An Estimate of alpha_S from Bottomonium in Unquenched QCD

We estimate the strong coupling constant from the perturbative expansion of the plaquette. The scale is set by the 2S-1S and 1P-1S splittings in bottomonium which are computed in NRQCD on dynamical gauge configurations with nf=2 degenerate Wilson quarks at intermediate masses. We have increased the statistics of our spectrum calculation in order to reliably extrapolate in the sea-quark mass. We find a value of alpha_MS(m_Z) = 0.1118(26) which is somewhat lower than previous estimates within NRQCD.Comment: LATTICE98(heavyqk

Modeling larval connectivity of coral reef organisms in the Kenya-Tanzania region

Most coral reef organisms have a bipartite life-cycle; they are site attached to reefs as adults but have pelagic larval stages that allow them to disperse to other reefs. Connectivity among coral reef patches is critical to the survival of local populations of reef organisms, and requires movement across gaps that are not suitable habitat for recruitment. Knowledge of population connectivity among individual reef habitats within a broader geographic region of coral reefs has been identified as key to developing efficient spatial management strategies to protect marine ecosystems. The study of larval connectivity of marine organisms is a complex multidisciplinary challenge that is difficult to address by direct observation alone. An approach that couples ocean circulation models with individual based models (IBMs) of larvae with different degrees of life-history complexity has been previously used to assess connectivity patterns in several coral reef regions (e.g., the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and the Caribbean). We applied the IBM particle tracking approach to the Kenya-Tanzania region, which exhibits strong seasonality in the alongshore currents due to the influence of the monsoon. A 3-dimensional (3D) ocean circulation model with 2 km horizontal resolution was coupled to IBMs that track virtual larvae released from each of 661 reef habitats, associated with 15 distinct regions. Given that reefs provide homes to numerous species, each with distinctive, and in aggregate very diverse life-histories, several life-history scenarios were modeled to examine the variety of dispersal and connectivity patterns possible. We characterize virtual larvae of Acropora corals and Acanthurus surgeonfish, two coral reef inhabitants with greatly differing pelagic life-histories, to examine the effects of short (50 days) pelagic larval durations (PLD), differences in swimming abilities (implemented as reef perception distances), and active depth keeping in reef connectivity. Acropora virtual larvae were modeled as 3D passive particles with a precompetency period of 4 days, a total PLD of 12 days and a perception distance of 10 m. Acanthurus virtual larvae were characterized by 50 days precompetency period, a total PLD of 72 days and a perception distance of 4 km. Acanthurus virtual larvae were modeled in two ways — as 3D passive particles and including an idealized ontogenetic vertical migration behavior. A range of distances within which larvae were able to perceive reefs and directionally swim to settle on them during the competency period were evaluated. The influence of interannual environmental variations was assessed for two years (2000, 2005) of contrasting physics. The spatial scale of connectivity is much smaller for the short PLD coral, with successful connections restricted to a 1° radius (~100 km) around source reefs. In contrast, long distance connections from the southern to the northernmost reefs (~950 km) are common for virtual Acanthurids. Successful settlement for virtual Acropora larvae was 20% overall, with cross-region recruitment much increased compared to the coral larvae. Approximately 8% of Acropora larvae that successfully settled, recruited to their source reef (self-recruitment), an important proportion compared to only 1-2 % self-recruitment for Acanthurus. These rates and dispersal distances are similar to previous modelling studies of similar species in other coral reef regions and agree well with the few observational studies within the Kenya-Tanzania region

Improving Stochastic Estimator Techniques for Disconnected Diagrams

Disconnected diagrams are expected to be sensitive to the inclusion of dynamical fermions. We present a feasibility study for the observation of such effects on the nucleonic matrix elements of the axial vector current, using SESAM full QCD vacuum configurations with Wilson fermions on $16^3\times 32$ lattices, at $\beta =5.6$. Starting from the standard methods developed by the Kentucky and Tsukuba groups, we investigate the improvement from various refinements thereof.Comment: One author added. Contribution to Lattice 1997, 3 pages LaTex, to appear in Nucl. Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.

Experimenting with Cigarettes and Physical Activity Among Mexican Origin Youth: A Cross Sectional Analysis of the Interdependent Associations Among Sensation Seeking, Acculturation, and Gender

Sensation seeking tendencies tend to manifest during adolescence and are associated with both health-compromising behaviors and health-enhancing behaviors. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between sensation seeking and physical activity, a health-enhancing behavior, and between sensation seeking and experimenting with cigarettes, a health compromising-behavior, among a cohort of Mexican origin adolescents residing in the United States with different levels of acculturation. Methods: In 2009, 1,154 Mexican origin youth (50.5% girls, mean age 14.3 years (SD = 1.04)) provided data on smoking behavior, physical activity, linguistic acculturation, and sensation seeking. We conducted Pearson's chi(2) tests to examine the associations between categorical demographic characteristics (i.e. gender, age, country of birth and parental educational attainment) and both cigarette experimentation and physical activity and Student's t-tests to examine mean differences on the continuous variables (i.e. sensation seeking subscale) by the behaviors. We examined mean differences in the demographic characteristics, acculturation, and both behaviors for each of the sensation seeking subscales using analysis of variance (ANOVA). To examine relationships between the sensation seeking subscales, gender, and both behaviors, at different levels of acculturation we completed unconditional logistic regression analyses stratified by level of acculturation. Results: Overall, 23.3% had experimented with cigarettes and 29.0% reported being physically active for at least 60 minutes/day on at least 5 days/week. Experimenting with cigarettes and being physically active were more prevalent among boys than girls. Among girls, higher levels of sensation seeking tendencies were associated with higher levels of acculturation and experimentation with cigarettes, but not with physical activity. Among boys, higher levels of sensation seeking tendencies were associated with higher levels of acculturation, experimenting with cigarettes and being physically active. Conclusions: Our results suggest that interventions designed to prevent smoking among Mexican origin youth may need to address social aspects associated with acculturation, paying close attention to gendered manifestations of sensation seeking.National Cancer Institute CA105203, CA126988Caroline W. Law Fund for Cancer PreventionDan Duncan Family Institute for Cancer Prevention and Risk AssessmentCenter for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research in Underserved Population

Light Quark Physics with Dynamical Wilson Fermions

We present results for spectroscopy, quark masses and decay constants obtained from SESAM's and TkL's large statistics simulations of QCD with two dynamical Wilson fermions.Comment: 3 pages; to appear in the proceedings of Lat.'9

Word Embeddings for Entity-annotated Texts

Learned vector representations of words are useful tools for many information retrieval and natural language processing tasks due to their ability to capture lexical semantics. However, while many such tasks involve or even rely on named entities as central components, popular word embedding models have so far failed to include entities as first-class citizens. While it seems intuitive that annotating named entities in the training corpus should result in more intelligent word features for downstream tasks, performance issues arise when popular embedding approaches are naively applied to entity annotated corpora. Not only are the resulting entity embeddings less useful than expected, but one also finds that the performance of the non-entity word embeddings degrades in comparison to those trained on the raw, unannotated corpus. In this paper, we investigate approaches to jointly train word and entity embeddings on a large corpus with automatically annotated and linked entities. We discuss two distinct approaches to the generation of such embeddings, namely the training of state-of-the-art embeddings on raw-text and annotated versions of the corpus, as well as node embeddings of a co-occurrence graph representation of the annotated corpus. We compare the performance of annotated embeddings and classical word embeddings on a variety of word similarity, analogy, and clustering evaluation tasks, and investigate their performance in entity-specific tasks. Our findings show that it takes more than training popular word embedding models on an annotated corpus to create entity embeddings with acceptable performance on common test cases. Based on these results, we discuss how and when node embeddings of the co-occurrence graph representation of the text can restore the performance.Comment: This paper is accepted in 41st European Conference on Information Retrieva

Glueballs and string breaking from full QCD

We present results on the static potential, and torelon and glueball masses from simulations of QCD with two flavours of dynamical Wilson fermions on $16^3\times 32$ and $24^3\times 40$ lattices at $\beta=5.6$.Comment: Talk presented by Gunnar Bali at International Symposium on Lattice Field Theories (Lattice 97), Edinburgh, July 1997, 3 pages LaTeX (epscrc2.sty) with 4 eps figure