Communicating Uncertainty and Risk in Air Quality Maps

Environmental sensors provide crucial data for understanding our surroundings. For example, air quality maps based on sensor readings help users make decisions to mitigate the effects of pollution on their health. Standard maps show readings from individual sensors or colored contours indicating estimated pollution levels. However, showing a single estimate may conceal uncertainty and lead to underestimation of risk, while showing sensor data yields varied interpretations. We present several visualizations of uncertainty in air quality maps, including a frequency-framing "dotmap" and small multiples, and we compare them with standard contour and sensor-based maps. In a user study, we find that including uncertainty in maps has a significant effect on how much users would choose to reduce physical activity, and that people make more cautious decisions when using uncertainty-aware maps. Additionally, we analyze think-aloud transcriptions from the experiment to understand more about how the representation of uncertainty influences people's decision-making. Our results suggest ways to design maps of sensor data that can encourage certain types of reasoning, yield more consistent responses, and convey risk better than standard maps

Tagged particle process in continuum with singular interactions

By using Dirichlet form techniques we construct the dynamics of a tagged particle in an infinite particle environment of interacting particles for a large class of interaction potentials. In particular, we can treat interaction potentials having a singularity at the origin, non-trivial negative part and infinite range, as e.g., the Lennard-Jones potential.Comment: 27 pages, proof for conservativity added, tightened presentatio

Validation of Reference Genes for Robust qRT-PCR Gene Expression Analysis in the Rice Blast Fungus Magnaporthe oryzae

This is the final version of the article. Available from Public Library of Science via the DOI in this record.The rice blast fungus causes significant annual harvest losses. It also serves as a genetically-tractable model to study fungal ingress. Whilst pathogenicity determinants have been unmasked and changes in global gene expression described, we know little about Magnaporthe oryzae cell wall remodelling. Our interests, in wall remodelling genes expressed during infection, vegetative growth and under exogenous wall stress, demand robust choice of reference genes for quantitative Real Time-PCR (qRT-PCR) data normalisation. We describe the expression stability of nine candidate reference genes profiled by qRT-PCR with cDNAs derived during asexual germling development, from sexual stage perithecia and from vegetative mycelium grown under various exogenous stressors. Our Minimum Information for Publication of qRT-PCR Experiments (MIQE) compliant analysis reveals a set of robust reference genes used to track changes in the expression of the cell wall remodelling gene MGG_Crh2 (MGG_00592). We ranked nine candidate reference genes by their expression stability (M) and report the best gene combination needed for reliable gene expression normalisation, when assayed in three tissue groups (Infective, Vegetative, and Global) frequently used in M. oryzae expression studies. We found that MGG_Actin (MGG_03982) and the 40S 27a ribosomal subunit MGG_40s (MGG_02872) proved to be robust reference genes for the Infection group and MGG_40s and MGG_Ef1 (Elongation Factor1-α) for both Vegetative and Global groups. Using the above validated reference genes, M. oryzae MGG_Crh2 expression was found to be significantly (p<0.05) elevated three-fold during vegetative growth as compared with dormant spores and two fold higher under cell wall stress (Congo Red) compared to growth under optimal conditions. We recommend the combinatorial use of two reference genes, belonging to the cytoskeleton and ribosomal synthesis functional groups, MGG_Actin, MGG_40s, MGG_S8 (Ribosomal subunit 40S S8) or MGG_Ef1, which demonstrated low M values across heterogeneous tissues. By contrast, metabolic pathway genes MGG_Fad (FAD binding domain-containing protein) and MGG_Gapdh (Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase) performed poorly, due to their lack of expression stability across samples.We acknowledge funding from Khazanah Foundation in support of SCO, BBSRC grant BB/J008923/1 awarded to SG and we thank Eleanor Jaskowska for her assistance in tissue preparation. Neither funder played a role in study design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish or manuscript preparation

The 'not-so-strange' body in the mirror: : A principal components analysis of direct and mirror self-observation

