A Survey of Viva CalleSJ Participants: San Jose, California, 2017

This report presents the findings from a self-complete paper survey of participants at the Viva CalleSJ open streets event held on Sunday, September 17, 2017. The survey was designed to provide information that would help the City of San José assess the success of the event, guide planning for future Viva CalleSJ events, and inform potential funders and community partners about the benefits of Viva CalleSJ. A total of 860 adults at the event completed the one-page paper survey. Survey findings provide detail about how people traveled to the event, their reasons for attending, what they did at the event, how much physical activity they got, and how much money they planned to spend while at the event. The survey also collected data on respondents’ gender, age, and race/ethnicity. Notable findings include that over three-quarters of respondents expected to be physically active at the event for more than an hour, over one-third expected to spend more than $20, and 22% volunteered that they played Pokémon GO, an augmented-reality game played on smart phones. The game maker enhanced the game along the 2017 Viva CalleSJ route for that day. This Pokémon GO factor likely explains why more people traveled from outside the City of San José to attend Viva CalleSJ in 2017 than did in the preceding two years

Chameleons Of Modern Drumming: Mastering Diverse Commerical Styles

Studio drummers are some of the most well-rounded musicians contributing to commercial music in the modern era. They are hired to lend their talents to an artist’s compositions by creating drum parts that will complement the overarching song arrangement. In this type of work, it is very helpful to be fluent in many different styles of drumming, as the music of each artist will require different techniques. Each of the drummers highlighted in this research have mastered the ability to shift from one style of music to the next with ease, earning them the title as a “chameleon” of modern drumming. The five drummers selected for analysis are presented chronologically, including Steve Gadd, Vinnie Colaiuta, Matt Chamberlain, Brian Blade, and Nate Smith. For each of the five drummers selected, three songs were chosen with each representing a different style of drumming. Nearly forty different transcriptions were created throughout the course of this research, notating specific patterns played in each song analyzed. After analyzing the drum parts from each song separately, similarities heard in the drumming on each record are highlighted. This helps us gain a deeper understanding of what makes each drummer unique in their personal taste and technique, and offers a brief summary of the individual style of each of these chameleon drummers

Designing Road Diet Evaluations: Lessons Learned from San Jose’s Lincoln Avenue Road Diet

This report analyzes traffic impacts from the 2015 implementation of a pilot “road diet” on Lincoln Avenue, in the City of San Jose, California, comparing data on traffic volumes and speeds from before and after the road diet was implemented. The analysis looks at impacts on both the road diet location itself and on surrounding streets likely to have been impacted by traffic diverted off the road diet segment. The results within the road diet zone were as expected, with falling volumes and numbers of speeders. The all-day data aggregated by street type (e.g., neighborhood streets, major streets) showed limited overall negative impacts outside the road diet segment. These summary results do not tell the entire story, however. Individual locations, particularly among the neighborhood streets, saw more noticeable negative impacts. The report ends with recommendations for best practices in designing and conducting road diet evaluation studies

Illusions of gunk

The possibility of gunk has been used to argue against mereological nihilism. This paper explores two responses on the part of the microphysical mereological nihilist: (1) the contingency defence, which maintains that nihilism is true of the actual world; but that at other worlds, composition occurs; (2) the impossibility defence, which maintains that nihilism is necessary true, and so gunk worlds are impossible. The former is argued to be ultimately unstable; the latter faces the explanatorily burden of explaining the illusion that gunk is possible. It is argued that we can discharge this burden by focussing on the contingency of the microphysicalist aspect of microphysical mereological nihilism. The upshot is that gunk-based arguments against microphysical mereological nihilism can be resisted

Precision Astrometry of a Sample of Speckle Binaries and Multiples with the Adaptive Optics Facilities at the Hale and Keck II Telescopes

Using the adaptive optics facilities at the 200-in Hale and 10-m Keck II, we observed in the near infrared a sample of 12 binary and multiple stars and one open cluster. We used the near diffraction limited images of these systems to measure the relative separations and position angles between their components. In this paper, we investigate and correct for the influence of the differential chromatic refraction and chip distortions on our relative astrometric measurements. Over one night, we achieve an astrometric precision typically well below 1 miliarcsecond and occasionally as small as 40 microarcseconds. Such a precision is in principle sufficient to astrometrically detect planetary mass objects around the components of nearby binary and multiple stars. Since we have not had sufficiently large data sets for the observed sample of stars to detect planets, we provide the limits to planetary mass objects based on the obtained astrometric precision.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables, to appear in MNRA

