Shocks and a Giant Planet in the Disk Orbiting BP Piscium?

Spitzer IRS spectroscopy supports the interpretation that BP Piscium, a gas and dust enshrouded star residing at high Galactic latitude, is a first-ascent giant rather than a classical T Tauri star. Our analysis suggests that BP Piscium's spectral energy distribution can be modeled as a disk with a gap that is opened by a giant planet. Modeling the rich mid-infrared emission line spectrum indicates that the solid-state emitting grains orbiting BP Piscium are primarily composed of ~75 K crystalline, magnesium-rich olivine; ~75 K crystalline, magnesium-rich pyroxene; ~200 K amorphous, magnesium-rich pyroxene; and ~200 K annealed silica ('cristobalite'). These dust grains are all sub-micron sized. The giant planet and gap model also naturally explains the location and mineralogy of the small dust grains in the disk. Disk shocks that result from disk-planet interaction generate the highly crystalline dust which is subsequently blown out of the disk mid-plane and into the disk atmosphere.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted to Ap

Characterizing Human Mobility Patterns in a Large Street Network

Previous studies demonstrated empirically that human mobility exhibits Levy flight behaviour. However, our knowledge of the mechanisms governing this Levy flight behaviour remains limited. Here we analyze over 72 000 people's moving trajectories, obtained from 50 taxicabs during a six-month period in a large street network, and illustrate that the human mobility pattern, or the Levy flight behaviour, is mainly attributed to the underlying street network. In other words, the goal-directed nature of human movement has little effect on the overall traffic distribution. We further simulate the mobility of a large number of random walkers, and find that (1) the simulated random walkers can reproduce the same human mobility pattern, and (2) the simulated mobility rate of the random walkers correlates pretty well (an R square up to 0.87) with the observed human mobility rate.Comment: 13 figures, 17 page

A patient preference study that evaluated fluticasone furoate and mometasone furoate nasal sprays for allergic rhinitis

Background: Corticosteroid nasal sprays are the mainstay of treatment for allergic rhinitis. These sprays have sensory attributes such as scent and/or odor, taste and aftertaste, and run down the throat and/or the nose, which, when unpleasant, can affect patient preference for, and compliance with, treatment. Objective: This study examined patient preference for fluticasone furoate nasal spray (FFNS) or mometasone furoate nasal spray (MFNS) based on their sensory attributes after administration in patients with allergic rhinitis. Methods: This was a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, cross-over study. Patient preferences were determined by using three questionnaires (Overall Preference, Immediate Attributes, and Delayed Attributes). Results: Overall, 56% of patients stated a preference for FFNS versus 32% for MFNS (p _ 0.001); the remaining 12% stated no preference. More patients stated a preference for FFNS versus MFNS for the attributes of “less drip down the throat” (p _ 0.001), “less run out of the nose” (p _ 0.05), “more soothing” (p _ 0.05), and “less irritating” (p _ 0.001). More patients responded in favor of FFNS versus MFNS for the immediate attributes, “run down the throat” (p _ 0.001), and “run out of the nose” (p _ 0.001), and, in the delayed attributes, “run down the throat” (p _ 0.001), “run out of the nose” (p _ 0.01), “presence of aftertaste” (p _ 0.01), and “no nasal irritation” (p _ 0.001). Conclusion: Patients with allergic rhinitis preferred FFNS versus MFNS overall and based on a number of individual attributes, including “less drip down the throat,” “less run out of the nose,” and “less irritating.” Greater preference may improve patient adherence and thereby improve symptom management of the patient’s allergic rhinitis

