Is Beauty A Valid Criterion for Truth?

[From the introduction]Both beauty and Truth lie beneath many of mankind’s deepest desires and aspirations. The search for beauty drives many people to travel to pristine forests or untouched coastlines to experience awe, while the search for knowledge about the Truth of the universe in which we live compels many to study the tiniest particles or largest spaces we can conceive in order to get a slight hold on our place in a seemingly endless and impartial existence. Our rational proclivities lead us to search for Truth and solid facts; our intrinsic appreciation for natural beauty allows us to deeply appreciate the beauty of a sunrise after a lifetime of daylight. Beauty and Truth both cause people to experience life and their own world in different and unique ways.Though examining Truth and beauty are great adventures in their own rights, examining the relationship between the two is also very interesting. The behavior of the universe when examined on both infinitely large and infinitely small scales can have many elements of beauty. Likewise, many beautiful occurrences in nature can have intriguing scientific explanations. When considering the idea that a proposed theory uniting every phenomenological law of physics will be recognizable because of its intrinsic beauty, however, it seems strange and almost irrational to add an aesthetic criterion to a scientific theory. This invites the question, “Is beauty a valid criterion for scientific Truth?” This question will be examined through a comparison of philosophic and scientific ideas about beauty and Truth, as well as a comparison of the implications of both positive and negative responses. [...

What Utilities Wish We Knew

Utility coordination in design has changed, but we still don’t have all the facts. Utility owners have valuable information that could make our coordination efforts even more successful. In this presentation, utility representatives discuss the top three things they wish designers knew and how we can seek to understand the project from their perspective, ultimately saving the project and utility owners alike time and money

Preventing Unintentional Drug Overdose in North Carolina by Advocating for Policies that Support Overdose Prevention

The main purpose of this Capstone project was to develop and promote a policy, which became the 911 Good Samaritan and Naloxone Access bill, to reduce unintentional drug overdose deaths in North Carolina (NC). The team's partner organization, North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition (NCHRC), solicited the Capstone team's help in raising awareness about NC's overdose problem, developing a policy solution, and advocating for state-level policy change. The Capstone project increased NCHRC's capacity to advocate for the 911 Good Samaritan and Naloxone Access bill, strengthened NCHRC's relationship with the North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA) and community stakeholders, raised awareness of the problem of drug overdose, and resulted in the passage of the policy into law. In 2010, unintentional poisoning, which typically involves drugs, became the second leading cause of injury death for all ages in the United States. Between 1997 and 2001, drug overdose deaths more than doubled in NC. Opioid pain relievers (OPR) accounted for 88% of the increase in drug-related deaths. Many overdose prevention efforts have focused on the supply side, with policies dictating prescribing practice or drug abuse screening and prevention. Although these efforts can prevent an overdose from happening, overdoses will still occur even with the best prevention efforts. Achieving a broader reduction in fatal overdose requires a more targeted policy-level intervention. For this Capstone project, the team produced five deliverables. Deliverable 1 was a literature review of the impact of drug overdose in NC and a fact sheet for distribution to stakeholders. Deliverable 2 consisted of policy recommendations, based on the literature review, intended to guide legislative sponsors in drafting a bill. Deliverable 3 was a presentation to the John Locke Foundation (JLF), a policy think tank, to educate their members and elicit support for the policy. Deliverable 4 was a drug overdose prevention summit in Raleigh to raise awareness and support among various stakeholders, including legislators, for the 911 Good Samaritan and Naloxone Access bill. Lastly, Deliverable 5 included the development of educational materials to raise awareness about the new law.Master of Public Healt

