Temporoparietal encoding of space and time during vestibular-guided orientation

When we walk in our environment, we readily determine our travelled distance and location using visual cues. In the dark, estimating travelled distance uses a combination of somatosensory and vestibular (i.e., inertial) cues. The observed inability of patients with complete peripheral vestibular failure to update their angular travelled distance during active or passive turns in the dark implies a privileged role for vestibular cues during human angular orientation. As vestibular signals only provide inertial cues of self-motion (e.g., velocity, °/s), the brain must convert motion information to distance information (a process called 'path integration') to maintain our spatial orientation during self-motion in the dark. It is unknown, however, what brain areas are involved in converting vestibular-motion signals to those that enable such vestibular-spatial orientation. Hence, using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping techniques, we explored the effect of acute right hemisphere lesions in 18 patients on perceived angular position, velocity and motion duration during whole-body angular rotations in the dark. First, compared to healthy controls' spatial orientation performance, we found that of the 18 acute stroke patients tested, only the four patients with damage to the temporoparietal junction showed impaired spatial orientation performance for leftward (contralesional) compared to rightward (ipsilesional) rotations. Second, only patients with temporoparietal junction damage showed a congruent underestimation in both their travelled distance (perceived as shorter) and motion duration (perceived as briefer) for leftward compared to rightward rotations. All 18 lesion patients tested showed normal self-motion perception. These data suggest that the cerebral cortical regions mediating vestibular-motion ('am I moving?') and vestibular-spatial perception ('where am I?') are distinct. Furthermore, the congruent contralesional deficit in time (motion duration) and position perception, seen only in temporoparietal junction patients, may reflect a common neural substrate in the temporoparietal junction that mediates the encoding of motion duration and travelled distance during vestibular-guided navigation. Alternatively, the deficits in timing and spatial orientation with temporoparietal junction lesions could be functionally linked, implying that the temporoparietal junction may act as a cortical temporal integrator, combining estimates of self-motion velocity over time to derive an estimate of travelled distance. This intriguing possibility predicts that timing abnormalities could lead to spatial disorientation

SHREC'16: partial matching of deformable shapes

Matching deformable 3D shapes under partiality transformations is a challenging problem that has received limited focus in the computer vision and graphics communities. With this benchmark, we explore and thoroughly investigate the robustness of existing matching methods in this challenging task. Participants are asked to provide a point-to-point correspondence (either sparse or dense) between deformable shapes undergoing different kinds of partiality transformations, resulting in a total of 400 matching problems to be solved for each method - making this benchmark the biggest and most challenging of its kind. Five matching algorithms were evaluated in the contest; this paper presents the details of the dataset, the adopted evaluation measures, and shows thorough comparisons among all competing methods

The 30/20 GHz flight experiment system, phase 2. Volume 2: Experiment system description

A detailed technical description of the 30/20 GHz flight experiment system is presented. The overall communication system is described with performance analyses, communication operations, and experiment plans. Hardware descriptions of the payload are given with the tradeoff studies that led to the final design. The spacecraft bus which carries the payload is discussed and its interface with the launch vehicle system is described. Finally, the hardwares and the operations of the terrestrial segment are presented

The 30/20 GHz flight experiment system, phase 2. Volume 1: Executive summary

Summary information on the final communication system design, communication payload, space vehicle, and development plan for the 30/20 GHz flight experiment will be installed on the LEASAT spacecraft which will be placed into orbit from the space shuttle cargo bay. The communication concept has two parts: a truck service and a customer premise service (CPS). The trucking system serves four spot beams which are interconnected in a satellite switched time division multiple access mode by an IF switch matrix. The CPS covers two large areas of the eastern United States with a pair of scanning beams

The 30/20 GHz flight experiment system, phase 2. Volume 3: Experiment system requirement document

An approach to the requirements document to be used to procure the system by NASA is presented. The basic approach is similar to the requirements document used in the commercial communication satellite. Enough detail requirements are given to define the system without tight constraints

