Building application of solar energy. Study no. 4: Scenarios for the utilization of solar energy in southern California buildings, change 1

Plausible future market scenarios for solar heating and cooling systems into buildings in the area served by the Southern California Edison Company. A range of plausible estimates for the number of solar systems which might be installed and the electrical energy which might be displaced by energy from these systems are provided. The effect on peak electrical load was not explicitly calculated but preliminary conclusions concerning peak load can be inferred from the estimates presented. Two markets are investigated: the single family market and the large power commercial market

Rokhlin Dimension for Flows

This research was supported by GIF Grant 1137/2011, SFB 878 Groups, Geometry and Actions and ERC Grant No. 267079. Part of the research was conducted at the Fields institute during the 2014 thematic program on abstract harmonic analysis, Banach and operator algebras, and at the Mittag–Leffler institute during the 2016 program on Classification of Operator Algebras: Complexity, Rigidity, and Dynamics.Peer reviewedPostprin

STAR: Sparse Trained Articulated Human Body Regressor

The SMPL body model is widely used for the estimation, synthesis, and analysis of 3D human pose and shape. While popular, we show that SMPL has several limitations and introduce STAR, which is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to SMPL. First, SMPL has a huge number of parameters resulting from its use of global blend shapes. These dense pose-corrective offsets relate every vertex on the mesh to all the joints in the kinematic tree, capturing spurious long-range correlations. To address this, we define per-joint pose correctives and learn the subset of mesh vertices that are influenced by each joint movement. This sparse formulation results in more realistic deformations and significantly reduces the number of model parameters to 20% of SMPL. When trained on the same data as SMPL, STAR generalizes better despite having many fewer parameters. Second, SMPL factors pose-dependent deformations from body shape while, in reality, people with different shapes deform differently. Consequently, we learn shape-dependent pose-corrective blend shapes that depend on both body pose and BMI. Third, we show that the shape space of SMPL is not rich enough to capture the variation in the human population. We address this by training STAR with an additional 10,000 scans of male and female subjects, and show that this results in better model generalization. STAR is compact, generalizes better to new bodies and is a drop-in replacement for SMPL. STAR is publicly available for research purposes at http://star.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: ECCV 202

The peripheral blood transcriptome in septic cardiomyopathy: an observational, pilot study.

BACKGROUND:Septic cardiomyopathy (SCM) is common in sepsis and associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Left ventricular global longitudinal strain (LV GLS), measured by speckle tracking echocardiography, allows improved identification of impaired cardiac contractility. The peripheral blood transcriptome may be an important window into SCM pathophysiology. We therefore studied the peripheral blood transcriptome and LV GLS in a prospective cohort of patients with sepsis. RESULTS:In this single-center observational pilot study, we enrolled adult patients (age > 18) with sepsis within 48 h of admission to the ICU. SCM was defined as LV GLS > - 17% based on echocardiograms performed within 72 h of admission. We enrolled 27 patients, 24 of whom had high-quality RNA results; 18 (75%) of 24 had SCM. The group was 50% female and had a median (IQR) age of 59.5 (48.5-67.0) years and admission APACHE II score of 21.0 (16.0-32.3). Forty-six percent had septic shock. After filtering for low-expression and non-coding genes, 15,418 protein coding genes were expressed and 73 had significantly different expression between patients with vs. without SCM. In patients with SCM, 43 genes were upregulated and 30 were downregulated. Pathway analysis identified enrichment in type 1 interferon signaling (adjusted p < 10-5). CONCLUSIONS:In this hypothesis-generating study, SCM was associated with upregulation of genes in the type 1 interferon signaling pathway. Interferons are cytokines that stimulate the innate and adaptive immune response and are implicated in the early proinflammatory and delayed immunosuppression phases of sepsis. While type 1 interferons have not been implicated previously in SCM, interferon therapy (for viral hepatitis and Kaposi sarcoma) has been associated with reversible cardiomyopathy, perhaps suggesting a role for interferon signaling in SCM

Association of left ventricular longitudinal strain with central venous oxygen saturation and serum lactate in patients with early severe sepsis and septic shock

