Childhood intelligence predicts premature mortality : Results from a 40-year population-based longitudinal study

Acknowledgements This study was supported by a grant from the Luxembourg Fonds National de la Recherche (VIVRE FNR/06/09/18) and a PhD scholarship awarded to the first author by the Fonds National de la Recherche.Peer reviewedPostprin

"Advanced" data reduction for the AMBER instrument

The amdlib AMBER data reduction software is meant to produce AMBER data products from the raw data files that are sent to the PIs of different proposals or that can be found in the ESO data archive. The way defined by ESO to calibrate the data is to calibrate one science data file with a calibration one, observed as close in time as possible. Therefore, this scheme does not take into account instrumental drifts, atmospheric variations or visibility-loss corrections, in the current AMBER data processing software, amdlib. In this article, we present our approach to complement this default calibration scheme, to perform the final steps of data reduction, and to produce fully calibrated AMBER data products. These additional steps include: an overnight view of the data structure and data quality, the production of night transfer functions from the calibration stars observed during the night, the correction of additional effects not taken into account in the standard AMBER data reduction software such as the so-called "jitter" effect and the visibility spectral coherence loss, and finally, the production of fully calibrated data products. All these new features are beeing implemented in the modular pipeline script amdlibPipeline, written to complement the amdlib software.Comment: 10 pages, will be published in the proceeding of the SPIE conference "astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation: Optical and Infrared Interferometry", held in Marseille from 23 to 27 june 200

AMBER closure and differential phases: accuracy and calibration with a Beam Commutation

The first astrophysical results of the VLTI focal instrument AMBER have shown the importance of the differential and closure phase measures, which are supposed to be much less sensitive to atmospheric and instrumental biases than the absolute visibility. However there are artifacts limiting the accuracy of these measures which can be substantially overcome by a specific calibration technique called Beam Commutation. This paper reports the observed accuracies on AMBER/VLTI phases in different modes, discusses some of the instrumental biases and shows the accuracy gain provided by Beam Commutation on the Differential Phase as well as on the Closure Phase.Comment: This paper will be published in the proceeding of SPIE ``astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation: Optical and Infrared Interferometry'

Analysis and Optimization of Noise Response for Low-Noise CMOS Image Sensors

CMOS image sensors are nowadays widely used in imaging applications and particularly in low light flux applications. This is really possible thanks to a reduction of noise obtained, among others, by the use of pinned photodiode associated with a Correlated Double Sampling readout. It reveals new noise sources which become the major contributors. This paper presents noise measurements on low-noise CMOS image sensor. Image sensor noise is analyzed and optimization is done in order to reach an input referred noise of 1 electron rms by column gain amplifier insertion and dark current noise optimization. Pixel array noise histograms are analyzed to determine noise impact of dark current and column gain amplifier insertion. Transfer noise impact, due to the use of pinned photodiode (4T photodiode), is also measured and analyzed by a specific readout sequence

Sea surface temperature contributes to marine crocodylomorph evolution

During the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, four distinct crocodylomorph lineages colonized the marine environment. They were conspicuously absent from high latitudes, which in the Mesozoic were occupied by warm-blooded ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. Despite a relatively well-constrained stratigraphic distribution, the varying diversities of marine crocodylomorphs are poorly understood, because their extinctions neither coincided with any major biological crises nor with the advent of potential competitors. Here we test the potential link between their evolutionary history in terms of taxic diversity and two abiotic factors, sea level variations and sea surface temperatures (SST). Excluding Metriorhynchoidea, which may have had a peculiar ecology, significant correlations obtained between generic diversity and estimated Tethyan SST suggest that water temperature was a driver of marine crocodylomorph diversity. Being most probably ectothermic reptiles, these lineages colonized the marine realm and diversified during warm periods, then declined or became extinct during cold intervals

Automatic Repair of Real Bugs: An Experience Report on the Defects4J Dataset

Defects4J is a large, peer-reviewed, structured dataset of real-world Java bugs. Each bug in Defects4J is provided with a test suite and at least one failing test case that triggers the bug. In this paper, we report on an experiment to explore the effectiveness of automatic repair on Defects4J. The result of our experiment shows that 47 bugs of the Defects4J dataset can be automatically repaired by state-of- the-art repair. This sets a baseline for future research on automatic repair for Java. We have manually analyzed 84 different patches to assess their real correctness. In total, 9 real Java bugs can be correctly fixed with test-suite based repair. This analysis shows that test-suite based repair suffers from under-specified bugs, for which trivial and incorrect patches still pass the test suite. With respect to practical applicability, it takes in average 14.8 minutes to find a patch. The experiment was done on a scientific grid, totaling 17.6 days of computation time. All their systems and experimental results are publicly available on Github in order to facilitate future research on automatic repair

Isometric group actions on Hilbert spaces: structure of orbits

Our main result is that a finitely generated nilpotent group has no isometric action on an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space with dense orbits. In contrast, we construct such an action with a finitely generated metabelian group.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in Canadian Math.

Statistical characterization of polychromatic absolute and differential squared visibilities obtained from AMBER/VLTI instrument

In optical interferometry, the visibility squared modulus are generally assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution and to be independent of each other. A quantitative analysis of the relevance of such assumptions is important to help improving the exploitation of existing and upcoming multi-wavelength interferometric instruments. Analyze the statistical behaviour of both the absolute and the colour-differential squared visibilities: distribution laws, correlations and cross-correlations between different baselines. We use observations of stellar calibrators obtained with AMBER instrument on VLTI in different instrumental and observing configurations, from which we extract the frame-by-frame transfer function. Statistical hypotheses tests and diagnostics are then systematically applied. For both absolute and differential squared visibilities and under all instrumental and observing conditions, we find a better fit for the Student distribution than for the Gaussian, log-normal and Cauchy distributions. We find and analyze clear correlation effects caused by atmospheric perturbations. The differential squared visibilities allow to keep a larger fraction of data with respect to selected absolute squared visibilities and thus benefit from reduced temporal dispersion, while their distribution is more clearly characterized. The frame selection based on the criterion of a fixed SNR value might result in either a biased sample of frames or in a too severe selection.Comment: A&A, 13 pages and 9 figure