Human Bocavirus in Infants, New Zealand

In 2005, a parvovirus, subsequently named human bocavirus (HBoV), was discovered in respiratory samples taken from infants and children hospitalized at Karolinksa University Hospital, Sweden, with lower respiratory tract infection. HBoV has since been identified in infants and children with respiratory illness in >17 countries, at frequencies ranging from 1.5% to >18.0%. This study reaffirms previous reports of finding HBoV in a subset of infants with bronchiolitis. It is also, to our knowledge, the first study of its kind in New Zealand infants, confirming wide distribution of HBoV. In the northern hemisphere, HBoV circulates primarily during the winter months, although it continues circulating until early summer, later than most other seasonal respiratory viruses. Therefore, this study may underestimate the percentage of New Zealand infants with bronchiolitis whose HBoV test results were positive because sample collection ceased in October (southern hemisphere spring) at the end of the bronchiolitis epidemic. The small number of HBoV-positive infants prevents conclusions concerning ethnicity, coinfection, and bronchiolitis severity

Neighbourhood natural space and the narrowing of socioeconomic inequality in children’s social, emotional, and behavioural wellbeing

Introduction: The natural environment may benefit children's social, emotional and behavioural wellbeing, whilst offering a lever to narrow socioeconomic health inequalities. We investigated whether immediate neighbourhood natural space and private gardens were related to children's wellbeing outcomes and whether these relationships were moderated by household income. Methods: A nationally representative sample of 774 children (55% female, 10/11 years old) from the Studying Physical Activity in Children's Environments across Scotland study. Social, emotional and behavioural difficulty scores (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) represented wellbeing outcomes. Percentage of total natural space and private gardens within 100m of the child's residence was quantified using Ordnance Survey's MasterMap Topography Layer®. Linear regression, including interaction terms, explored the two main research questions. Results: A 10% increase in residential natural space was associated with a 0.08 reduction (-0.15, -0.01; 95%CI) in Emotional Problem scores and a 0.09 improvement (0.02, 0.16; 95%CI) in Prosocial Behaviour scores. Household income moderated the associations between % natural space and private gardens on Prosocial Behaviour scores: for natural space, there was a positive relationship for those in the lowest income quintile (0.25 (0.09, 0.41; 95%CI)) and a null relationship for those in the highest quintile (-0.07 (-0.16, 0.02; 95%CI)). For private garden space, there was a positive relationship for those in the highest quintile (0.15 (0.05, 0.26; 95%CI)) and negative relationship with those in the lowest quintile (-0.30 (-0.50, -0.07, 95%CI)). Conclusion: The natural environment could be a lever to benefit those from less advantaged backgrounds, particularly the development of prosocial behaviours

Clean Low-Biomass Procedures and Their Application to Ancient Ice Core Microorganisms

Microorganisms in glacier ice provide tens to hundreds of thousands of years archive for a changing climate and microbial responses to it. Analyzing ancient ice is impeded by technical issues, including limited ice, low biomass, and contamination. While many approaches have been evaluated and advanced to remove contaminants on ice core surfaces, few studies leverage modern sequencing to establish in silico decontamination protocols for glacier ice. Here we sought to apply such “clean” sampling techniques with in silico decontamination approaches used elsewhere to investigate microorganisms archived in ice at ~41 (D41, ~20,000 years) and ~49 m (D49, ~30,000 years) depth in an ice core (GS3) from the summit of the Guliya ice cap in the northwestern Tibetan Plateau. Four “background” controls were established – a co-processed sterile water artificial ice core, two air samples collected from the ice processing laboratories, and a blank, sterile water sample – and used to assess contaminant microbial diversity and abundances. Amplicon sequencing revealed 29 microbial genera in these controls, but quantitative PCR showed that the controls contained about 50–100-times less 16S DNA than the glacial ice samples. As in prior work, we interpreted these low-abundance taxa in controls as “contaminants” and proportionally removed them in silico from the GS3 ice amplicon data. Because of the low biomass in the controls, we also compared prokaryotic 16S DNA amplicons from pre-amplified (by re-conditioning PCR) and standard amplicon sequencing, and found the resulting microbial profiles to be repeatable and nearly identical. Ecologically, the contaminant-controlled ice microbial profiles revealed significantly different microorganisms across the two depths in the GS3 ice core, which is consistent with changing climate, as reported for other glacier ice samples. Many GS3 ice core genera, including Methylobacterium, Sphingomonas, Flavobacterium, Janthinobacterium, Polaromonas, and Rhodobacter, were also abundant in previously studied ice cores, which suggests wide distribution across glacier environments. Together these findings help further establish “clean” procedures for studying low-biomass ice microbial communities and contribute to a baseline understanding of microorganisms archived in glacier ice

