Life on a low income in austere times

Following the ‘credit crunch’ 2007-2008, the UK entered the deepest recessionary conditions in living memory. As the liquidity from the financial services sector came to an abrupt halt, the investment ‘life blood’ of the economy in short supply, numerous companies, including long established high street businesses, ceased trading and consequently, unemployment rates rose to the highest levels since the 1980s. After the initial ‘bailout’ of the banking sector, political attention turned to the growing public deficit and the spectre of public sector austerity came to dominate the policy agenda. This agenda swiftly moved from how best to regulate the financial services industry to the question of the ‘welfare bill’ and the growing problem of ‘worklessness’. From this point, particularly as the Universal Credit Scheme passed through parliament and came to be implemented in various phases, much was said in political and policy debates about the lives of the ‘poor’ and many ‘common sense’ assumptions informed these discussions. However as is often the case, omitted from these discussions were the voices of those people living of low income. To redress this imbalance, the report aims to document the reality of life on a low income during this period, by affording primacy to the ‘voices’ of those living in poverty

Large-Scale Image Processing with the ROTSE Pipeline for Follow-Up of Gravitational Wave Events

Electromagnetic (EM) observations of gravitational-wave (GW) sources would bring unique insights into a source which are not available from either channel alone. However EM follow-up of GW events presents new challenges. GW events will have large sky error regions, on the order of 10-100 square degrees, which can be made up of many disjoint patches. When searching such large areas there is potential contamination by EM transients unrelated to the GW event. Furthermore, the characteristics of possible EM counterparts to GW events are also uncertain. It is therefore desirable to be able to assess the statistical significance of a candidate EM counterpart, which can only be done by performing background studies of large data sets. Current image processing pipelines such as that used by ROTSE are not usually optimised for large-scale processing. We have automated the ROTSE image analysis, and supplemented it with a post-processing unit for candidate validation and classification. We also propose a simple ad hoc statistic for ranking candidates as more likely to be associated with the GW trigger. We demonstrate the performance of the automated pipeline and ranking statistic using archival ROTSE data. EM candidates from a randomly selected set of images are compared to a background estimated from the analysis of 102 additional sets of archival images. The pipeline's detection efficiency is computed empirically by re-analysis of the images after adding simulated optical transients that follow typical light curves for gamma-ray burst afterglows and kilonovae. We show that the automated pipeline rejects most background events and is sensitive to simulated transients to limiting magnitudes consistent with the limiting magnitude of the images

Preliminary catalog of pictures taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo 15 mission

Catalog of all pictures taken from lunar module or lunar surface during Apollo 15 missio

Philanthropy or solidarity? Ethical dilemmas about humanitarianism in crisis afflicted Greece

That philanthropy perpetuates the conditions that cause inequality is an old argument shared by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde and Slavoj Zizek. I recorded the same argument in conversations regarding a growing humanitarian concern in austerity-ridden Greece. At the local level a number of solidarity initiatives provide the most impoverished families with humanitarian help. Some citizens participate in such initiatives wholeheartedly, while some other citizens criticize solidarity movements drawing primarily from Marxist-inspired arguments, such as, for example, that humanitarianism rationalises state inaction. The local narratives presented in this article bring forward two parallel possibilities engendered by the humanitarian face of social solidarity: first, its empowering potential (where solidarity initiatives enhance local social awareness), and second, the de-politicisation of the crisis and the experience of suffering (a liability that stems from the effectiveness of humanitarianism in ameliorating only temporarily the superficial consequences of the crisis). These two overlapping possibilities can help us problematise the contextual specificity and strategic employment of humanitarian solidarity in times of austerity

Additional Records of Deep-Sea Fishes from Off Greater New England

Recent review of deep-sea fishes captured deeper than 200m off greater New England, from the Scotian Shelf at 44°N to the southern New England Shelf at about 38°N, documented 591 species. Subsequent trawling activity and reviews of deep-sea taxa occurring in the area have revealed that an additional 40 species in habit the deep sea off New England. Thirty-two of these new records were captured in the course of 44 bottom trawls and 94 mid-water trawls over or in the proximity of Bear Seamount (39°55\u27N, 67°30\u27W). Five of the 40 species have been described as new to science, at least in part from material taken in the study area. In addition to describing such information as specimen size and position, depth, and date of capture, errors made in the previous study of deep-sea fishes in the area are identified and corrected

Maladaptive striatal plasticity and abnormal reward-learning in cervical dystonia

In monogenetic generalized forms of dystonia, in vitro neurophysiological recordings have demonstrated direct evidence for abnormal plasticity at the level of the cortico‐striatal synapse. It is unclear whether similar abnormalities contribute to the pathophysiology of cervical dystonia, the most common type of focal dystonia. We investigated whether abnormal cortico‐striatal synaptic plasticity contributes to abnormal reward‐learning behavior in patients with focal dystonia. Forty patients and 40 controls performed a reward gain and loss avoidance reversal learning task. Participant's behavior was fitted to a computational model of the basal ganglia incorporating detailed cortico‐striatal synaptic learning rules. Model comparisons were performed to assess the ability of four hypothesized receptor specific abnormalities of cortico‐striatal long‐term potentiation (LTP) and long‐term depression (LTD): increased or decreased D1:LTP/LTD and increased or decreased D2: LTP/LTD to explain abnormal behavior in patients. Patients were selectively impaired in the post‐reversal phase of the reward task. Individual learning rates in the reward reversal task correlated with the severity of the patient's motor symptoms. A model of the striatum with decreased D2:LTP/ LTD best explained the patient's behavior, suggesting excessive D2 cortico‐striatal synaptic depotentiation could underpin biased reward‐learning in patients with cervical dystonia. Reversal learning impairment in cervical dystonia may be a behavioral correlate of D2‐specific abnormalities in cortico‐striatal synaptic plasticity. Reinforcement learning tasks with computational modeling could allow the identification of molecular targets for novel treatments based on their ability to restore normal reward‐learning behavior in these patients

Overview of the BlockNormal Event Trigger Generator

In the search for unmodeled gravitational wave bursts, there are a variety of methods that have been proposed to generate candidate events from time series data. Block Normal is a method of identifying candidate events by searching for places in the data stream where the characteristic statistics of the data change. These change-points divide the data into blocks in which the characteristics of the block are stationary. Blocks in which these characteristics are inconsistent with the long term characteristic statistics are marked as Event-Triggers which can then be investigated by a more computationally demanding multi-detector analysis.Comment: GWDAW-8 proceedings, 6 pages, 2 figure

Observing gravitational waves from core-collapse supernovae in the advanced detector era

The next galactic core-collapse supernova (CCSN) has already exploded, and its electromagnetic (EM) waves, neutrinos, and gravitational waves (GWs) may arrive at any moment. We present an extensive study on the potential sensitivity of prospective detection scenarios for GWs from CCSNe within 5 Mpc, using realistic noise at the predicted sensitivity of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors for 2015, 2017, and 2019. We quantify the detectability of GWs from CCSNe within the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud, for which there will be an observed neutrino burst. We also consider extreme GW emission scenarios for more distant CCSNe with an associated EM signature. We find that a three-detector network at design sensitivity will be able to detect neutrino-driven CCSN explosions out to ∼5.5  kpc, while rapidly rotating core collapse will be detectable out to the Large Magellanic Cloud at 50 kpc. Of the phenomenological models for extreme GW emission scenarios considered in this study, such as long-lived bar-mode instabilities and disk fragmentation instabilities, all models considered will be detectable out to M31 at 0.77 Mpc, while the most extreme models will be detectable out to M82 at 3.52 Mpc and beyond