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Paul M. Jenkinson, and Catherine Preston, ‘The “not-so-strange” body in the mirror: A principal components analysis of direct and mirror self-observation’, Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 48, pp. 262-272, first published online 4 January 2017, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.12.007 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.In this study we adopted a psychometric approach to examine how the body is subjectively experienced in a mirror. One hundred and twenty-four healthy participants viewed their body for five minutes directly or via a mirror, and then completed a 20-item questionnaire designed to capture subjective experiences of the body. PCA revealed a two-component structure for both direct and mirror conditions, comprising body evaluations (and alienation) and unusual feelings and perceptions. The relationship between these components and pre-existing tendencies for appearance anxiety, body dysmorphic-type beliefs, dissociative symptomatology, self-objectification and delusion ideation further supported the similarity between direct and mirror conditions; however, the occurrence of strange experiences like those reported to occur during prolonged face viewing was not confirmed. These results suggest that, despite obvious differences in visual feedback, observing the body via a mirror (as an outside observer) is subjectively equivalent to observing the body directly (from our own viewpoint).Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Gibbs cluster measures on configuration spaces

The probability distribution g_cl of a Gibbs cluster point process in X = R^d (with i.i.d. random clusters attached to points of a Gibbs configuration with distribution g) is studied via the projection of an auxiliary Gibbs measure ĝ in the space of configurations ^γ={(x,\bar{y})}, where x∈X indicates a cluster "center" and y∈\mathfrak{X}=\sqcup_{n} X^n represents a corresponding cluster relative to x. We show that the measure g_cl is quasi-invariant with respect to the group Diff_0(X) of compactly supported diffeomorphisms of X, and prove an integration-by-parts formula for g_cl. The associated equilibrium stochastic dynamics is then constructed using the method of Dirichlet forms

Highly directional and coherent emission from dark excitons enabled by bound states in the continuum

A double-edged sword in two-dimensional material science and technology is an optically forbidden dark exciton. On the one hand, it is fascinating for condensed matter physics, quantum information processing, and optoelectronics due to its long lifetime. On the other hand, it is notorious for being optically inaccessible from both excitation and detection standpoints. Here, we provide an efficient and low-loss solution to the dilemma by reintroducing photonics bound states in the continuum (BICs) to manipulate dark excitons in the momentum space. In a monolayer tungsten diselenide under normal incidence, we observed a giant enhancement with an enhancement factor of ~3,100 for dark excitons enabled by transverse magnetic BICs with intrinsic out-of-plane electric fields. By further employing widely tunable Friedrich-Wintgen BICs, we demonstrated highly directional emission from the dark excitons with a divergence angle of merely 7 degrees. We found that the directional emission is coherent at room temperature, unambiguously shown in polarization analyses and interference measurements. Therefore, the BICs reintroduced as a momentum-space photonic environment could be an intriguing platform to reshape and redefine light-matter interactions in nearby quantum materials, such as low-dimensional materials, otherwise challenging or even impossible to achieve

Scientists Want More Children

Scholars partly attribute the low number of women in academic science to the impact of the science career on family life. Yet, the picture of how men and women in science – at different points in the career trajectory – compare in their perceptions of this impact is incomplete. In particular, we know little about the perceptions and experiences of junior and senior scientists at top universities, institutions that have a disproportionate influence on science, science policy, and the next generation of scientists. Here we show that having fewer children than wished as a result of the science career affects the life satisfaction of science faculty and indirectly affects career satisfaction, and that young scientists (graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) who have had fewer children than wished are more likely to plan to exit science entirely. We also show that the impact of science on family life is not just a woman's problem; the effect on life satisfaction of having fewer children than desired is more pronounced for male than female faculty, with life satisfaction strongly related to career satisfaction. And, in contrast to other research, gender differences among graduate students and postdoctoral fellows disappear. Family factors impede talented young scientists of both sexes from persisting to research positions in academic science. In an era when the global competitiveness of US science is at risk, it is concerning that a significant proportion of men and women trained in the select few spots available at top US research universities are considering leaving science and that such desires to leave are related to the impact of the science career on family life. Results from our study may inform university family leave policies for science departments as well as mentoring programs in the sciences

Uniqueness of Gibbs Measure for Models With Uncountable Set of Spin Values on a Cayley Tree

We consider models with nearest-neighbor interactions and with the set $[0,1]$ of spin values, on a Cayley tree of order $k\geq 1$. It is known that the "splitting Gibbs measures" of the model can be described by solutions of a nonlinear integral equation. For arbitrary $k\geq 2$ we find a sufficient condition under which the integral equation has unique solution, hence under the condition the corresponding model has unique splitting Gibbs measure.Comment: 13 page