Qualitative Exploration of Illness Perceptions of Rheumatoid Arthritis in the General Public

Treating patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) within three months of symptom onset 2 leads to significantly improved outcomes. However, many people delay seeking medical 3 attention. In order to understand the reasons for this delay, it is important to have a thorough 4 understanding of public perceptions about RA. The current study investigated these perceptions 5 used the Self-Regulation Model (SRM) as a framework to explain how health behavior is 6 influenced by illness perceptions (prototypes) through qualitative interviews with 15 members of 7 the public without RA. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and analyzed using 8 framework analysis based on SRM illness perceptions. 9 Both accurate and inaccurate perceptions about the identity, causes, consequences, 10 controllability and timeline of RA were identified. This highlights opportunities to enhance public 11 knowledge about RA. These findings further support the utility of exploring prototypical beliefs of 12 illness, suggesting their potential role in influencing help-seeking behaviors and identifying 13 probable drivers/barriers to early presentation

The Deflationary Theory of Ontological Dependence

When an entity ontologically depends on another entity, the former ‘presupposes’ or ‘requires’ the latter in some metaphysical sense. This paper defends a novel view, Dependence Deflationism, according to which ontological dependence is what I call an aggregative cluster concept: a concept which can be understood, but not fully analysed, as a ‘weighted total’ of constructive and modal relations. The view has several benefits: it accounts for clear cases of ontological dependence as well as the source of disagreement in controversial ones; it gives a nice story about the evidential relevance of modal, mereological and set-theoretic facts to ontological dependence; and it makes sense of debates over the relation's formal properties. One important upshot of the deflationary account is that questions of ontological dependence are generally less deep and less interesting than usually thought

Limits to sustained energy intake. XXI. Effect of exposing the mother, but not her pups, to a cold environment during lactation in mice

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Carbon_h-Factor: Predicting Individuals' Research Impact at Early Stages of Their Career

Assessing an individual's research impact on the basis of a transparent algorithm is an important task for evaluation and comparison purposes. Besides simple but also inaccurate indices such as counting the mere number of publications or the accumulation of overall citations, and highly complex but also overwhelming full-range publication lists in their raw format, Hirsch (2005) introduced a single figure cleverly combining different approaches. The so-called h-index has undoubtedly become the standard in scientometrics of individuals' research impact (note: in the present paper I will always use the term “research impact” to describe the research performance as the logic of the paper is based on the h-index, which quantifies the specific “impact” of, e.g., researchers, but also because the genuine meaning of impact refers to quality as well). As the h-index reflects the number h of papers a researcher has published with at least h citations, the index is inherently positively biased towards senior level researchers. This might sometimes be problematic when predictive tools are needed for assessing young scientists' potential, especially when recruiting early career positions or equipping young scientists' labs. To be compatible with the standard h-index, the proposed index integrates the scientist's research age (Carbon_h-factor) into the h-index, thus reporting the average gain of h-index per year. Comprehensive calculations of the Carbon_h-factor were made for a broad variety of four research-disciplines (economics, neuroscience, physics and psychology) and for researchers performing on three high levels of research impact (substantial, outstanding and epochal) with ten researchers per category. For all research areas and output levels we obtained linear developments of the h-index demonstrating the validity of predicting one's later impact in terms of research impact already at an early stage of their career with the Carbon_h-factor being approx. 0.4, 0.8, and 1.5 for substantial, outstanding and epochal researchers, respectively

Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?

A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation as the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor reveals several weaknesses in this commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the mismatch between citing and cited documents, the deceptive display of three decimals that belies the real precision, and the absence of confidence intervals. These are minor issues that are easily amended and should be corrected, but more substantive improvements are needed. There are indications that the scientific community seeks and needs better certification of journal procedures to improve the quality of published science. Comprehensive certification of editorial and review procedures could help ensure adequate procedures to detect duplicate and fraudulent submissions.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, 6 table