QWERTY

Qwerty is a sustainable laptop bag made for those ages ranging from 18 to 35.Ope

On the scarcity of Magellanic Cloud-like satellites

We have used H alpha narrow-band imaging to search for star-forming satellite galaxies around 143 luminous spiral galaxies, with the goal of quantifying the frequency of occurrence of satellites resembling the Magellanic Clouds, around galaxies comparable to the Milky Way. For two-thirds of the central galaxies, no star-forming satellites are found, down to luminosities and star-formation rates well below those of the Magellanic Clouds. A total of 62 satellites is found, associated with 47 of the central galaxies searched. The R-band magnitude difference between central galaxies and their satellites has a median value of 4.6 mag, and a maximum of 10.2 mag. The mean projected separation of the satellites from their central galaxies is 81 kpc, or 98 kpc for systems beyond 30 Mpc. Thus star-forming satellites are quite rare, and the Milky Way is unusual both for the luminosity and the proximity of its two brightest satellites. We also find that the Clouds themselves are unusual in that they appear to form a bound binary pair; such close satellite pairs, of any luminosity, are also extremely rare in our survey.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Meningococcal carriage among Hajj pilgrims, risk factors for carriage and records of vaccination: a study of pilgrims to Mecca.

OBJECTIVE: The Saudi government requires that all pilgrims receive a quadrivalent meningococcal vaccine at least 10 days before the Hajj. We conducted a study to determine the uptake of meningococcal vaccine and antibiotic use. We also investigated risk factors of meningococcal carriage and carriage of Neisseria meningitidis pathogenic serogroups A, C, W and Y. METHODS: A cross-sectional oropharyngeal carriage survey was conducted in 2973 Hajj pilgrims in September 2017. A real-time polymerase chain reaction (rt-PCR) assay was used to identify N. meningitidis from the oropharyngeal swabs. A questionnaire investigated potential risk factors for carriage of N. meningitidis. RESULTS: Two thousand two hundred forty nine oropharyngeal swabs were obtained. The overall prevalence of carriage of N. meningitidis was 4.6% (95% CI: 3.4%-6%). Carriage of pathogenic serogroups was not associated significantly with any of the meningococcal risk factors evaluated. 77% of pilgrims were vaccinated but 22.58 % said they were carrying unofficial vaccination cards. CONCLUSION: Carriage of serogroups A, C, W and Y was not significantly associated with any of the risk factors investigated. Almost a quarter of pilgrims were unlikely to have been vaccinated, highlighting a need to strengthen compliance with the current policy of vaccination to prevent meningococcal disease outbreaks during and after the Hajj

Galaxy Zoo: Passive Red Spirals

We study the spectroscopic properties and environments of red spiral galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo project. By carefully selecting face-on, disk dominated spirals we construct a sample of truly passive disks (not dust reddened, nor dominated by old stellar populations in a bulge). As such, our red spirals represent an interesting set of possible transition objects between normal blue spirals and red early types. We use SDSS data to investigate the physical processes which could have turned these objects red without disturbing their morphology. Red spirals prefer intermediate density regimes, however there are no obvious correlations between red spiral properties and environment - environment alone is not sufficient to determine if a spiral will become red. Red spirals are a small fraction of spirals at low masses, but are a significant fraction at large stellar masses - massive galaxies are red independent of morphology. We confirm that red spirals have older stellar popns and less recent star formation than the main spiral population. While the presence of spiral arms suggests that major star formation cannot have ceased long ago, we show that these are not recent post-starbursts, so star formation must have ceased gradually. Intriguingly, red spirals are ~4 times more likely than normal spirals to host optically identified Seyfert or LINER, with most of the difference coming from LINERs. We find a curiously large bar fraction in the red spirals suggesting that the cessation of star formation and bar instabilities are strongly correlated. We conclude by discussing the possible origins. We suggest they may represent the very oldest spiral galaxies which have already used up their reserves of gas - probably aided by strangulation, and perhaps bar instabilities moving material around in the disk.Comment: MNRAS in press, 20 pages, 15 figures (v3

Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and colour on environment

We analyse the relationships between galaxy morphology, colour, environment and stellar mass using data for over 100,000 objects from Galaxy Zoo, the largest sample of visually classified morphologies yet compiled. We conclusively show that colour and morphology fractions are very different functions of environment. Both are sensitive to stellar mass; however, at fixed stellar mass, while colour is also highly sensitive to environment, morphology displays much weaker environmental trends. Only a small part of both relations can be attributed to variation in the stellar mass function with environment. Galaxies with high stellar masses are mostly red, in all environments and irrespective of their morphology. Low stellar-mass galaxies are mostly blue in low-density environments, but mostly red in high-density environments, again irrespective of their morphology. The colour-density relation is primarily driven by variations in colour fractions at fixed morphology, in particular the fraction of spiral galaxies that have red colours, and especially at low stellar masses. We demonstrate that our red spirals primarily include galaxies with true spiral morphology. We clearly show there is an environmental dependence for colour beyond that for morphology. Before using the Galaxy Zoo morphologies to produce the above results, we first quantify a luminosity-, size- and redshift-dependent classification bias that affects this dataset, and probably most other studies of galaxy population morphology. A correction for this bias is derived and applied to produce a sample of galaxies with reliable morphological type likelihoods, on which we base our analysis.Comment: 25 pages, 20 figures (+ 6 pages, 11 figures in appendices); moderately revised following referee's comments; accepted by MNRA

How do you say ‘hello’? Personality impressions from brief novel voices

On hearing a novel voice, listeners readily form personality impressions of that speaker. Accurate or not, these impressions are known to affect subsequent interactions; yet the underlying psychological and acoustical bases remain poorly understood. Furthermore, hitherto studies have focussed on extended speech as opposed to analysing the instantaneous impressions we obtain from first experience. In this paper, through a mass online rating experiment, 320 participants rated 64 sub-second vocal utterances of the word ‘hello’ on one of 10 personality traits. We show that: (1) personality judgements of brief utterances from unfamiliar speakers are consistent across listeners; (2) a two-dimensional ‘social voice space’ with axes mapping Valence (Trust, Likeability) and Dominance, each driven by differing combinations of vocal acoustics, adequately summarises ratings in both male and female voices; and (3) a positive combination of Valence and Dominance results in increased perceived male vocal Attractiveness, whereas perceived female vocal Attractiveness is largely controlled by increasing Valence. Results are discussed in relation to the rapid evaluation of personality and, in turn, the intent of others, as being driven by survival mechanisms via approach or avoidance behaviours. These findings provide empirical bases for predicting personality impressions from acoustical analyses of short utterances and for generating desired personality impressions in artificial voices

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectrum at 148 and 218 GHz from the 2008 Southern Survey

We present measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum made by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope at 148 GHz and 218 GHz, as well as the cross-frequency spectrum between the two channels. Our results clearly show the second through the seventh acoustic peaks in the CMB power spectrum. The measurements of these higher-order peaks provide an additional test of the {\Lambda}CDM cosmological model. At l > 3000, we detect power in excess of the primary anisotropy spectrum of the CMB. At lower multipoles 500 < l < 3000, we find evidence for gravitational lensing of the CMB in the power spectrum at the 2.8{\sigma} level. We also detect a low level of Galactic dust in our maps, which demonstrates that we can recover known faint, diffuse signals.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures. Submitted to ApJ. This paper is a companion to Hajian et al. (2010) and Dunkley et al. (2010

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Data Characterization and Map Making

We present a description of the data reduction and mapmaking pipeline used for the 2008 observing season of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). The data presented here at 148 GHz represent 12% of the 90 TB collected by ACT from 2007 to 2010. In 2008 we observed for 136 days, producing a total of 1423 hours of data (11 TB for the 148 GHz band only), with a daily average of 10.5 hours of observation. From these, 1085 hours were devoted to a 850 deg^2 stripe (11.2 hours by 9.1 deg) centered on a declination of -52.7 deg, while 175 hours were devoted to a 280 deg^2 stripe (4.5 hours by 4.8 deg) centered at the celestial equator. We discuss sources of statistical and systematic noise, calibration, telescope pointing, and data selection. Out of 1260 survey hours and 1024 detectors per array, 816 hours and 593 effective detectors remain after data selection for this frequency band, yielding a 38% survey efficiency. The total sensitivity in 2008, determined from the noise level between 5 Hz and 20 Hz in the time-ordered data stream (TOD), is 32 micro-Kelvin sqrt{s} in CMB units. Atmospheric brightness fluctuations constitute the main contaminant in the data and dominate the detector noise covariance at low frequencies in the TOD. The maps were made by solving the least-squares problem using the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient method, incorporating the details of the detector and noise correlations. Cross-correlation with WMAP sky maps, as well as analysis from simulations, reveal that our maps are unbiased at multipoles ell > 300. This paper accompanies the public release of the 148 GHz southern stripe maps from 2008. The techniques described here will be applied to future maps and data releases.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figures, 6 tables, an ACT Collaboration pape