Household wealth and adolescents' social-emotional functioning in schools.

This study attempts a two-part shift in educational research narrowly fixated on the socioeconomic determinants of student test-score performance. First, we focus on variations in how to measure wealth. Second, we move beyond achievement and focus on the wealth determinants of adolescents' social-emotional competencies. Using data from a nationally-representative sample of US eighth graders, we find that the correlation between wealth and social-emotional competencies varies according to how the partitions among the upper class, the middle and working classes, and the poor are defined. By emphasizing wealth in the production of classed social-emotional competencies not captured by test scores, our findings suggest that the growth of household wealth has a more salient effect for lower- and middle-class adolescents than the highest class which appears to have the least to gain, in terms of social-emotional competencies, from an increase in household wealth

AI Solutions for MDS: Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Misuse Detection and Localisation in Telecommunication Environments

This report considers the application of Articial Intelligence (AI) techniques to the problem of misuse detection and misuse localisation within telecommunications environments. A broad survey of techniques is provided, that covers inter alia rule based systems, model-based systems, case based reasoning, pattern matching, clustering and feature extraction, articial neural networks, genetic algorithms, arti cial immune systems, agent based systems, data mining and a variety of hybrid approaches. The report then considers the central issue of event correlation, that is at the heart of many misuse detection and localisation systems. The notion of being able to infer misuse by the correlation of individual temporally distributed events within a multiple data stream environment is explored, and a range of techniques, covering model based approaches, `programmed' AI and machine learning paradigms. It is found that, in general, correlation is best achieved via rule based approaches, but that these suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as the difculty of developing and maintaining an appropriate knowledge base, and the lack of ability to generalise from known misuses to new unseen misuses. Two distinct approaches are evident. One attempts to encode knowledge of known misuses, typically within rules, and use this to screen events. This approach cannot generally detect misuses for which it has not been programmed, i.e. it is prone to issuing false negatives. The other attempts to `learn' the features of event patterns that constitute normal behaviour, and, by observing patterns that do not match expected behaviour, detect when a misuse has occurred. This approach is prone to issuing false positives, i.e. inferring misuse from innocent patterns of behaviour that the system was not trained to recognise. Contemporary approaches are seen to favour hybridisation, often combining detection or localisation mechanisms for both abnormal and normal behaviour, the former to capture known cases of misuse, the latter to capture unknown cases. In some systems, these mechanisms even work together to update each other to increase detection rates and lower false positive rates. It is concluded that hybridisation offers the most promising future direction, but that a rule or state based component is likely to remain, being the most natural approach to the correlation of complex events. The challenge, then, is to mitigate the weaknesses of canonical programmed systems such that learning, generalisation and adaptation are more readily facilitated

Epikardiale Atherosklerose, koronare Gefäßschlängelungen, Aneurysmata und Muskelbrücken – Analyse der Koronarmorphologie bei Patienten mit Acetylcholin-induzierten Koronarspasmen

Koronare Vasomotionsstörungen stellen eine relevante Ursache für Angina pectoris bei Patienten ohne hämodynamisch relevante atherosklerotische Plaques dar. Die Genese der Vasomotionsstörungen ist multifaktoriell und nicht final geklärt. Mittels Acetylcholin-Testung lassen sich epikardiale von mikrovaskulären Spasmen differenzieren. Ziel der Arbeit war die Analyse koronarer Morphologiekriterien und deren Einfluss auf mögliche Testergebnisse. Die Kriterien einer geringgradigen Atherosklerose, Muskelbrücken, Aneurysmata und Gefäßschlängelungen wurden untersucht. Die Koronarangiographien von 610 Patienten, die im Robert-Bosch-Krankenhaus Stuttgart einen Acetylcholin-Test erhalten haben wurden auf jene Morphologiekriterien untersucht. Diese Patienten wiesen eine Angina pectoris auf, in Abwesenheit höhergradiger Stenosen. Im Anschluss wurden die Morphologiekriterien mit dem Acetylcholin-Testergebnis verglichen. Es lässt sich eine signifikante Häufung geringgradiger Atherosklerose bei Patienten mit epikardialem Koronarspasmus im Acetylcholin-Test erkennen. Zudem scheint es beim Vorhandensein von koronaren Gefäßschlängelungen weniger epikardiale Spasmusformen im Acetylcholintest zu geben

Continuous-wave operation of vertically emitting ring interband cascade lasers at room temperature

Funding: The authors are grateful for financial support received under Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) project No. 1516332 (ATMO-SENSE).We present vertical light emission in continuous-wave mode from an interband cascade laser (ICL) at a record temperature of up to 38 °C. These results pave the way toward a more efficient and compact integration of this technology in mobile spectroscopic applications. Our approach employs ring cavity ICLs that are mounted epi-side down for efficient heat extraction from the devices. The vertical single-mode emission relies on a metallized second-order distributed-feedback grating designed for an emission wavelength of 3.8 μm. A single lateral mode operation is favored by a narrow waveguide width of 4 μm. Optical output powers of more than 6 mW were measured at 20 °C for rings with a diameter of ∼800 μm. At this temperature, the threshold current-density amounted to 0.60 kA/cm2 and the device showed continuous current and temperature tuning rates of 0.06 nm/mA and 0.37 nm/K, respectively.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

On the HU Aquarii planetary system hypothesis

In this work, we investigate the eclipse timing of the polar binary HU Aquarii that has been observed for almost two decades. Recently, Qian et al. attributed large (O-C) deviations between the eclipse ephemeris and observations to a compact system of two massive jovian companions. We improve the Keplerian, kinematic model of the Light Travel Time (LTT) effect and re-analyse the whole currently available data set. We add almost 60 new, yet unpublished, mostly precision light curves obtained using the time high-resolution photo-polarimeter OPTIMA, as well as photometric observations performed at the MONET/N, PIRATE and TCS telescopes. We determine new mid--egress times with a mean uncertainty at the level of 1 second or better. We claim that because the observations that currently exist in the literature are non-homogeneous with respect to spectral windows (ultraviolet, X-ray, visual, polarimetric mode) and the reported mid--egress measurements errors, they may introduce systematics that affect orbital fits. Indeed, we find that the published data, when taken literally, cannot be explained by any unique solution. Many qualitatively different and best-fit 2-planet configurations, including self-consistent, Newtonian N-body solutions may be able to explain the data. However, using high resolution, precision OPTIMA light curves, we find that the (O-C) deviations are best explained by the presence of a single circumbinary companion orbiting at a distance of ~4.5 AU with a small eccentricity and having ~7 Jupiter-masses. This object could be the next circumbinary planet detected from the ground, similar to the announced companions around close binaries HW Vir, NN Ser, UZ For, DP Leo or SZ Her, and planets of this type around Kepler-16, Kepler-34 and Kepler-35.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figures, accepted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS

Substrate-emitting ring interband cascade lasers

The authors acknowledge the support by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) projects P26100-N27 (H2N) and NextLite (F4909-N23), and the State of Bavaria. HD acknowledges financial support through an APART fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.We demonstrate interband cascade lasers fabricated into ring-shaped cavities with vertical light emission through the substrate at a wavelength of λ ≈ 3.7 µm. The out-coupling mechanism is based on a metallized second-order distributed feedback grating. At room-temperature, a pulsed threshold current-density of 0.75 kA/cm2 and a temperature-tuning rate of 0.3 nm/°C is measured. In contrast to the azimuthal polarization of ring quantum cascade lasers, we observe a radial polarization of the projected nearfield of ring interband cascade lasers. These findings underline the fundamental physical difference between light generation in interband and intersubband cascade lasers, offering new perspectives for device integration.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe