Smoking inequality across genders and socio-economic positions. Evidence from Italian data

There has been a dearth of literature on smoking inequalities, in spite of its contribution to health inequalities. We exploit Italian individual-level data from repeated cross-sections of the annual household survey, “Aspects of Daily Life,” that was part of the Multipurpose Survey carried out by the Italian National Statistical Office (ISTAT) for the period 1999–2012 to identify the main socio-demographic characteristics that determine smoking inequalities. We use the Concentration Index to identify in which groups smoking is relatively more prevalent. We find that, among men, pro-rich inequality is driven by members of the lower socio-economic positions, while we observe the opposite for women. We encourage policymakers to address the issue of smoking inequalities, which the current policies have largely disregarded

Hadron-hadron correlations at low and high pTp_T in heavy-ion collisions

The modification of two particle correlations within a jet due to its propagation through dense strongly interacting matter is explored. Different properties of the medium may be probed by varying the momentum of the detected hadrons. Very high transverse momentum ($p_T$) correlations sample the gluon density of the medium; the minimal modification on the same side as the trigger is consistent with the picture and parameters of partonic energy loss. Lower momentum hadrons, sensitive to the presence of composite structures in the medium may excite collective modes such as Cherenkov radiation, resulting in conical patterns in the detected correlations.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, Latex. To appear in the proceedings of the International Conference on Strong & Electroweak Matter 2006, Brookhaven National Laboratory, May 10-13, 200

Restriction categories III: colimits, partial limits, and extensivity

A restriction category is an abstract formulation for a category of partial maps, defined in terms of certain specified idempotents called the restriction idempotents. All categories of partial maps are restriction categories; conversely, a restriction category is a category of partial maps if and only if the restriction idempotents split. Restriction categories facilitate reasoning about partial maps as they have a purely algebraic formulation. In this paper we consider colimits and limits in restriction categories. As the notion of restriction category is not self-dual, we should not expect colimits and limits in restriction categories to behave in the same manner. The notion of colimit in the restriction context is quite straightforward, but limits are more delicate. The suitable notion of limit turns out to be a kind of lax limit, satisfying certain extra properties. Of particular interest is the behaviour of the coproduct both by itself and with respect to partial products. We explore various conditions under which the coproducts are ``extensive'' in the sense that the total category (of the related partial map category) becomes an extensive category. When partial limits are present, they become ordinary limits in the total category. Thus, when the coproducts are extensive we obtain as the total category a lextensive category. This provides, in particular, a description of the extensive completion of a distributive category.Comment: 39 page

BirdSAT: Cross-View Contrastive Masked Autoencoders for Bird Species Classification and Mapping

We propose a metadata-aware self-supervised learning~(SSL)~framework useful for fine-grained classification and ecological mapping of bird species around the world. Our framework unifies two SSL strategies: Contrastive Learning~(CL) and Masked Image Modeling~(MIM), while also enriching the embedding space with metadata available with ground-level imagery of birds. We separately train uni-modal and cross-modal ViT on a novel cross-view global bird species dataset containing ground-level imagery, metadata (location, time), and corresponding satellite imagery. We demonstrate that our models learn fine-grained and geographically conditioned features of birds, by evaluating on two downstream tasks: fine-grained visual classification~(FGVC) and cross-modal retrieval. Pre-trained models learned using our framework achieve SotA performance on FGVC of iNAT-2021 birds and in transfer learning settings for CUB-200-2011 and NABirds datasets. Moreover, the impressive cross-modal retrieval performance of our model enables the creation of species distribution maps across any geographic region. The dataset and source code will be released at https://github.com/mvrl/BirdSAT}.Comment: Accepted at WACV 202

Deciphering the properties of hot and dense matter with hadron-hadron correlations

Two classes of jet correlations in hot and dense matter are explored. Correlations between very high transverse momentum hadrons within a jet sample the gluon density of the medium, where, the minimal modification on the same side as the trigger is consistent with the picture and parameters of partonic energy loss. Lower momentum partons, sampled through softer correlations, due to their larger wavelengths are sensitive to the presence of composite structures in the medium. Scattering off such states may modify the dispersion relation of the radiated gluons resulting in conical patterns in the detected correlations.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Latex, To appear in the proceedings of the International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions, June 9-16, 2006, Pacific Grove, Californi

Smoking Inequality across Genders and Socioeconomic Classes. Evidence from Longitudinal Italian Data

