An oxygen isotope record of lacustrine opal from a European Maar indicates climatic stability during the Last Interglacial

The penultimate temperate period, 127–110 ka before present (BP), bracketed by abrupt shifts of the global climate system initiating and terminating it, is considered as an analogue of the Holocene because of a similar low global ice‐volume. Ice core records as well as continental and marine records exhibit conflicting evidence concerning the climate variability within this period, the Last Interglacial. We present, for the first time, a high‐resolution record of oxygen isotopes in diatom opal of the Last Interglacial obtained from the Ribains Maar in France (44°50′09″N 3°49′16″E). Our results indicate that the Last Interglacial in southwestern Europe was generally a period of climatic stability. The record shows that the temperate period was initiated by an abrupt warm event followed midway by a minor climatic transition to a colder climate. An abrupt isotopic depletion that occurs simultaneously with abrupt changes in pollen and diatom assemblages marks the end of the temperate period, and is correlative with the Melisey I stadial. Variations in the isotopic composition of lake‐water related to the isotopic composition of precipitation and evaporation dominate the biogenic opal oxygen isotope record

Blocked All-Pairs Shortest Paths Algorithm on Intel Xeon Phi KNL Processor: A Case Study

Manycores are consolidating in HPC community as a way of improving performance while keeping power efficiency. Knights Landing is the recently released second generation of Intel Xeon Phi architecture. While optimizing applications on CPUs, GPUs and first Xeon Phi's has been largely studied in the last years, the new features in Knights Landing processors require the revision of programming and optimization techniques for these devices. In this work, we selected the Floyd-Warshall algorithm as a representative case study of graph and memory-bound applications. Starting from the default serial version, we show how data, thread and compiler level optimizations help the parallel implementation to reach 338 GFLOPS.Comment: Computer Science - CACIC 2017. Springer Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 79

Using the World Health Organization's 4S-Framework to Strengthen National Strategies, Policies and Services to Address Mental Health Problems in Adolescents in Resource-Constrained Settings

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Most adolescents live in resource-constrained countries and their mental health has been less well recognised than other aspects of their health. The World Health Organization's 4-S Framework provides a structure for national initiatives to improve adolescent health through: gathering and using strategic information; developing evidence-informed policies; scaling up provision and use of health services; and strengthening linkages with other government sectors. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the findings of a recent systematic review of mental health problems in adolescents in resource-constrained settings might be applied using the 4-S Framework.</p> <p>Method</p> <p>Analysis of the implications of the findings of a systematic search of the English-language literature for national strategies, policies, services and cross-sectoral linkages to improve the mental health of adolescents in resource-constrained settings.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Data are available for only 33/112 [29%] resource-constrained countries, but in all where data are available, non-psychotic mental health problems in adolescents are identifiable, prevalent and associated with reduced quality of life, impaired participation and compromised development. In the absence of evidence about effective interventions in these settings expert opinion is that a broad public policy response which addresses direct strategies for prevention, early intervention and treatment; health service and health workforce requirements; social inclusion of marginalised groups of adolescents; and specific education is required. Specific endorsed strategies include public education, parent education, training for teachers and primary healthcare workers, psycho-educational curricula, identification through periodic screening of the most vulnerable and referral for care, and the availability of counsellors or other identified trained staff members in schools from whom adolescents can seek assistance for personal, peer and family relationship problems.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The predominant endorsed action is not that dedicated mental health services for adolescents are required, but that mental health care should be integrated using cross-sectoral strategies into the communities in which adolescents live, the institutions they attend and the organisations in which they participate.</p

Using Newspapers for Tracking the Business Cycle: A Comparative Study for Germany and Switzerland

On the basis of keyword searches in newspaper articles several versions of the Recession-word Index (RWI) are constructed for Germany and Switzerland. We use these indices in order to track the business cycle dynamics in these two countries. Our main findings are the following. First, we show that augmenting benchmark autoregressive models with the RWI generally leads to improvement in accuracy of one-step ahead forecasts of GDP growth compared to those obtained by the benchmark model. Second, the accuracy of out-of-sample forecasts obtained with models augmented with the RWI is comparable to that of models augmented with established economic indicators in both countries, such as the Ifo Business Climate Index and the ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for Germany, and the KOF Economic Barometer and the Purchasing Managers Index in manufacturing for Switzerland. Third, we show that the RWI-based forecasts are more accurate than the consensus forecasts (published by Consensus Economics Inc.) for Switzerland, whereas we reach the opposite conclusion for Germany. In fact, the accuracy of the consensus forecasts of GDP growth for Germany appears to be superior to that of any other indicator considered in our study. These results are robust to changes in estimation/forecast samples, the use of rolling vs expanding estimation windows, and the inclusion of a web-based recession indicator extracted from Google Trends into a set of the competing models

