Generating qudits with d=3,4 encoded on two-photon states

We present an experimental method to engineer arbitrary pure states of qudits with d=3,4 using linear optics and a single nonlinear crystal.Comment: 4 pages, 1 eps figure. Minor changes. The title has been changed for publication on Physical Review

UV and X-ray Spectral Lines of FeXXIII Ion for Plasma Diagnostics

We have calculated X-ray and UV spectra of Be-like Fe (FeXXIII) ion in collisional-radiative model including all fine-structure transitions among the 2s^2, 2s2p, 2p^2, 2snl, and 2pnl levels where n=3 and 4, adopting data for the collision strengths by Zhang & Sampson (1992) and by Sampson, Goett, & Clark (1984). Some line intensity ratios can be used for the temperature diagnostics. We show 5 ratios in UV region and 9 ratios in X-ray region as a function of electron temperature and density at 0.3keV < T_e < 10keV and $n_e = 1 - 10^{25} cm^{-3}$. The effect of cascade in these line ratios and in the level population densities are discussed.Comment: LaTeX, 18 pages, 10 Postscript figures. To appear in Physica Script

CHIANTI - an Atomic Database for Emission Lines. Paper VI: Proton Rates and Other Improvements

The CHIANTI atomic database contains atomic energy levels, wavelengths, radiative transition probabilities and electron excitation data for a large number of ions of astrophysical interest. Version 4 has been released, and proton excitation data is now included, principally for ground configuration levels that are close in energy. The fitting procedure for excitation data, both electrons and protons, has been extended to allow 9 point spline fits in addition to the previous 5 point spline fits. This allows higher quality fits to data from close-coupling calculations where resonances can lead to significant structure in the Maxwellian-averaged collision strengths. The effects of photoexcitation and stimulated emission by a blackbody radiation field in a spherical geometry on the level balance equations of the CHIANTI ions can now be studied following modifications to the CHIANTI software. With the addition of H I, He I and N I, the first neutral species have been added to CHIANTI. Many updates to existing ion data-sets are described, while several new ions have been added to the database, including Ar IV, Fe VI and Ni XXI. The two-photon continuum is now included in the spectral synthesis routines, and a new code for calculating the relativistic free-free continuum has been added. The treatment of the free-bound continuum has also been updated.Comment: CHIANTI is available at http://wwwsolar.nrl.navy.mil/chianti.htm

How did the discussion go: Discourse act classification in social media conversations

We propose a novel attention based hierarchical LSTM model to classify discourse act sequences in social media conversations, aimed at mining data from online discussion using textual meanings beyond sentence level. The very uniqueness of the task is the complete categorization of possible pragmatic roles in informal textual discussions, contrary to extraction of question-answers, stance detection or sarcasm identification which are very much role specific tasks. Early attempt was made on a Reddit discussion dataset. We train our model on the same data, and present test results on two different datasets, one from Reddit and one from Facebook. Our proposed model outperformed the previous one in terms of domain independence; without using platform-dependent structural features, our hierarchical LSTM with word relevance attention mechanism achieved F1-scores of 71\% and 66\% respectively to predict discourse roles of comments in Reddit and Facebook discussions. Efficiency of recurrent and convolutional architectures in order to learn discursive representation on the same task has been presented and analyzed, with different word and comment embedding schemes. Our attention mechanism enables us to inquire into relevance ordering of text segments according to their roles in discourse. We present a human annotator experiment to unveil important observations about modeling and data annotation. Equipped with our text-based discourse identification model, we inquire into how heterogeneous non-textual features like location, time, leaning of information etc. play their roles in charaterizing online discussions on Facebook

Management of Spastic Paresis and Cervical Dystonia: access to Therapeutic Innovations Through an International Program of Practical Courses