Geographic Discrimination: Of Place, Space, Hillbillies, and Home

This Essay explores the two-sided challenge of geographic discrimination, where U.S. citizens receive disparate treatment from other citizens or the government solely because of where they live or self-identify as home, through the interdisciplinary concepts of space, place, and distance; and an original examination of discrimination against Appalachians. Such disparate treatment is unavoidable and even arguably politically correct. Where we call home matters in a number of legitimate ways to include our access to jobs and services, culture, educational opportunities, and other basic human capabilities. Although technology has increased individual mobility more than ever before, a majority of Americans nevertheless live in the same state where they were born. But even the most invidious geographic discrimination-locational prejudice-remains largely legal under U.S. law. As exemplified by sports rivalries and Appalachian stereotypes, Americans continue to make the stereotyping sampling error, sweeping categorical assumptions about people from a particular place that they probably would not make about race or gender. The hillbilly epithet long hurled at Appalachians is one of the oldest examples of locational prejudice in U.S history. Although Appalachians are often stereotyped as a marginalized poor White minority, in reality, if all the counties defined by federal statute as Appalachia became one state, that state would be the third largest state in the nation with about 17% nonwhite citizens. Appalachians, like other regional identities, possess considerable definitional problems. Most locational prejudice against Appalachians has probably occurred in places outside Appalachia. Generations of Appalachians have been forced to move to find jobs in the so-called Great Migration of the late 19th and 20th centuries. These self-declared urban Appalachians still consider Appalachia their home. Despite the U.S. District Court encompassing Cincinnati, Ohio, rejecting treating Appalachians as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the City of Cincinnati passed a Human Rights Ordinance in 1992 that remains the only known U.S. law to proscribe Appalachian discrimination. What distinguishes Appalachian discrimination from other U.S. geographic discrimination, however, is the remarkable official recognition that Appalachia has historically suffered locational prejudice by the federal government and by the nine states within Appalachia. Such invidious locational prejudice-as distinguished from the unavoidable consequences of personal choice and regional planning-requires a remedy. How should U.S. law treat citizens who embody multiple, intersecting protected classes like race, gender, and sexual orientation? Geography has long provided a practical and principled panacea to the longstanding intersectionality or multidimensionality) problem. Focusing on home and practical geography may not only allow policy makers to reconcile competing individual identities and protected classes but also help eliminate pretextual discrimination while encouraging concrete compromise. U.S. law already distinguishes its equal protection jurisprudence geographically with its hierarchy of national, state, county, and municipal law. Basic human capabilities like having a place to live, a job to provide for your family, and a school to teach your children to contribute to U.S. society all require geographic place and space. Ultimately, freedom from discrimination means freedom to come home to where you are equally valued and possess equal opportunity

Controlling Charging and Arcing on a Solar Powered Auroral Orbiting Spacecraft

The Global Precipitation Measurement satellite (GPM) will be launched into a high inclination (65 degree) orbit to monitor rainfall on a global scale. Satellites in high inclination orbits have been shown to charge to high negative potentials, with the possibility of arcing on the solar arrays, when three conditions are met: a drop in plasma density below approximately 10,000 cm(exp -3), an injection of energetic electrons of energy more that 7-10 keV, and passage through darkness. Since all of these conditions are expected to obtain for some of the GPM orbits, charging calculations were done using first the Space Environment and Effects (SEE) Program Interactive Spacecraft Charging Handbook, and secondly the NASA Air-force Spacecraft Charging Analyzer Program (NASCAP-2k). The object of the calculations was to determine if charging was likely for the GPM configuration and materials, and specifically to see if choosing a particular type of thermal white paint would help minimize charging. A detailed NASCAP-2k geometrical model of the GPM spacecraft was built, with such a large number of nodes that it challenged the capability of NASCAP-2k to do the calculations. The results of the calculations were that for worst-case auroral charging conditions, charging to levels on the order of -120 to -230 volts could occur on GPM during night-time, with differential voltages on the solar arrays that might lead to solar array arcing. In sunlit conditions, charging did not exceed -20 V under any conditions. The night-time results were sensitive to the spacecraft surface materials chosen. For non-conducting white paints, the charging was severe, and could continue unabated throughout the passage of GPM through the auroral zone. Somewhat conductive (dissipative) white paints minimized the night-time charging to levels of -120 V or less, and thus were recommended for GPM thermal control. It is shown that the choice of thermal control paints is important to prevent arcing on high inclination orbiting spacecraft solar arrays as well as for GEO satellites, even for solar array designs chosen to minimize arcing

A Tale of Two DRAGGNs: A Hybrid Approach for Interpreting Action-Oriented and Goal-Oriented Instructions

Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands. We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments. Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.Comment: Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics at ACL 201