Measurement of the electroweak production of a Z boson and two jets in proton-proton collisions at 7 and 8 TeV

A measurement of the electroweak production cross section of a Z boson and two jets is performed using proton-proton collision data at centre-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV. The data is collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC with an integrated luminosity of 5 and 19 fb$^{-1}$, respectively. A study on the hadronic activity between the two tagging jets is also presented.Comment: Proceedings for LHCP201

Quark-gluon Jet Discrimination At CMS

Many physics analyses at the LHC are looking into processes where the signal jets are originating from quarks, while jets in the background are more gluon enriched. Based on observables sensitive to fundamental differences in the fragmentation properties of gluons and quarks, a likelihood discriminant is constructed to distinguish between jets originating from quarks and gluons. The performance of the tagger is evaluated using Z+jets and dijet events produced in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV, recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC.Comment: Proceedings for LHCP201

Resolving Range Conflict in Nevada? Buyouts and Other Compensation Alternatives

To mitigate adverse effects on ranchers from reduced access to public forage, financial or other forms of ‘compensation’ may be required. In this paper, we use results from a survey of Nevada ranchers to examine ranchers’ willingness to sell grazing permits and participate in other schemes that enable them to continue ranching in spite of declining access to public forage. On average ranchers demand $255 per AUM to sell grazing permits, while support for other programs, some of which are performance based, depends on whether respondents trust public agencies and intend to pass their ranch on to an heir.Compensation for grazing rights, environmental services, range economics

Multi-core Symbolic Bisimulation Minimisation

Bisimulation minimisation alleviates the exponential growth of transition systems in model checking by computing the smallest system that has the same behavior as the original system according to some notion of equivalence. One popular strategy to compute a bisimulation minimisation is signature-based partition refinement. This can be performed symbolically using binary decision diagrams to allow models with larger state spaces to be minimised. This paper studies strong and branching symbolic bisimulation for labeled transition systems, continuous-time markov chains, and interactive markov chains. We introduce the notion of partition refinement with partial signatures. We extend the parallel BDD library Sylvan to parallelize the signature refinement algorithm, and develop a new parallel BDD algorithm to refine a partition, which conserves previous block numbers and uses a parallel data structure to store block assignments. We also present a specialized BDD algorithm for the computation of inert transitions. The experimental evaluation, based on benchmarks from the literature, demonstrates a speedup of up to 95x sequentially. In addition, we find parallel speedups of up to 17x due to parallelisation with 48 cores. Finally, we present the implementation of these algorithms as a versatile tool that can be customized for bisimulation minimisation in various contexts

Problems and opportunities of applying data-& audio-mining techniques to ethnic music

[TODO] Add abstract here

Biogeochemical Cycling of Metals in Barataria Basin (Diagenesis, Mass Balance, Transport, Louisiana).

Metal distribution, accumulation, and differential mobility were determined in the terrestrial and aquatic portions of Barataria Basin. Seasonal variations in surface water and interstitial pore water constituents of marsh and bay bottom sediments, along a salinity transect were determined through a monthly sampling from March 1984 to August 1985. Diffusion and mass transfer coefficients in bay bottom sediments were determined through the use of non-steady state diffusion cell incubations, and the use of a kinetic silica model, respectively. Sedimentation and particle mixing rates were calculated from the (\u27137)Cs distribution, and Fe(\u272+) and Mn(\u272+) production rates were obtained by applying a one-dimensional transport-reaction model to the solid phase distribution. An iron and manganese mass balance was calculated for bay bottom sediments in the upper and lower portions of the basin. Diagenetic remobilization in the rapidly accumulating bottom sediments of the lower basin resulted in manganese and iron turnover rates of 20 and 40 days, respectively. Increase in ionic strength and benthic fluxes along this salinity transect resulted in significantly higher concentrations of dissolved iron and manganese in the aquatic portions of the lower basin. However, particulate iron and manganese decreased towards the middle and lower parts of the basin due to desorption processes. Partial metal fractionation in water soluble, exchangeable, reducible, and residual phases in marsh and bottom sediments was performed in order to assess and predict the distribution in labile and non-mobile fractions. Saturation states in respect with the main sedimentary solid phases were determined through the use of Geochem, an ion speciation model. Pyrite content, along this salinity transect, was found to be significantly higher in the brackish environments. Dynamic iron and pyrite cycling in the salt marsh resulted in a low pyritic pool (.69% FeS(,2)), characterized as single fine-grained euhedral crystals, indicating its rapid formation. The differential mobility of iron and manganese resulted in a significant fractionation of both metals in the lower basin. Manganese export was restricted to the saline portions of the basin, and an estimated .95 to 1.95 g Mn m(\u27-2) is lost to the Gulf of Mexico every year

Non-rigid 3D motion estimation at high temporal resolution from prospectively undersampled k-space data using low-rank MR-MOTUS

With the recent introduction of the MR-LINAC, an MR-scanner combined with a radiotherapy LINAC, MR-based motion estimation has become of increasing interest to (retrospectively) characterize tumor and organs-at-risk motion during radiotherapy. To this extent, we introduce low-rank MR-MOTUS, a framework to retrospectively reconstruct time-resolved non-rigid 3D+t motion-fields from a single low-resolution reference image and prospectively undersampled k-space data acquired during motion. Low-rank MR-MOTUS exploits spatio-temporal correlations in internal body motion with a low-rank motion model, and inverts a signal model that relates motion-fields directly to a reference image and k-space data. The low-rank model reduces the degrees-of-freedom, memory consumption and reconstruction times by assuming a factorization of space-time motion-fields in spatial and temporal components. Low-rank MR-MOTUS was employed to estimate motion in 2D/3D abdominothoracic scans and 3D head scans. Data were acquired using golden-ratio radial readouts. Reconstructed 2D and 3D respiratory motion-fields were respectively validated against time-resolved and respiratory-resolved image reconstructions, and the head motion against static image reconstructions from fully-sampled data acquired right before and right after the motion. Results show that 2D+t respiratory motion can be estimated retrospectively at 40.8 motion-fields-per-second, 3D+t respiratory motion at 7.6 motion-fields-per-second and 3D+t head-neck motion at 9.3 motion-fields-per-second. The validations show good consistency with image reconstructions. The proposed framework can estimate time-resolved non-rigid 3D motion-fields, which allows to characterize drifts and intra and inter-cycle patterns in breathing motion during radiotherapy, and could form the basis for real-time MR-guided radiotherapy.Comment: 18 pages main text, 8 main figures, 1 main table, 12 supporting videos, 2 supporting figures, 1 supporting information PDF. Submitted to Magnetic Resonance in Medicine as Full Pape