Has Cosmology Advanced in Recent Years?

Cosmologists are astronomers who study the universe as\ud a whole. The idea of the universe as a whole presents\ud some difficulty both to science and philosophy. In science,\ud because we can only study parts of a system unknown in\ud its totality. Moreover there are features of scientific cosmology\ud which set it apart from other sciences: we cannot\ud in cosmology speak of experiments or verifiable predictions\ud (Cosmologists are prophets of the past!). We can\ud only check astronomical observations with theories and\ud models. Philosophically, the connection between models\ud of the universe and reality, the intelligibility of an universe\ud as an independently existing entity and the perennial\ud questions about the origin of the universe remain unsolved

OGO-6 experiment F-03

The results obtained with the retarding potential analyzer on the OGO-6 satellite are discussed. The information obtained during the OGO-6 flight concerned the following subjects: (1) measurement of electron flux density in the plasmasphere, (2) latitudinal variations of ion temperature, (3) heating in the nighttime ionosphere by conjugate photoelectrons, (4) longitudinal variation in equatorial ion temperature at low altitude, and (5) identification of heavy ions in the upper F region

Unveiling Spaces: Architecturally meaningful semantic descriptions from images of interior spaces

There has been a growing adoption of computer vision tools and technologies in architectural design workflows over the past decade. Notable use cases include point cloud generation, visual content analysis, and spatial awareness for robotic fabrication. Multiple image classification, object detection, and semantic pixel segmentation models have become popular for the extraction of high-level symbolic descriptions and semantic content from two-dimensional images and videos. However, a major challenge in this regard has been the extraction of high-level architectural structures (walls, floors, ceilings windows etc.) from diverse imagery where parts of these elements are occluded by furniture, people, or other non-architectural elements. This project aims to tackle this problem by proposing models that are capable of extracting architecturally meaningful semantic descriptions from two-dimensional scenes of populated interior spaces. 1000 virtual classrooms are parametrically generated, randomized along key spatial parameters such as length, width, height, and door/window positions. The positions of cameras, and non-architectural visual obstructions (furniture/objects) are also randomized. A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for image-to-image translation (Pix2Pix) is trained on synthetically generated rendered images of these enclosures, along with corresponding image abstractions representing high-level architectural structure. The model is then tested on unseen synthetic imagery of new enclosures, and outputs are compared to ground truth using pixel-wise comparison for evaluation. A similar model evaluation is also carried out on photographs of existing indoor enclosures, to measure its performance in real-world settings.Comment: Written for 6.869, Advances in Computer Vision at MIT, Spring 2022. 9 pages, 13 figure

Une vraie transition vers la pratique : simulation de rôles inversés

Implication Statement This article explores a direct-observation simulation swapping resident and consultant roles as a measure to assess competence during the final “transition to practice” phase of residency. As indicated by the Royal College, assessment of competency in this stage should include direct observation; however, this is challenging to implement, both from the perspective of a busy clinical environment, but also logistically, as a final-stage resident is still a learner in a consultant clinic. Our suggested approach allows for both real-world experience for the resident as well as direct observation and assessment by the consultant, thus providing the resident with targeted, actionable feedback, as well as ensuring the final-stage resident is competent for practice.Énoncé des implications de la recherche Cet article explore une simulation d’observation directe dans laquelle les rôles de résident et de consultant sont inversés comme moyen d’évaluation des compétences durant l’étape finale de la résidence, la « transition vers la pratique ». Le Collège royal indique qu’à ce stade, l’observation directe doit faire partie de l’évaluation des compétences; or, cette modalité d’évaluation est difficile à mettre en œuvre dans un environnement clinique animé et un contexte logistique où le résident est encore un apprenant dans une clinique de consultants. L’approche que nous proposons permet à la fois au résident d’acquérir une expérience réelle et au consultant de faire l’observation directe pour l’évaluation, et d’offrir une rétroaction ciblée et utile, tout en s’assurant que le résident en fin de parcours a les compétences requises pour pratiquer