Syftet med denna studie är att synliggöra pedagogers syn på föräldrasamverkan i förskolan. Vi har även intresserat oss på samverkan mellan pedagogerna och föräldrar med annat modersmål än svenska. Vår studie grundar sig på observationer kring bemötande av föräldrar på förskolan. Vi undersökte hur pedagogerna såg på föräldrasamverkan och hur de arbetar kring samverkan med föräldrar, för att kunna få en bredare syn i vår studie om hur samverkan fungerar på de aktuella förskolorna. Som metod använde vi kvalitativ intervju då detta lämpade sig väl för oss för att vi skulle kunna få en bredare syn om hur samverkan fungerar på de aktuella förskolorna. Intervjuer ger mer exakta svar och det underlättar för oss som intervjuar att ställa följdfrågor. Resultatet visar att samverkan med föräldrar har ökat i förskolan och blivit en stor del av verksamheten. Pedagogerna försöker engagera sig mycket i arbetet med föräldrasamverkan och letar efter möjligheter för att skapa en bra kommunikation med föräldrar som har annat modersmål än svenska. Resultaten visar även att pedagogerna menar att oavsett om föräldrarna behärskar det svenska språket eller inte så anstränger de sig för att visa föräldrarna att de är viktiga i verksamheten

The Index of (White) Noises and their Product Systems

(See detailed abstract in the article.) We single out the correct class of spatial product systems (and the spatial endomorphism semigroups with which the product systems are associated) that allows the most far reaching analogy in their classifiaction when compared with Arveson systems. The main differences are that mere existence of a unit is not it sufficient: The unit must be CENTRAL. And the tensor product under which the index is additive is not available for product systems of Hilbert modules. It must be replaced by a new product that even for Arveson systems need not coincide with the tensor product

Physicochemical study of spiropyran-terthiophene derivatives: photochemistry and thermodynamics

The photochemistry and thermodynamics of two terthiophene (TTh) derivatives bearing benzospiropyran (BSP) moieties, 1-(3,3’’-dimethylindoline-6’-nitrobenzospiropyranyl)-2-ethyl 4,4’’-didecyloxy-2,2’:5’,2’’-terthiophene-3’-acetate (BSP-2) and 1-(3,3’’-dimethylindoline-6’-nitrobenzospiropyranyl)-2-10 ethyl 4,4’’-didecyloxy-2,2’:5’,2’’-terthiophene-3’-carboxylate (BSP-3), differing only by a single methylene spacer unit, have been studied. The kinetics of photogeneration of the equivalent merocyanine (MC) isomers (MC-2 and MC-3, respectively), the isomerisation properties of MC-2 and MC-3, and the thermodynamic parameters have been studied in cetonitrile, and compared to the parent, non-TThfunctionalised, benzospiropyran derivative, BSP-1. Despite the close structural similarity of BSP-2 and 15 BSP-3, their physicochemical properties were found to differ significantly; examples include activation energies (Ea(MC-2) = 75.05 KJ mol-1, Ea(MC-3) = 100.39 kJ mol-1) and entropies of activation (S‡ MC-2 = - 43.38 J K-1 mol-1, S‡ MC-3 = 37.78 J K-1 mol-1) for the thermal relaxation from MC to BSP, with the MC-3 value much closer to the unmodified MC-1 value (46.48 J K -1 mol-1) for this latter quantity. The thermal relaxation kinetics and solvatochromic behaviour of the derivatives in a range of solvents of 20 differing polarity (ethanol, dichloromethane, acetone, toluene and diethyl ether) are also presented. Differences in the estimated values of these thermodynamic and kinetic parameters are discussed with reference to the molecular structure of the derivatives

Intermittent release of transients in the slow solar wind: 2. In situ evidence

In paper 1, we showed that the Heliospheric Imager (HI) instruments on the pair of NASA STEREO spacecraft can be used to image the streamer belt and, in particular, the variability of the slow solar wind which originates near helmet streamers. The observation of intense intermittent transient outflow by HI implies that the corresponding in situ observations of the slow solar wind and corotating interaction regions (CIRs) should contain many signatures of transients. In the present paper, we compare the HI observations with in situ measurements from the STEREO and ACE spacecraft. Analysis of the solar wind ion, magnetic field, and suprathermal electron flux measurements from the STEREO spacecraft reveals the presence of both closed and partially disconnected interplanetary magnetic field lines permeating the slow solar wind. We predict that one of the transients embedded within the second CIR (CIR‐D in paper 1) should impact the near‐Earth ACE spacecraft. ACE measurements confirm the presence of a transient at the time of CIR passage; the transient signature includes helical magnetic fields and bidirectional suprathermal electrons. On the same day, a strahl electron dropout is observed at STEREO‐B, correlated with the passage of a high plasma beta structure. Unlike ACE, STEREO‐B observes the transient a few hours ahead of the CIR. STEREO‐A, STEREO‐B, and ACE spacecraft observe very different slow solar wind properties ahead of and during the CIR analyzed in this paper, which we associate with the intermittent release of transients