Purpose: Our purpose was to determine satisfaction and confidence of the Ixcellence Network training program on health care practitioners using botulinum toxin A (BoNT-A) for neurologic disorders, including spastic paresis and cervical dystonia. / Methods: The Ixcellence Network training program was designed by a scientific committee of 6 experts and then tested at centers in Europe, and Latin America. The training, provided by 16 experienced neurologists and rehabilitation specialists, consisted of theoretic and practical sessions that covered the different stages of the patient's journey from diagnosis to tailored treatment and rehabilitation. Trainees' feedback and the impact on participants' practice were evaluated by 2 individual questionnaires, at the end of the session (T0) and at 6 months (T6). Trainers' feedback was also collected through an individual questionnaire. / Findings: Between September 2012 and December 2017, 728 trained physicians participated in training programs with 48%, 23%, and 29% of attendees participating in training sessions dedicated to adult spastic paresis, child spastic paresis, and cervical dystonia, respectively. At T0, 93% of attendees thought that they had been given new information and 90% thought that the training would change their daily practice. This was confirmed at T6 by 93% of respondents. Trainees were highly satisfied with the program, in particular with the practical sessions. Trainers expectations were met for attendees' level of expertise, motivation, language, and participation. / Implications: In this descriptive study, we show that the Ixcellence Network program represents a new educational approach to promote consistency in care practices and dissemination of expertise on the use of BoNT-A for neurologic disorders.

Second-order Democratic Aggregation

Aggregated second-order features extracted from deep convolutional networks have been shown to be effective for texture generation, fine-grained recognition, material classification, and scene understanding. In this paper, we study a class of orderless aggregation functions designed to minimize interference or equalize contributions in the context of second-order features and we show that they can be computed just as efficiently as their first-order counterparts and they have favorable properties over aggregation by summation. Another line of work has shown that matrix power normalization after aggregation can significantly improve the generalization of second-order representations. We show that matrix power normalization implicitly equalizes contributions during aggregation thus establishing a connection between matrix normalization techniques and prior work on minimizing interference. Based on the analysis we present {\gamma}-democratic aggregators that interpolate between sum ({\gamma}=1) and democratic pooling ({\gamma}=0) outperforming both on several classification tasks. Moreover, unlike power normalization, the {\gamma}-democratic aggregations can be computed in a low dimensional space by sketching that allows the use of very high-dimensional second-order features. This results in a state-of-the-art performance on several datasets

Rolling Adhesion of Yeast Engineered to Express Cell Adhesion Molecules

Selectins are cell adhesion molecules that mediate capture of leukocytes on vascular endothelium as an essential component of the inflammatory response. Here we describe a method for yeast surface display of selectins, together with a functional assay that measures rolling adhesion of selectin-expressing yeast on a ligand-coated surface. E-selectin-expressing yeast roll specifically on surfaces bearing sialyl-Lewisx ligands. Observation of yeast rolling dynamics at various stages of their life cycle indicates that the kinematics of yeast motion depends on the ratio of the bud radius to the parent radius (B/P). Large-budded yeast walk across the surface, alternately pivoting about bud and parent. Small-budded yeast wobble across the surface, with bud pivoting about parent. Tracking the bud location of budding yeast allows measurement of the angular velocity of the yeast particle. Comparison of translational and angular velocities of budding yeast demonstrates that selectin-expressing cells are rolling rather than slipping across ligand-coated surfaces

Nonlinear Relationship between Birth Weight and Visceral Fat in Adolescents

To determine the association of birth weight with abdominal fat distribution and markers known to increase risk for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes in adolescents

The Minimum Shared Edges Problem on Grid-like Graphs

We study the NP-hard Minimum Shared Edges (MSE) problem on graphs: decide whether it is possible to route $p$ paths from a start vertex to a target vertex in a given graph while using at most $k$ edges more than once. We show that MSE can be decided on bounded (i.e. finite) grids in linear time when both dimensions are either small or large compared to the number $p$ of paths. On the contrary, we show that MSE remains NP-hard on subgraphs of bounded grids. Finally, we study MSE from a parametrised complexity point of view. It is known that MSE is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the number $p$ of paths. We show that, under standard complexity-theoretical assumptions, the problem parametrised by the combined parameter $k$, $p$, maximum degree, diameter, and treewidth does not admit a polynomial-size problem kernel, even when restricted to planar graphs

Validity of the second law in nonextensive quantum thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics in nonextensive statistical mechanics is discussed in the quantum regime. Making use of the convexity property of the generalized relative entropy associated with the Tsallis entropy indexed by q, Clausius' inequality is shown to hold in the range of q between zero and two. This restriction on the range of the entropic index, q, is purely quantum mechanical and there exists no upper bound of q for validity of the second law in classical theory.Comment: 12 pages, no figure