Plasma measurements with the retarding potential analyser on OGO 6

Plasma measurements with retarding potential analyzer on OGO

« Ça réveille l’esprit » : Initier les professeurs et stagiaires de la Faculté d’oncologie à la pratique de l’observation et de la formation directes au cours d’un cours de maître donné à des musiciens

Bringing faculty to a realization of the importance of direct observation is a major task during the transition to competency-based medical education. Musicians generally already endorse a strong coaching culture. We included a live cello masterclass in an oncology faculty and trainee workshop in order to demonstrate coaching and feedback. Based on participant post-event interviews, the musical masterclass was a highly effective catalyst for self-reflection in regards to teaching practices and lead to new and revised perspectives on observation and coaching in medicine.  With just a musician-trainee, music coach, and faculty moderator, this effective demonstration can be easily replicated

Geo-located Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) for Crowdsourced Evaluation of Urban Environments

Sentiment analysis methods are rapidly being adopted by the field of Urban Design and Planning, for the crowdsourced evaluation of urban environments. However, most models used within this domain are able to identify positive or negative sentiment associated with a textual appraisal as a whole, without inferring information about specific urban aspects contained within it, or the sentiment associated with them. While Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is becoming increasingly popular, most existing ABSA models are trained on non-urban themes such as restaurants, electronics, consumer goods and the like. This body of research develops an ABSA model capable of extracting urban aspects contained within geo-located textual urban appraisals, along with corresponding aspect sentiment classification. We annotate a dataset of 2500 crowdsourced reviews of public parks, and train a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model with Local Context Focus (LCF) on this data. Our model achieves significant improvement in prediction accuracy on urban reviews, for both Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) and Aspect Sentiment Classification (ASC) tasks. For demonstrative analysis, positive and negative urban aspects across Boston are spatially visualized. We hope that this model is useful for designers and planners for fine-grained urban sentiment evaluation.Comment: Created for 6.8610, Quantitative Methods for Natural Language Processing at MIT Fall 2022. 5 pages, 4 figure

Planar ion trap (retarding potential analyzer) experiment for atmosphere explorer

The retarding potential analyzer and drift meter were carried aboard all three Atmosphere Explorer spacecraft. These instruments measure the total thermal ion concentration and temperature, the bulk thermal ion velocity vector and some limited properties of the relative abundance of H(+), He(+), O(+) and molecular ions. These instruments functioned with no internal failures on all the spacecraft. On AE-E there existed some evidence for external surface contamination that damaged the integrity of the RPA sweep grids. This led to some difficulties in data reduction and interpretation that did not prove to be a disastrous problem. The AE-D spacecraft functioned for only a few months before it re-entered. During this time the satellite suffered from a nutation about the spin axis of about + or - 2 deg. This 2 deg modulation was superimposed upon the ion drift meter horizontal ion arrival angle output requiring the employment of filtering techniques to retrieve the real data

Near miss or standard of care? DPYD screening for cancer patients receiving fluorouracil

5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and its pro-drug capecitabine are widely used anticancer agents. Most 5-FU catabolism is dependent on dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD) encoded by the DPYD gene, and DPYD variants that reduce DPD function increase 5-FU toxicity. Most DPD deficient patients are heterozygous and can be treated with reduced 5-FU dosing. We describe a patient with a genotype associated with near complete absence of DPD function, and severe and likely fatal toxicity with 5-FU treatment. The patient was treated effectively with alternative systemic therapy. Routine pretreatment DPYD genotyping is recommended by the European Medicines Agency, and guidelines for use of 5-FU in DPD deficient patients are available. However, outside the province of Quebec, routine pretreatment screening for DPD deficiency remains unavailable in Canada. It is likely our patient would have died from 5-FU toxicity under the current standard of care, but instead provides an example of the potential benefit of DPYD screening on patient outcomes