Constraint on neutrino masses from SDSS-III/BOSS Ly-alpha forest and other cosmological probes

International audienceWe present constraints on the parameters of the $\Lambda$CDM cosmologicalmodel in the presence of massive neutrinos, using the one-dimensionalLy$\alpha$ forest power spectrum obtained with the Baryon OscillationSpectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) byPalanque-Delabrouille et al. (2013), complemented by additional cosmologicalprobes. The interpretation of the measured Ly$\alpha$ spectrum is done using asecond-order Taylor expansion of the simulated power spectrum. BOSS Ly$\alpha$ data alone provide better bounds than previous Ly$\alpha$ results,but are still poorly constraining, especially for the sum of neutrino masses$\sum m_\nu$, for which we obtain an upper bound of 1.1~eV (95\% CL), includingsystematics for both data and simulations. Ly$\alpha$ constraints on$\Lambda$CDM parameters and neutrino masses are compatible with CMB bounds fromthe Planck collaboration. Interestingly, the combination of Ly$\alpha$ with CMBdata reduces the uncertainties significantly, due to very different directionsof degeneracy in parameter space, leading to the strongest cosmological boundto date on the total neutrino mass, $\sum m_\nu < 0.15$~eV at 95\% CL (with abest-fit in zero). Adding recent BAO results further tightens this constraintto $\sum m_\nu < 0.14$~eV at 95\% CL. This bound is nearly independent of thestatistical approach used, and of the different combinations of CMB and BAOdata sets considered in this paper in addition to Ly$\alpha$. Given themeasured values of the two squared mass differences $\Delta m^2$, this resulttends to favor the normal hierarchy scenario against the inverted hierarchyscenario for the masses of the active neutrino species

The SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Quasar Target Selection for Data Release Nine

The SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), a five-year spectroscopic survey of 10,000 deg^2, achieved first light in late 2009. One of the key goals of BOSS is to measure the signature of baryon acoustic oscillations in the distribution of Ly-alpha absorption from the spectra of a sample of ~150,000 z>2.2 quasars. Along with measuring the angular diameter distance at z\approx2.5, BOSS will provide the first direct measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe at z > 2. One of the biggest challenges in achieving this goal is an efficient target selection algorithm for quasars over 2.2 < z < 3.5, where their colors overlap those of stars. During the first year of the BOSS survey, quasar target selection methods were developed and tested to meet the requirement of delivering at least 15 quasars deg^-2 in this redshift range, out of 40 targets deg^-2. To achieve these surface densities, the magnitude limit of the quasar targets was set at g <= 22.0 or r<=21.85. While detection of the BAO signature in the Ly-alpha absorption in quasar spectra does not require a uniform target selection, many other astrophysical studies do. We therefore defined a uniformly-selected subsample of 20 targets deg^-2, for which the selection efficiency is just over 50%. This "CORE" subsample will be fixed for Years Two through Five of the survey. In this paper we describe the evolution and implementation of the BOSS quasar target selection algorithms during the first two years of BOSS operations. We analyze the spectra obtained during the first year. 11,263 new z>2.2 quasars were spectroscopically confirmed by BOSS. Our current algorithms select an average of 15 z > 2.2 quasars deg^-2 from 40 targets deg^-2 using single-epoch SDSS imaging. Multi-epoch optical data and data at other wavelengths can further improve the efficiency and completeness of BOSS quasar target selection. [Abridged]Comment: 33 pages, 26 figures, 12 tables and a whole bunch of quasars. Submitted to Ap