Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Discontinuous shear modulus determines the glass transition temperature

A solid - amorphous or crystalline - is defined by a finite shear modulus while a fluid lacks such. We thus experimentally investigate the elastic properties of a colloidal glass former near the glass transition: spectroscopy of vibrational excitations yields the dispersion relations of longitudinal and transverse phonons in the glassy state. From the long wavelength limit of the dispersion relation we extract the bulk and the shear modulus. As expected, the latter disappear in a fluid and we measure a clearly resolved discontinuous behaviour of the elastic moduli at the glass transition. This not only determines the transition temperature T_G of the system but also directly addresses recent discussions about elasticity during vitrification. We show that low frequency excitations in our system are plane waves such that continuum elasticity theory can be used to describe the macroscopic behaviour.
Centre for Economic and Financial Research at New Economic School Dynamic Modeling under Linear-Exponential Loss Stanislav Anatolyev

We develop a methodology of parametric modeling of time series dynamics when the underlying loss function is linear-exponential (Linex). We propose to directly model the dynamics of the conditional expectation that determines the optimal predictor. The procedure hinges on the exponential quasi maximum likelihood interpretation of the Linex loss and nicely fits the multiple error modeling framework. Many conclusions relating to estimation, inference and forecasting follow from results already available in the econometric literature. The methodology is illustrated using data on United States GNP growth and Treasury bill returns.
Evaluating the impact of menu labeling on food choices and intake.

OBJECTIVES We assessed the impact of restaurant menu calorie labels on food choices and intake. METHODS Participants in a study dinner (n=303) were randomly assigned to either (1) a menu without calorie labels (no calorie labels), (2) a menu with calorie labels (calorie labels), or (3) a menu with calorie labels and a label stating the recommended daily caloric intake for an average adult (calorie labels plus information). Food choices and intake during and after the study dinner were measured. RESULTS Participants in both calorie label conditions ordered fewer calories than those in the no calorie labels condition. When calorie label conditions were combined, that group consumed 14% fewer calories than the no calorie labels group. Individuals in the calorie labels condition consumed more calories after the study dinner than those in both other conditions. When calories consumed during and after the study dinner were combined, participants in the calorie labels plus information group consumed an average of 250 fewer calories than those in the other groups. CONCLUSIONS Calorie labels on restaurant menus impacted food choices and intake; adding a recommended daily caloric requirement label increased this effect, suggesting menu label legislation should require such a label. Future research should evaluate menu labeling's impact on children's food choices and consumption.
Constrained optimal synthesis and robustness analysis by randomized algorithms

We extend the existing order statistics distribution theory to the general case in which the order statistics is associated with certain constraints and the distribution of population is not assumed to be absolutely continuous. In particular, we derive an inequality on distribution for related order statistics. Moreover, we also propose two different approaches in searching reliable solutions to the robust analysis and optimal synthesis problems under constraints. Furthermore, minimum computational effort is investigated and bounds for sample size are derived.
Ionized ultraviolet and soft X-ray absorption in the low-redshift active galactic nucleus PG 1126−041

We present here the analysis of ultraviolet spectra from IUE and an X-ray spectrum from ROSAT PSPC observations of the X-ray-weak, far-infrared-loud AGN, PG 1126−041 (Mrk 1298). The first UV spectra taken in 1992 June, simultaneously with ROSAT, show strong absorption lines of N v, C iv and Si iv, extending over a velocity range from −1000 to −5000 km s−1 with respect to the corresponding line centre. Our analysis shows that the broad emission-line region (BELR) is, at least partially, covered by the material causing these absorption lines. In the IUE spectrum taken in 1995 January, the continuum was a factor of 2 brighter and the UV absorption lines are found to be considerably weaker than in 1992, but little variation in the emission-line fluxes is found. With UV spectral indices of αUV≃1.82 and 1.46 for the 1992 and 1995 data, the far-UV spectrum is steep. Based on the emission-line ratios and the broad-band spectral energy distribution, we argue that the steepness of the UV spectrum is unlikely to be caused by reddening. The soft X-ray emission in the ROSAT band is weak. A simple power-law model yields a very poor fit with a UV-to-X-ray spectral index αUVX=2.3. Highly ionized (warm) absorption is suggested by the ROSAT data. After correcting for a warm absorber, the optical to X-ray spectral slope is close to the average of αUVX≃1.67 for radio-quiet quasars. From photoionization calculations we find the following results. (1) A single-zone absorption model cannot explain simultaneously the UV absorption lines and the ionized X-ray absorption if metal abundances are solar. Furthermore, in order to be consistent with the equivalent width of the observed Lyα absorption line, the turbulent velocity of the warm absorber must be less than 190 km s−1, which imposes serious constraints on a disc wind model. (2) The UV absorption lines and their variability cannot be explained by a single-zone model with solar abundances and the large variability in the absorption lines suggests that C iv and N v absorption lines are not severely saturated. (3) The absorption of the ionizing continuum by warm material strongly affects the emission-line spectrum.
Predicting Impact Shock Magnitude: Which Ground Reaction Force Variable Should We Use?

