienced by the East-German population after 1961 is evident in the increase in social inequality of physical stature thereafter, as well as in the increasing gap relative to the height of the West-German population. After unification, however, there is a tendency for East-German males, but not of females, to catch up with their West-German counterparts

Weak Lensing from Space I: Instrumentation and Survey Strategy

A wide field space-based imaging telescope is necessary to fully exploit the technique of observing dark matter via weak gravitational lensing. This first paper in a three part series outlines the survey strategies and relevant instrumental parameters for such a mission. As a concrete example of hardware design, we consider the proposed Supernova/Acceleration Probe (SNAP). Using SNAP engineering models, we quantify the major contributions to this telescope's Point Spread Function (PSF). These PSF contributions are relevant to any similar wide field space telescope. We further show that the PSF of SNAP or a similar telescope will be smaller than current ground-based PSFs, and more isotropic and stable over time than the PSF of the Hubble Space Telescope. We outline survey strategies for two different regimes - a ``wide'' 300 square degree survey and a ``deep'' 15 square degree survey that will accomplish various weak lensing goals including statistical studies and dark matter mapping.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, replaced with Published Versio

Supernova / Acceleration Probe: A Satellite Experiment to Study the Nature of the Dark Energy

The Supernova / Acceleration Probe (SNAP) is a proposed space-based experiment designed to study the dark energy and alternative explanations of the acceleration of the Universe's expansion by performing a series of complementary systematics-controlled measurements. We describe a self-consistent reference mission design for building a Type Ia supernova Hubble diagram and for performing a wide-area weak gravitational lensing study. A 2-m wide-field telescope feeds a focal plane consisting of a 0.7 square-degree imager tiled with equal areas of optical CCDs and near infrared sensors, and a high-efficiency low-resolution integral field spectrograph. The SNAP mission will obtain high-signal-to-noise calibrated light-curves and spectra for several thousand supernovae at redshifts between z=0.1 and 1.7. A wide-field survey covering one thousand square degrees resolves ~100 galaxies per square arcminute. If we assume we live in a cosmological-constant-dominated Universe, the matter density, dark energy density, and flatness of space can all be measured with SNAP supernova and weak-lensing measurements to a systematics-limited accuracy of 1%. For a flat universe, the density-to-pressure ratio of dark energy can be similarly measured to 5% for the present value w0 and ~0.1 for the time variation w'. The large survey area, depth, spatial resolution, time-sampling, and nine-band optical to NIR photometry will support additional independent and/or complementary dark-energy measurement approaches as well as a broad range of auxiliary science programs. (Abridged)Comment: 40 pages, 18 figures, submitted to PASP, http://snap.lbl.go

Surviving rather than thriving: Understanding the experiences of women coaches using a theory of gendered social well-being

In shifting our gaze to the sociological impact of being in the minority, the purpose of this study was to substantiate a model of gendered social well-being to appraise women coaches’ circumstances, experiences and challenges as embedded within the social structures and relations of their profession. This is drawn on indepth interviews with a sample of head women coaches within the UK. The findings demonstrate that personal lives, relationships, social and family commitments were sidelined by many of the participants in order to meet the expectations of being a (woman) coach. We locate these experiences in the organisational practices of high performance sport which hinder women coaches from having meaningful control over their lives. The complexities of identity are also revealed through the interplay of gender with (dis)ability, age and whiteness as evidence of hegemonic femininity within the coaching profession. Consequently, for many women, coaching is experienced as a ‘developmental dead-end’

Population vulnerability to COVID-19 in Europe: A burden of disease analysis

Background: Evidence has emerged showing that elderly people and those with pre-existing chronic health conditions may be at higher risk of developing severe health consequences from COVID-19. In Europe, this is of particular relevance with ageing populations living with non-communicable diseases, multi-morbidity and frailty. Published estimates of Years Lived with Disability (YLD) from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study help to characterise the extent of these effects. Our aim was to identify the countries across Europe that have populations at highest risk from COVID-19 by using estimates of population age structure and YLD for health conditions linked to severe illness from COVID-19. Methods: Population and YLD estimates from GBD 2017 were extracted for 45 countries in Europe. YLD was restricted to a list of specific health conditions associated with being at risk of developing severe consequences from COVID-19 based on guidance from the United Kingdom Government. This guidance also identified individuals aged 70 years and above as being at higher risk of developing severe health consequences. Study outcomes were defined as: (i) proportion of population aged 70 years and above; and (ii) rate of YLD for COVID-19 vulnerable health conditions across all ages. Bivariate groupings were established for each outcome and combined to establish overall population-level vulnerability. Results: Countries with the highest proportions of elderly residents were Italy, Greece, Germany, Portugal and Finland. When assessments of population-level YLD rates for COVID-19 vulnerable health conditions were made, the highest rates were observed for Bulgaria, Czechia, Croatia, Hungary and Bosnia and Herzegovina. A bivariate analysis indicated that the countries at high-risk across both measures of vulnerability were: Bulgaria; Portugal; Latvia; Lithuania; Greece; Germany; Estonia; and Sweden. Conclusion: Routine estimates of population structures and non-fatal burden of disease measures can be usefully combined to create composite indicators of vulnerability for rapid assessments, in this case to severe health consequences from COVID-19. Countries with available results for sub-national regions within their country, or national burden of disease studies that also use sub-national levels for burden quantifications, should consider using non-fatal burden of disease estimates to estimate geographical vulnerability to COVID-19