Art/Sci Nexus, 9 Evenings Revisited

Following the exhibition of Hybrid Bodies at KKW in 2016 Andrew Carnie and I were invited back to act as mentors to a group of young artists and scientists from all over Europe undertaking a week long workshop designed to lead to new art/science collaborations. We were also invited to present the Hybrid Bodies project at a one day public event preceding the workshop

Advances in imaging for atrial fibrillation ablation.

Over the last fifteen years, our understanding of the pathophysiology of atrial fibrillation (AF) has paved the way for ablation to be utilized as an effective treatment option. With the aim of gaining more detailed anatomical representation, advances have been made using various imaging modalities, both before and during the ablation procedure, in planning and execution. Options have flourished from procedural fluoroscopy, electroanatomic mapping systems, preprocedural computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, and combinations of these technologies. Exciting work is underway in an effort to allow the electrophysiologist to assess scar formation in real time. One advantage would be to lessen the learning curve for what are very complex procedures. The hope of these developments is to improve the likelihood of a successful ablation procedure and to allow more patients access to this treatment

Identifying idiolect in forensic authorship attribution: an n-gram textbite approach

Forensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying authors of disputed or anonymous documents, which are potentially evidential in legal cases, through the analysis of linguistic clues left behind by writers. The forensic linguist “approaches this problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of the language [. . . ], their own idiolect” (Coulthard, 2004: 31). However, given the diXculty in empirically substantiating a theory of idiolect, there is growing concern in the Veld that it remains too abstract to be of practical use (Kredens, 2002; Grant, 2010; Turell, 2010). Stylistic, corpus, and computational approaches to text, however, are able to identify repeated collocational patterns, or n-grams, two to six word chunks of language, similar to the popular notion of soundbites: small segments of no more than a few seconds of speech that journalists are able to recognise as having news value and which characterise the important moments of talk. The soundbite oUers an intriguing parallel for authorship attribution studies, with the following question arising: looking at any set of texts by any author, is it possible to identify ‘n-gram textbites’, small textual segments that characterise that author’s writing, providing DNA-like chunks of identifying material

A Third Planet Orbiting HIP 14810

We present new precision radial velocities and a three-planet Keplerian orbit fit for the V = 8.5, G5 V star HIP 14810. We began observing this star at Keck Observatory as part of the N2K Planet Search Project. Wright et al. (2007) announced the inner two planets to this system, and subsequent observations have revealed the outer planet planet and the proper orbital solution for the middle planet. The planets have minimum masses of 3.9, 1.3, and 0.6 M_Jup and orbital periods of 6.67, 147.7, and 952 d, respectively. We have numerically integrated the family of orbital solutions consistent with the data and find that they are stable for at least 10^6 yr. Our photometric search shows that the inner planet does not transit.Comment: ApJL, accepte

A Framework for Robust Assimilation of Potentially Malign Third-Party Data, and its Statistical Meaning

This paper presents a model-based method for fusing data from multiple sensors with a hypothesis-test-based component for rejecting potentially faulty or otherwise malign data. Our framework is based on an extension of the classic particle filter algorithm for real-time state estimation of uncertain systems with nonlinear dynamics with partial and noisy observations. This extension, based on classical statistical theories, utilizes statistical tests against the system's observation model. We discuss the application of the two major statistical testing frameworks, Fisherian significance testing and Neyman-Pearsonian hypothesis testing, to the Monte Carlo and sensor fusion settings. The Monte Carlo Neyman-Pearson test we develop is useful when one has a reliable model of faulty data, while the Fisher one is applicable when one may not have a model of faults, which may occur when dealing with third-party data, like GNSS data of transportation system users. These statistical tests can be combined with a particle filter to obtain a Monte Carlo state estimation scheme that is robust to faulty or outlier data. We present a synthetic freeway traffic state estimation problem where the filters are able to reject simulated faulty GNSS measurements. The fault-model-free Fisher filter, while underperforming the Neyman-Pearson one when the latter has an accurate fault model, outperforms it when the assumed fault model is incorrect.Comment: IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine, special issue on GNSS-based positionin

Fission fragment assisted reactor concept for space propulsion: Foil reactor

The concept is to fabricate a reactor using thin films or foils of uranium, uranium oxide and then to coat them on substrates. These coatings would be made so thin as to allow the escaping fission fragments to directly heat a hydrogen propellant. The idea was studied of direct gas heating and direct gas pumping in a nuclear pumped laser program. Fission fragments were used to pump lasers. In this concept two substrates are placed opposite each other. The internal faces are coated with thin foil of uranium oxide. A few of the advantages of this technology are listed. In general, however, it is felt that if one look at all solid core nuclear thermal rockets or nuclear thermal propulsion methods, one is going to find that they all pretty much look the same. It is felt that this reactor has higher potential reliability. It has low structural operating temperatures, very short burn times, with graceful failure modes, and it has reduced potential for energetic accidents. Going to a design like this would take the NTP community part way to some of the very advanced engine designs, such as the gas core reactor, but with reduced risk because of the much lower temperatures