Molecular Model of Dynamic Social Network Based on E-mail communication

In this work we consider an application of physically inspired sociodynamical model to the modelling of the evolution of email-based social network. Contrary to the standard approach of sociodynamics, which assumes expressing of system dynamics with heuristically defined simple rules, we postulate the inference of these rules from the real data and their application within a dynamic molecular model. We present how to embed the n-dimensional social space in Euclidean one. Then, inspired by the Lennard-Jones potential, we define a data-driven social potential function and apply the resultant force to a real e-mail communication network in a course of a molecular simulation, with network nodes taking on the role of interacting particles. We discuss all steps of the modelling process, from data preparation, through embedding and the molecular simulation itself, to transformation from the embedding space back to a graph structure. The conclusions, drawn from examining the resultant networks in stable, minimum-energy states, emphasize the role of the embedding process projecting the non–metric social graph into the Euclidean space, the significance of the unavoidable loss of information connected with this procedure and the resultant preservation of global rather than local properties of the initial network. We also argue applicability of our method to some classes of problems, while also signalling the areas which require further research in order to expand this applicability domain

Palladium nanoparticles by electrospinning from poly(acrylonitrile-co-acrylic acid)-PdCl2 solutions. Relations between preparation conditions, particle size, and catalytic activity

Catalytic palladium (Pd) nanoparticles on electrospun copolymers of acrylonitrile and acrylic acid (PAN-AA) mats were produced via reduction of PdCl2 with hydrazine. Fiber mats were electrospun from homogeneous solutions of PAN-AA and PdCl2 in dimethylformamide (DMF). Pd cations were reduced to Pd metals when fiber mats were treated in an aqueous hydrazine solution at room temperature. Pd atoms nucleate and form small crystallites whose sizes were estimated from the peak broadening of X-ray diffraction peaks. Two to four crystallites adhere together and form agglomerates. Agglomerate sizes and fiber diameters were determined by scanning and transmission electron microscopy. Spherical Pd nanoparticles were dispersed homogeneously on the electrospun nanofibers. The effects of copolymer composition and amount of PdCl2 on particle size were investigated. Pd particle size mainly depends on the amount of acrylic acid functional groups and PdCl2 concentration in the spinning solution. Increasing acrylic acid concentration on polymer chains leads to larger Pd nanoparticles. In addition, Pd particle size becomes larger with increasing PdCl2 concentration in the spinning solution. Hence, it is possible to tune the number density and the size of metal nanoparticles. The catalytic activity of the Pd nanoparticles in electrospun mats was determined by selective hydrogenation of dehydrolinalool (3,7-dimethyloct-6- ene-1-yne-3-ol, DHL) in toluene at 90 °C. Electrospun fibers with Pd particles have 4.5 times higher catalytic activity than the current Pd/Al2O3 catalyst

Phantom universe from CPT symmetric QFT

Inspired by the generalization of quantum theory for the case of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with CPT symmetry, we construct a simple classical cosmological scalar field based model describing a smooth transition from ordinary dark energy to the phantom one

Interaction data are identifiable even across long periods of time

Fine-grained records of people’s interactions, both offline and online, are collected at large scale. These data contain sensitive information about whom we meet, talk to, and when. We demonstrate here how people’s interaction behavior is stable over long periods of time and can be used to identify individuals in anonymous datasets. Our attack learns the profile of an individual using geometric deep learning and triplet loss optimization. In a mobile phone metadata dataset of more than 40k people, it correctly identifies 52% of individuals based on their 2-hop interaction graph. We further show that the profiles learned by our method are stable over time and that 24% of people are still identifiable after 20 weeks. Our results suggest that people with well-balanced interaction graphs are more identifiable. Applying our attack to Bluetooth close-proximity networks, we show that even 1-hop interaction graphs are enough to identify people more than 26% of the time. Our results provide strong evidence that disconnected and even re-pseudonymized interaction data can be linked together making them personal data under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation

Electrocortical therapy for motion sickness

Given a sufficiently provocative stimulus, almost everyone can be made motion sick, with approximately one-third experiencing significant symptoms on long bus trips, on ships, or in light aircraft.1–4 Current countermeasures are either behavioral or pharmacologic. Behavioral measures include habituation/desensitization treatment protocols5 as well as positioning the head in alignment with the direction of the gravito-inertial force and maintaining a stable horizontal reference frame.5 Pharmacologic measures include antimuscarinics, H1 antihistamines, and sympathomimetics, which all detrimentally impact upon cognitive function, rendering them inappropriate for occupational use.5 All current therapies are only partially effective