Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, Part W, conodonts, conoidal shells, worms, trace fossils: comments and additions

18 p., 21 fig.http://paleo.ku.edu/contributions.htm

NRG Oncology-Radiation Therapy Oncology Group Study 1014: 1-Year Toxicity Report From a Phase 2 Study of Repeat Breast-Preserving Surgery and 3-Dimensional Conformal Partial-Breast Reirradiation for In-Breast Recurrence.

PURPOSE: To determine the associated toxicity, tolerance, and safety of partial-breast reirradiation. METHODS AND MATERIALS: Eligibility criteria included in-breast recurrence occurring \u3e1 year after whole-breast irradiation, \u3c3 \u3ecm, unifocal, and resected with negative margins. Partial-breast reirradiation was targeted to the surgical cavity plus 1.5 cm; a prescription dose of 45 Gy in 1.5 Gy twice daily for 30 treatments was used. The primary objective was to evaluate the rate of grade ≥3 treatment-related skin, fibrosis, and/or breast pain adverse events (AEs), occurring ≤1 year from re-treatment completion. A rate of ≥13% for these AEs in a cohort of 55 patients was determined to be unacceptable (86% power, 1-sided α = 0.07). RESULTS: Between 2010 and 2013, 65 patients were accrued, and the first 55 eligible and with 1 year follow-up were analyzed. Median age was 68 years. Twenty-two patients had ductal carcinoma in situ, and 33 had invasive disease: 19 ≤1 cm, 13 \u3e1 to ≤2 cm, and 1 \u3e2 cm. All patients were clinically node negative. Systemic therapy was delivered in 51%. All treatment plans underwent quality review for contouring accuracy and dosimetric compliance. All treatment plans scored acceptable for tumor volume contouring and tumor volume dose-volume analysis. Only 4 (7%) scored unacceptable for organs at risk contouring and organs at risk dose-volume analysis. Treatment-related skin, fibrosis, and/or breast pain AEs were recorded as grade 1 in 64% and grade 2 in 7%, with only 1 ( CONCLUSION: Partial-breast reirradiation with 3-dimensional conformal radiation therapy after second lumpectomy for patients experiencing in-breast failures after whole-breast irradiation is safe and feasible, with acceptable treatment quality achieved. Skin, fibrosis, and breast pain toxicity was acceptable, and grade 3 toxicity was rare

Landauer Conductance without Two Chemical Potentials

We present a theory of the four--terminal conductance for the multi-channel tunneling barrier, which is based on the self-consistent solution of Shrodinger, Poisson and continuity equations. We derive new results for the case of a barrier embedded in a long wire with and without disorder. We also recover known expressions for the conductance of the barrier placed into a ballistic constriction. Our approach avoids a problematic use of two chemical potentials in the same system.Comment: 12 page

Arnold and Tilla English Opera Troupe Playbill

Seeking to cultivate popular support for opera in the Victorian Era, American-style opera evolved with traveling troupes performing in English, particularly during the post-Civil War period. This playbill, ca. 1860s, is for the performance of the Arnold and Tilla\u27s English Opera Troupe at Norumbega Hall in Bangor. The company was formed by the principle artists of the Kellogg Opera Company and the Richings Opera Company for a three-week tour of Maine. They performed the Daniel Auber opera, Fra Diavolo and Michael William Balfe\u27s Bohemian Girl on two different nights. Fra Diavolo was one of the Kellogg Company\u27s standard operas while Bohemian Girl was performed regularly by the Richings Company. Performers of note included Blanche Ellerman, a London-born Prima Donna who obtained a contract with the Caroline Riching Opera Company and American-born James Albert Arnold who joined the Riching Company around 1866. The pair would marry in 1869. Clara Fisher was born in London and was considered a prodigy of the stage. At the age of 16 she emigrated to the United States, debuting to rave reviews. She became so financially successful, she was able to retire from the stage in 1844. Poor investments forced her to resume performing in 1850. At the time of her appearance in Bangor, Fisher would have been in her mid-50s.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mainebicentennial/1105/thumbnail.jp

Soft lepton-flavor violation in a multi-Higgs-doublet seesaw model

We consider the Standard Model with an arbitrary number n_H of Higgs doublets and enlarge the lepton sector by adding to each lepton family \ell a right-handed neutrino singlet \nu_{\ell R}. We assume that all Yukawa-coupling matrices are diagonal, but the Majorana mass matrix M_R of the right-handed neutrino singlets is an arbitrary symmetric matrix, thereby introducing an explicit but soft violation of all lepton numbers. We investigate lepton-flavor-violating processes within this model. We pay particular attention to the large-m_R behavior of the amplitudes for these processes, where m_R is the order of magnitude of the matrix elements of M_R. While the amplitudes for processes like tau^- --> mu^- gamma and Z --> tau^+ mu^- drop as 1/m_R^2 for arbitrary n_H, processes like tau^- --> mu^- e^+ e^- and mu^- --> e^- e^+ e^- obey this power law only for n_H = 1. For n_H \geq 2, on the contrary, those amplitudes do not fall off when m_R increases, rather they converge towards constants. This non-decoupling of the right-handed scale occurs because of the sub-process ell^- --> ell'^- {S_b^0}^*, where S_b^0 is a neutral scalar which subsequently decays to e^+ e^-. That sub-process has a contribution from charged-scalar exchange which, for n_H \geq 2, does not decrease when m_R tends to infinity. We also perform a general study of the non-decoupling and argue that, after performing the limit m_R --> \infty and removing the \nu_R from the Lagrangian, our model becomes a multi-Higgs-doublet Standard Model with suppressed flavor-changing Yukawa couplings. Finally, we show that, with the usual assumptions about the mass scales in the seesaw mechanism, the branching ratios of all lepton-flavor-changing processes are several orders of magnitude smaller than present experimental limits.Comment: 46 pages, 2 figures, Revte

