Book Review: The Founder of Hare Krishnas as Seen by Devotees: A Cognitive Study of Religious Charisma

A review of The Founder of Hare Krishnas as Seen by Devotees: A Cognitive Study of Religious Charisma by Kimmo Ketola

Behavior of Torsional Alfven Waves and Field Line Resonance on Rotating Magnetars

Torsional Alfven waves are likely excited with bursts in rotating magnetars. These waves are probably propagated through corotating atmospheres toward a vacuum exterior. We have studied the physical effects of the azimuthal wave number and the characteristic height of the plasma medium on wave transmission. In this work, explicit calculations were carried out based on the three-layered cylindrical model. We found that the coupling strength between the internal shear and the external Alfven modes is drastically enhanced, when resonance occurs in the corotating plasma cavity. The spatial structure of the electromagnetic fields in the resonance cavity is also investigated when Alfven waves exhibit resonance.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, submitted to MNRA

Type Ic core-collapse supernova explosions evolved from very massive stars

We investigate the possibility of a super-luminous Type Ic core-collapse supernovae producing a large amount of 56Ni. Very massive stars with a main-sequence mass larger than 100 Msun and a metallicity 0.001 < Z < 0.004 are expected to explode as super-luminous Type Ic supernovae. Stars with ~ 110 - 150 Msun and Z < 0.001 would explode as Type Ic pulsational pair-instability supernovae if the whole H and He layers has been lost by the mass loss during pulsational pair-instability. We evaluate the total ejecta mass and the yields of 56Ni, O, and Si in core-collapse supernovae evolved from very massive stars. We adopt 43.1 and 61.1 Msun WO stars with Z=0.004 as supernova progenitors expected to explode as Type Ic core-collapse supernovae. These progenitors have masses of 110 and 250 Msun at the zero-age main sequence. Spherical explosions with an explosion energy larger than 2e52 erg produce more than 3.5 Msun 56Ni, enough to reproduce the light curve of SN 2007bi. Asphericity of the explosion affects the total ejecta mass as well as the yields of 56Ni, O, and Si. Aspherical explosions of the 110 and 250 Msun models reproduce the 56Ni yield of SN 2007bi. These explosions will also show large velocity dispersion. An aspherical core-collapse supernova evolved from a very massive star is a possibility of the explosion of SN 2007bi.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRA

Gap between theory and practice: noise sensitive word alignment in machine translation

Word alignment is to estimate a lexical translation probability p(e|f), or to estimate the correspondence g(e, f) where a function g outputs either 0 or 1, between a source word f and a target word e for given bilingual sentences. In practice, this formulation does not consider the existence of ‘noise’ (or outlier) which may cause problems depending on the corpus. N-to-m mapping objects, such as paraphrases, non-literal translations, and multiword expressions, may appear as both noise and also as valid training data. From this perspective, this paper tries to answer the following two questions: 1) how to detect stable patterns where noise seems legitimate, and 2) how to reduce such noise, where applicable, by supplying extra information as prior knowledge to a word aligner

Sentence-level quality estimation for MT system combination

This paper provides the system description of the Dublin City University system combination module for our participation in the system combination task in the Second Workshop on Applying Machine Learning Techniques to Optimize the Division of Labour in Hybrid MT (ML4HMT- 12). We incorporated a sentence-level quality score, obtained by sentence-level Quality Estimation (QE), as meta information guiding system combination. Instead of using BLEU or (minimum average) TER, we select a backbone for the confusion network using the estimated quality score. For the Spanish-English data, our strategy improved 0.89 BLEU points absolute compared to the best single score and 0.20 BLEU points absolute compared to the standard system combination strateg

Topic modeling-based domain adaptation for system combination

This paper gives the system description of the domain adaptation team of Dublin City University for our participation in the system combination task in the Second Workshop on Applying Machine Learning Techniques to Optimise the Division of Labour in Hybrid MT (ML4HMT-12). We used the results of unsupervised document classification as meta information to the system combination module. For the Spanish-English data, our strategy achieved 26.33 BLEU points, 0.33 BLEU points absolute improvement over the standard confusion-network-based system combination. This was the best score in terms of BLEU among six participants in ML4HMT-12

Cigarette Use and Striatal Dopamine D2/3 Receptors: Possible Role in the Link between Smoking and Nicotine Dependence.

BackgroundCigarette smoking induces dopamine release in the striatum, and smoking- or nicotine-induced ventral striatal dopamine release is correlated with nicotine dependence. Smokers also exhibit lower dopamine D2/3 receptor availability in the dorsal striatum than nonsmokers. Negative correlations of striatal dopamine D2/3 receptor availability with smoking exposure and nicotine dependence, therefore, might be expected but have not been tested.MethodsTwenty smokers had positron emission tomography scans with [18F]fallypride to measure dopamine D2/3 receptor availability in ventral and dorsal regions of the striatum and provided self-report measures of recent and lifetime smoking and of nicotine dependence.ResultsAs reported before, lifetime smoking was correlated with nicotine dependence. New findings were that ventral striatal dopamine D2/3 receptor availability was negatively correlated with recent and lifetime smoking and also with nicotine dependence.ConclusionThe results suggest an effect of smoking on ventral striatal D2/3 dopamine receptors that may contribute to nicotine dependence