452 research outputs found
The Effect of Use and Access on Citations
It has been shown (S. Lawrence, 2001, Nature, 411, 521) that journal articles
which have been posted without charge on the internet are more heavily cited
than those which have not been. Using data from the NASA Astrophysics Data
System (ads.harvard.edu) and from the ArXiv e-print archive at Cornell
University (arXiv.org) we examine the causes of this effect.Comment: Accepted for publication in Information Processing & Management,
special issue on scientometric
A Chandra Search for Coronal X Rays from the Cool White Dwarf GD 356
We report observations with the Chandra X-ray Observatory of the single,
cool, magnetic white dwarf GD 356. For consistent comparison with other X-ray
observations of single white dwarfs, we also re-analyzed archival ROSAT data
for GD 356 (GJ 1205), G 99-47 (GR 290 = V1201 Ori), GD 90, G 195-19 (EG250 = GJ
339.1), and WD 2316+123 and archival Chandra data for LHS 1038 (GJ 1004) and GD
358 (V777 Her). Our Chandra observation detected no X rays from GD 356, setting
the most restrictive upper limit to the X-ray luminosity from any cool white
dwarf -- L_{X} < 6.0 x 10^{25} ergs/s, at 99.7% confidence, for a 1-keV
thermal-bremsstrahlung spectrum. The corresponding limit to the electron
density is n_{0} < 4.4 x 10^{11} cm^{-3}. Our re-analysis of the archival data
confirmed the non-detections reported by the original investigators. We discuss
the implications of our and prior observations on models for coronal emission
from white dwarfs. For magnetic white dwarfs, we emphasize the more stringent
constraints imposed by cyclotron radiation. In addition, we describe (in an
appendix) a statistical methodology for detecting a source and for constraining
the strength of a source, which applies even when the number of source or
background events is small.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the Astrophysical Journa
Pneumococcal colonisation is an asymptomatic event in healthy adults using an experimental human colonisation model
Introduction
Pneumococcal colonisation is regarded as a pre-requisite for developing pneumococcal disease. In children previous studies have reported pneumococcal colonisation to be a symptomatic event and described a relationship between symptom severity/frequency and colonisation density. The evidence for this in adults is lacking in the literature. This study uses the experimental human pneumococcal challenge (EHPC) model to explore whether pneumococcal colonisation is a symptomatic event in healthy adults.
Methods
Healthy participants aged 18â50 were recruited and inoculated intra-nasally with either Streptococcus pneumoniae (serotypes 6B, 23F) or saline as a control. Respiratory viral swabs were obtained prior to inoculation. Nasal and non-nasal symptoms were then assessed using a modified Likert score between 1 (no symptoms) to 7 (cannot function). The rate of symptoms reported between the two groups was compared and a correlation analysis performed.
Results
Data from 54 participants were analysed. 46 were inoculated with S. pneumoniae (29 with serotype 6B, 17 with serotype 23F) and 8 received saline (control). In total, 14 became experimentally colonised (30.4%), all of which were inoculated with serotype 6B. There was no statistically significant difference in nasal (p = 0.45) or non-nasal symptoms (p = 0.28) between the inoculation group and the control group. In those who were colonised there was no direct correlation between colonisation density and symptom severity. In the 22% (12/52) who were co-colonised, with pneumococcus and respiratory viruses, there was no statistical difference in either nasal or non-nasal symptoms (virus positive p = 0.74 and virus negative p = 1.0).
Conclusion
Pneumococcal colonisation using the EHPC model is asymptomatic in healthy adults, regardless of pneumococcal density or viral co-colonisation
Robust Egocentric Photo-realistic Facial Expression Transfer for Virtual Reality
Social presence, the feeling of being there with a real person, will fuel the
next generation of communication systems driven by digital humans in virtual
reality (VR). The best 3D video-realistic VR avatars that minimize the uncanny
effect rely on person-specific (PS) models. However, these PS models are
time-consuming to build and are typically trained with limited data
variability, which results in poor generalization and robustness. Major sources
of variability that affects the accuracy of facial expression transfer
algorithms include using different VR headsets (e.g., camera configuration,
slop of the headset), facial appearance changes over time (e.g., beard,
make-up), and environmental factors (e.g., lighting, backgrounds). This is a
major drawback for the scalability of these models in VR. This paper makes
progress in overcoming these limitations by proposing an end-to-end
multi-identity architecture (MIA) trained with specialized augmentation
strategies. MIA drives the shape component of the avatar from three cameras in
the VR headset (two eyes, one mouth), in untrained subjects, using minimal
personalized information (i.e., neutral 3D mesh shape). Similarly, if the PS
texture decoder is available, MIA is able to drive the full avatar
(shape+texture) robustly outperforming PS models in challenging scenarios. Our
key contribution to improve robustness and generalization, is that our method
implicitly decouples, in an unsupervised manner, the facial expression from
nuisance factors (e.g., headset, environment, facial appearance). We
demonstrate the superior performance and robustness of the proposed method
versus state-of-the-art PS approaches in a variety of experiments
Defining the genetic susceptibility to cervical neoplasia - a genome-wide association study
Funding: MAB was funded by a National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) Senior Principal Research Fellowship. Support was also received from the Australian Cancer Research Foundation. JL holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Human Genome Epidemiology. The Seattle study was supported by the following grants: NIH, National Cancer Institute grants P01CA042792 and R01CA112512. Cervical Health Study (from which the NSW component was obtained) was funded by NHMRC Grant 387701, and CCNSW core grant. The Montreal study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (grant MOP-42532) and sample processing was funded by the Reseau FRQS SIDA-MI. The Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, the ALF/LUA research grant in Gothenburg and UmeĂ„, the Lundberg Foundation, the Torsten and Ragnar Soderbergâs Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, and the European Commission grant HEALTH-F2-2008-201865-GEFOS, BBMRI.se, the Swedish Society of Medicine, the KempeFoundation (JCK-1021), the Medical Faculty of UmeĂ„ University, the County Council of Vasterbotten (Spjutspetsanslag VLL:159:33-2007). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscriptPeer reviewedPublisher PDFPublisher PD
LSST Science Book, Version 2.0
A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint
magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science
opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)
will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field
of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over
20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with
fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a
total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic
parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book
discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a
broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and
outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies,
the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local
Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the
properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then
turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to
z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and
baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to
constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at
http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo
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