Phase diagram of two-component bosons on an optical lattice

We present a theoretical analysis of the phase diagram of two--component bosons on an optical lattice. A new formalism is developed which treats the effective spin interactions in the Mott and superfluid phases on the same footing. Using the new approach we chart the phase boundaries of the broken spin symmetry states up to the Mott to superfluid transition and beyond. Near the transition point, the magnitude of spin exchange can be very large, which facilitates the experimental realization of spin-ordered states. We find that spin and quantum fluctuations have a dramatic effect on the transition making it first order in extended regions of the phase diagram. For Mott states with even occupation we find that the competition between effective Heisenberg exchange and spin-dependent on--site interaction leads to an additional phase transition from a Mott insulator with no broken symmetries into a spin-ordered insulator

Developing Clinical Strength-of-Evidence Approach to Define HIV-Associated Malignancies for Cancer Registration in Kenya

Background Sub-Saharan Africa cancer registries are beset by an increasing cancer burden further exacerbated by the AIDS epidemic where there are limited capabilities for cancer-AIDS match co-registration. We undertook a pilot study based on a “strength-of-evidence” approach using clinical data that is abstracted at the time of cancer registration for purposes of linking cancer diagnosis to AIDS diagnosis. Methods/Findings The standard Nairobi Cancer Registry form was modified for registrars to abstract the following clinical data from medical records regarding HIV infection/AIDS in a hierarchal approach at time of cancer registration from highest-to-lowest strength-of-evidence: 1) documentation of positive HIV serology; 2) antiretroviral drug prescription; 3) CD4+ lymphocyte count; and 4) WHO HIV clinical stage or immune suppression syndrome (ISS), which is Kenyan terminology for AIDS. Between August 1 and October 31, 2011 a total of 1,200 cancer cases were registered. Of these, 171 cases (14.3%) met clinical strength-of-evidence criteria for association with HIV infection/AIDS; 69% (118 cases were tumor types with known HIV association – Kaposi’s sarcoma, cervical cancer, non-Hodgkin’s and Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and conjunctiva carcinoma) and 31% (53) were consistent with non-AIDS defining cancers. Verifiable positive HIV serology was identified in 47 (27%) cases for an absolute seroprevalence rate of 4% among the cancer registered cases with an upper boundary of 14% among those meeting at least one of strength-of-evidence criteria. Conclusions/Significance This pilot demonstration of a hierarchal, clinical strength-of-evidence approach for cancer-AIDS registration in Kenya establishes feasibility, is readily adaptable, pragmatic, and does not require additional resources for critically under staffed cancer registries. Cancer is an emerging public health challenge, and African nations need to develop well designed population-based studies in order to better define the impact and spectrum of malignant disease in the backdrop of HIV infection

Interfacial adsorption in Potts models on the square lattice

We study the effect of interfacial phenomena in two-dimensional perfect and random (or disordered) $q$-state Potts models with continuous phase transitions, using, mainly, Monte Carlo techniques. In particular, for the total interfacial adsorption, the critical behavior, including corrections to scaling, are analyzed. The role of randomness is scrutinized. Results are discussed applying scaling arguments and invoking findings for bulk critical properties. In all studied cases, i.e., $q = 3$, $4$, and $q = 8$, the spread of the interfacial adsorption profiles is observed to increase linearly with the lattice size at the bulk transition point.Comment: 6 pages, 6 eps figures, 1 table, minor corrections, accepted for publication in Eur. Phys. J.

Constraining cosmology with the Gaia - unWISE Quasar Catalog and CMB lensing: structure growth

We study the angular clustering of Quaia, a Gaia- and unWISE-based catalog of over a million quasars with an exceptionally well-defined selection function. With it, we derive cosmology constraints from the amplitude and growth of structure across cosmic time. We divide the sample into two redshift bins, centered at z = 1.0 and z = 2.1, and measure both overdensity auto-correlations and cross-correlations with maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background convergence measured by Planck. From these data, and including a prior from measurements of the baryon acoustic oscillations scale, we place constraints on the amplitude of the matter power spectrum σ 8 = 0.766 ± 0.034, and on the matter density parameter Ω m = 0.343+0.017 -0.019. These measurements are in reasonable agreement with Planck at the ∼ 1.4σ level, and are found to be robust with respect to observational and theoretical uncertainties. We find that our slightly lower value of σ 8 is driven by the higher-redshift sample, which favours a low amplitude of matter fluctuations. We present plausible arguments showing that this could be driven by contamination of the CMB lensing map by high-redshift extragalactic foregrounds, which should also affect other cross-correlations with tracers of large-scale structure beyond z ∼ 1.5. Our constraints are competitive with those from state-of-the-art 3×2-point analyses, but arise from a range of scales and redshifts that is highly complementary to those covered by cosmic shear data and most galaxy clustering samples. This, coupled with the unprecedented combination of volume and redshift precision achieved by Quaia, allows us to break the usual degeneracy between Ω m and σ 8