Squeezing spectra from s-ordered quasiprobability distributions. Application to dispersive optical bistability

It is well known that the squeezing spectrum of the field exiting a nonlinear cavity can be directly obtained from the fluctuation spectrum of normally ordered products of creation and annihilation operators of the cavity mode. In this article we show that the output field squeezing spectrum can be derived also by combining the fluctuation spectra of any pair of s-ordered products of creation and annihilation operators. The interesting result is that the spectrum obtained in this way from the linearized Langevin equations is exact, and this occurs in spite of the fact that no s-ordered quasiprobability distribution verifies a true Fokker-Planck equation, i.e., the Langevin equations used for deriving the squeezing spectrum are not exact. The (linearized) intracavity squeezing obtained from any s-ordered distribution is also exact. These results are exemplified in the problem of dispersive optical bistability.Comment: 15 pages, no figures, to be published in Journal of Modern Optic

A Number-Theoretic Error-Correcting Code

In this paper we describe a new error-correcting code (ECC) inspired by the Naccache-Stern cryptosystem. While by far less efficient than Turbo codes, the proposed ECC happens to be more efficient than some established ECCs for certain sets of parameters. The new ECC adds an appendix to the message. The appendix is the modular product of small primes representing the message bits. The receiver recomputes the product and detects transmission errors using modular division and lattice reduction

Formalizing Size-Optimal Sorting Networks: Extracting a Certified Proof Checker

Since the proof of the four color theorem in 1976, computer-generated proofs have become a reality in mathematics and computer science. During the last decade, we have seen formal proofs using verified proof assistants being used to verify the validity of such proofs. In this paper, we describe a formalized theory of size-optimal sorting networks. From this formalization we extract a certified checker that successfully verifies computer-generated proofs of optimality on up to 8 inputs. The checker relies on an untrusted oracle to shortcut the search for witnesses on more than 1.6 million NP-complete subproblems.Comment: IMADA-preprint-c

IgA vasculitis (Henoch-Schönlein purpura): refractory and relapsing disease course in the adult population.

BACKGROUND: The disease course of adult immunoglobulin A (IgA) vasculitis (IgAV; Henoch-Schönlein purpura) has not been well defined. METHODS: In a retrospective survey, we studied 85 adult IgAV patients with extended follow-up (median 43 months) for 67 patients. RESULTS: Only 33 of 67 (49%) achieved complete remission. Ongoing renal disease was the most common persistent organ manifestation, but extra-renal disease activity was also present in >50% of patients not achieving complete remission. Twenty-nine of 67 (43%) had relapsing disease, with 18/67 (27%) experiencing several relapses. Skin disease was the most common feature in relapsing patients, followed by nephritis. At 4 years of follow-up, 6 of 29 (21%) experienced progressive disease and 10/29 (34%) relapsing disease. Five of 67 (7%) developed nephritis after diagnosis, within the first 6 months of follow-up. At final follow-up, 10 of 67 (15%) had chronic kidney disease Stage ≥G3a, 18 (27%) haematuria and 13 (19%) proteinuria. No therapy appeared particularly effective and only 6/17 patients treated with mycophenolate mofetil experienced a good response. CONCLUSIONS: The disease course of adult IgAV is different from that seen in children, with higher frequency of persisting and relapsing disease. Renal disease is the main determinant of ongoing disease activity, but extra-renal features were seen in >50% of patients with chronic disease activity. No clear conclusions on use or choice of immunosuppressive agent could be made based on our experience

Optimizing a Certified Proof Checker for a Large-Scale Computer-Generated Proof

In recent work, we formalized the theory of optimal-size sorting networks with the goal of extracting a verified checker for the large-scale computer-generated proof that 25 comparisons are optimal when sorting 9 inputs, which required more than a decade of CPU time and produced 27 GB of proof witnesses. The checker uses an untrusted oracle based on these witnesses and is able to verify the smaller case of 8 inputs within a couple of days, but it did not scale to the full proof for 9 inputs. In this paper, we describe several non-trivial optimizations of the algorithm in the checker, obtained by appropriately changing the formalization and capitalizing on the symbiosis with an adequate implementation of the oracle. We provide experimental evidence of orders of magnitude improvements to both runtime and memory footprint for 8 inputs, and actually manage to check the full proof for 9 inputs.Comment: IMADA-preprint-c