Canadian ERTS program progress report

Progress of the Canadian ERTS program is provided along with statistics on the production and role of ERTS images both from the CCRS in Ottawa and from the Prince Albert Saskatchewan satellite station. The types of products, difficulties of production and some of the main applications in Canada are discussed

Astrophysically robust systematics removal using variational inference: application to the first month of Kepler data

Space-based transit search missions such as Kepler are collecting large numbers of stellar light curves of unprecedented photometric precision and time coverage. However, before this scientific goldmine can be exploited fully, the data must be cleaned of instrumental artefacts. We present a new method to correct common-mode systematics in large ensembles of very high precision light curves. It is based on a Bayesian linear basis model and uses shrinkage priors for robustness, variational inference for speed, and a de-noising step based on empirical mode decomposition to prevent the introduction of spurious noise into the corrected light curves. After demonstrating the performance of our method on a synthetic dataset, we apply it to the first month of Kepler data. We compare the results, which are publicly available, to the output of the Kepler pipeline's pre-search data conditioning, and show that the two generally give similar results, but the light curves corrected using our approach have lower scatter, on average, on both long and short timescales. We finish by discussing some limitations of our method and outlining some avenues for further development. The trend-corrected data produced by our approach are publicly available.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Self-Rated Health Trajectories among Married Americans: Do Disparities Persist over 20 Years?

The purpose of this study is to understand self-rated health (SRH) trajectories by social location (race/ethnicity by gender by social class) among married individuals in the United States. We estimate multilevel models of SRH using six observations from 1980 to 2000 from a nationally representative panel of married individuals initially aged 25–55 (Marital Instability Over the Life Course Study). Results indicate that gender, race/ethnicity, and social class are associated with initial SRH disparities. Women are less healthy than men; people of color are less healthy than whites; lower educated individuals are less healthy than higher educated individuals. Women’s health declined slower than men’s but did not di@er by race/ethnicity or education. Results from complex intersectional models show that white men with any college had the highest initial SRH. Only women with any college had significantly slower declines in SRH compared to white men with any college. For married individuals of all ages, most initial SRH disparities persist over twenty years. Intersecting statuses show that education provides uneven health benefits across racial/ethnic and gender subgroups

BamView: visualizing and interpretation of next-generation sequencing read alignments.

So-called next-generation sequencing (NGS) has provided the ability to sequence on a massive scale at low cost, enabling biologists to perform powerful experiments and gain insight into biological processes. BamView has been developed to visualize and analyse sequence reads from NGS platforms, which have been aligned to a reference sequence. It is a desktop application for browsing the aligned or mapped reads [Ruffalo, M, LaFramboise, T, Koyutürk, M. Comparative analysis of algorithms for next-generation sequencing read alignment. Bioinformatics 2011;27:2790-6] at different levels of magnification, from nucleotide level, where the base qualities can be seen, to genome or chromosome level where overall coverage is shown. To enable in-depth investigation of NGS data, various views are provided that can be configured to highlight interesting aspects of the data. Multiple read alignment files can be overlaid to compare results from different experiments, and filters can be applied to facilitate the interpretation of the aligned reads. As well as being a standalone application it can be used as an integrated part of the Artemis genome browser, BamView allows the user to study NGS data in the context of the sequence and annotation of the reference genome. Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) density and candidate SNP sites can be highlighted and investigated, and read-pair information can be used to discover large structural insertions and deletions. The application will also calculate simple analyses of the read mapping, including reporting the read counts and reads per kilobase per million mapped reads (RPKM) for genes selected by the user

Intersections of Hyperconics in Projective Planes of Even Order

AbstractWe show how to lift the even intersection equivalence relation from the hyperovals of PG(2, 4) to an equivalence relation amongst sets of hyperconics in π=PG(2, F). Here, F is any finite or infinite field of characteristic two that contains a subfield of order 4, but does not contain a subfield of order 8. Moreover, we are able to determine the number of points that two hyperconics in π will have in common provided some projective subplane of order 4 intersects both of them in hexads

Some observations on the application of software metrics to UML models

In this position paper we discuss some of the existing work on applying metrics to UML models, present some of our own work in this area, and specify some topics for future research that we regard as important

Towards the re-usability of software metric definitions at the meta level

A large number of metrics for evaluating the quality of software have been proposed in the literature. However, there is no standard terminology or formalism for defining metrics and consequently many of the metrics proposed have some ambiguity in their definitions. This hampers the empirical validation of these metrics. To address this problem, we generalise an existing approach to defining metrics that is based on the Object Constraint Language and the Unified Modelling Language metamodel. We have developed a prototype tool called DMML (Defining Metrics at the Meta Level) that supports this approach and we present details of this tool. To illustrate the approach, we present formal definitions for the Chidamber and Kemerer metrics suite

Towards the re-usability of software metric definitions at the meta level

A large number of metrics for evaluating the quality of software have been proposed in the literature. However, there is no standard terminology or formalism for defining metrics and consequently many of the metrics proposed have some ambiguity in their definitions. This hampers the empirical validation of these metrics. To address this problem, we generalise an existing approach to defining metrics that is based on the Object Constraint Language and the Unified Modelling Language metamodel. We have developed a prototype tool called DMML (Defining Metrics at the Meta Level) that supports this approach and we present details of this tool. To illustrate the approach, we present formal definitions for the Chidamber and Kemerer metrics suite

A Definition of the Chidamber and Kemerer Metrics suite for UML. Technical Report NUIM-CS-TR-2006-03

Since there is no standard formalism for defining software metrics, many of the measures that exist have some ambiguity in their definitions which hinders their comparison and implementation. We address this problem by presenting an approach for defining software metrics. This approach is based on expressing the measures as Object Constraint Language queries over a language metamodel. To illustrate the approach, we specify how the Chidamber and Kemerer metrics suite can be measured from Unified Modelling Language class diagrams by presenting formal definitions for these metrics using the Unified Modelling Language 2.0 metamodel