There has been a dearth of literature on smoking inequalities, in spite of its contribution to health inequalities. We exploit longitudinal Italian individual-level data to identify the main sociodemographic characteristics that determine smoking inequalities. We use the Erreygers Concentration Index to identify in which groups smoking is relatively more prevalent. We find that, among men, pro-poor prevalence is driven by members of the lower socio-economic classes, while we observe the opposite for women. We encourage policymakers to address the issue of smoking inequalities, which the current policies have largely disregarded

O(d,d)-invariance in inhomogeneous string cosmologies with perfect fluid

In the first part of the present paper, we show that O(d,d)-invariance usually known in a homogeneous cosmological background written in terms of proper time can be extended to backgrounds depending on one or several coordinates (which may be any space-like or time-like coordinate(s)). In all cases, the presence of a perfect fluid is taken into account and the equivalent duality transformation in Einstein frame is explicitly given. In the second part, we present several concrete applications to some four-dimensional metrics, including inhomogeneous ones, which illustrate the different duality transformations discussed in the first part. Note that most of the dual solutions given here do not seem to be known in the literature.Comment: 25 pages, no figures, Latex. Accepted for publication in General Relativity and Gravitatio

The Nuclear Stellar Disk in Andromeda: A Fossil from the Era of Black Hole Growth

The physics of angular momentum transport from galactic scales (~10-100 pc) to much smaller radii is one of the oustanding problems in our understanding of the formation and evolution of super-massive black holes (BHs). Seemingly unrelated observations have discovered that there is a lopsided stellar disk of unknown origin orbiting the BH in M31, and possibly many other systems. We show that these nominally independent puzzles are in fact closely related. Multi-scale simulations of gas inflow from galactic to BH scales show that when sufficient gas is driven towards a BH, gravitational instabilities form a lopsided, eccentric disk that propagates inwards from larger radii. The lopsided stellar disk exerts a strong torque on the remaining gas, driving inflows that fuel the growth of the BH and produce quasar-level luminosities. The same disk can produce significant obscuration along many sightlines and thus may be the putative 'torus' invoked to explain obscured active galactic nuclei and the cosmic X-ray background. The stellar relic of this disk is long lived and retains the eccentric pattern. Simulations that yield quasar-level accretion rates produce relic stellar disks with kinematics, eccentric patterns, precession rates, and surface density profiles in reasonable agreement with observations of M31. The observed properties of nuclear stellar disks can thus be used to constrain the formation history of super-massive BHs.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted to MNRAS Letters (matches published version

Medium/Long wavelength sensitive opsin diversity in Pitheciidae

New World primates feature a complex colour vision system. Most species have polymorphic colour vision where males have a dichromatic colour perception and females can be either ichromatic or trichromatic. The adaptive value of high allelic diversity of opsins, a light sensitive protein, found in primates’ eyes remains unknown. Studies revealing the allelic diversity are important as they shed light on our understanding of the adaptive value of differences in the colouration of species and their ecologies. Here we investigate the allelic types found in Pitheciidae, an understudied New World primate family, revealing the diversity of medium/long wavelength sensitive opsins both in cryptic and conspicuous species of this primate family. We found five alleles in Cacajao, six in Callicebinae (i.e. Plecturocebus, Cheracebus, and Callicebus), four in Chiropotes, and three in Pithecia, some of them reported for the first time. Both cryptic and conspicuous species in this group presented high allelic diversity

Well-Being and psychological consequences of temporary contracts : the case of younger Italian employees

Working conditions in Western countries have changed dramatically in the last twenty years, witnessing the emergence of new forms of employment contracts. The number of "standard" fulltime permanent jobs has decreased, while non-standard work arrangements such as temporary, contingent or part-time contracts have become much more common. This paper analyses the impact of temporary contracts and job insecurity on well-being among younger Italian employees. We use the "Health Conditions and Use of the Health Service Survey" carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics in conjunction with the Bank of Italy's Survey on Households Income and Wealth (SHIW). We consider four dimensions of individual well-being: physical health, mental health, self-assessed health and happiness. To account for individual heterogeneity we match each temporary worker with a permanent worker using propensity score matching. Well-being of matched individuals is compared to estimates of the average effect of working with a temporary as opposed to a permanent contract. Our analysis reveals a negative relationship between psychological well-being, happiness and having a temporary job and is particularly marked for male