Peak tibial acceleration (PTA) measured using accelerometers attached to the musculoskeletal system is considered the most effective method of quantifying impact shock magnitude as a result of footstrike during running. Ground Reaction Forces (GRFs) measured using force plates are also widely used to predict PTA. However it is not clear which is the most effective GRF variable to use. This has led to different variables being reported within biomechanics literature. This study aimed to identify which GRF variable is the most suitable for consistent and accurate prediction of impact shock magnitudes. Thirteen participants (10 male and 3 female) took part in this study. Simultaneous tibial accelerations and GRF information were recorded as participants ran at 4.0ms -1 +5% over a force platform. The relationship between various GRF parameters including, average vertical loading rates, peak instantaneous vertical loading rates (PIVLR), event times were compared to tibial shock magnitudes using Pearson correlations. The GRF variables analysed identified that the strongest correlation (r=0.469) exists between the PIVLR and the PTA. This study therefore provides evidence that the most effective method of predicting PTA is via the PIVLR. This method does not require identification of a vertical GRF impact peak which is dependent on the individual researcher identifying the peak, and can be identified repeatedly across studies.
Modeling Interdependent Risks

In an interdependent world the risks faced by any one agent depend not only on its choices but also on those of all others. Expectations about others' choices will influence investments in risk management and the outcome can be suboptimal for everyone. We model this as the Nash equilibrium of a game and give conditions for such a suboptimal equilibrium to be tipped to an optimal one. We also characterize the smallest coalition to tip an equilibrium, the minimum critical coalition, and show that this is also the cheapest critical coalition, so that there is no less expensive way to move the system from the suboptimal to the optimal equilibrium. We illustrate these results by reference to airline security and the control of infectious diseases via vaccination.
Orthogonalized ALS: A Theoretically Principled Tensor Decomposition Algorithm for Practical Use

The popular Alternating Least Squares (ALS) algorithm for tensor decomposition is efficient and easy to implement, but often converges to poor local optima—particularly when the weights of the factors are non-uniform. We propose a modification of the ALS approach that is as efficient as standard ALS, but provably recovers the true factors with random initialization under standard incoherence assumptions on the factors of the tensor. We demonstrate the significant practical superiority of our approach over traditional ALS for a variety of tasks on synthetic data—including tensor factorization on exact, noisy and over-complete tensors, as well as tensor completion—and for computing word embeddings from a third-order word tri-occurrence tensor.
Open and closed boundaries in large-scale convective dynamos

Context. Earlier work has suggested that large-scale dynamos can reach and maintain equipartition field strengths on a dynamical time scale only if magnetic helicity of the fluctuating field can be shed from the domain through open boundaries. Aims. Our aim is to test this scenario in convection-driven dynamos by comparing results for open and closed boundary conditions. Methods. Three-dimensional numerical simulations of turbulent compressible convection with shear and rotation are used to study the effects of boundary conditions on the excitation and saturation of large-scale dynamos. Open (vertical-field) and closed (perfectconductor) boundary conditions are used for the magnetic field. The shear flow is such that the contours of shear are vertical, crossing the outer surface, and are thus ideally suited for driving a shear-induced magnetic helicity flux. Results. We find that for given shear and rotation rate, the growth rate of the magnetic field is larger if open boundary conditions are used. The growth rate first increases for small magnetic Reynolds number, Rm, but then levels off at an approximately constant value for intermediate values of Rm. For large enough Rm, a small-scale dynamo is excited and the growth rate of the field in this regime increases as Rm 1/2 . Regarding the nonlinear regime, the saturation level of the energy of the total magnetic field is independent of Rm when open boundaries are used. In the case of perfect-conductor boundaries, the saturation level first increases as a function of Rm, but then decreases proportional to Rm −1 for Rm > 30, indicative of catastrophic quenching. These results suggest that the shear-induced magnetic helicity flux is efficient in alleviating catastrophic quenching when open boundaries are used. The horizontally averaged mean field is still weakly decreasing as a function of Rm even for open boundaries.
Evaluation of Mechanical Strength of Epoxy Polymer Concrete with Silica Powder as Filler

Silica powder as filler was used in preparation of polymer concrete. Utilization of waste silica powder as a filler in polymer concrete is promising, it may enhances the physical properties and mechanical strength of the polymer concrete. The mechanical properties of PCs with variation of filler compositions (100, 150, 200%) and resin (10, 15, 20%) were investigated. The compressive strength of polymer concrete with silica powder as filler in comparison with cement concrete was enhanced by four folds. The casted PCs were also investigated for their compressive, flexural and tensile strengths. Samples with 15 and 20% epoxy resin and 200% filler (15% fine silica powder, 25% medium size silica powder and 60% coarse silica powder) had maximum mechanical strengths. The values of compressive, flexural and tensile strengths were 128.9, 22.5 and 16.2 MPa, respectively.
PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Parental Discipline and Affection and Children ’ s Prosocial Behavior : Genetic and Environmental Links

The authors investigated genetic and environmental contributions to the relationships between children’s (N 9,319 twin pairs) prosocial behavior and parental positivity and negativity toward them. Children’s prosocial behavior was rated by parents at ages 3, 4, and 7 and by teachers at age 7. At each age, parents described their feelings and discipline toward each twin. Parental positivity was indexed by positive feelings and positive, noncoercive discipline, and parental negativity was indexed by negative feelings and coercive, punitive discipline. Genetics and the environment both contributed to individual differences in prosocial behavior and in parenting. At all ages, parental positivity correlated positively, and parental negativity correlated negatively with prosocial behavior. Genetic factors largely mediated the negative correlation between prosocial behavior and parental negativity. Shared environmental effects contributed mainly to the positive relationship between prosocial behavior and parental positivity. This pattern was found both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. The findings point to the importance of children’s characteristics and of the parent–child relationship in family processes.
Characteristics of Texts Affecting Relevance Judgments

We report on preliminary results from two studies, investigating the factors which underlie people's judgments of the relevance or usefulness of documents to particular information problems. The studies aimed to see whether factors other than topical relevance are significant in such decisions, to identify any such factors, and to relate such factors both to the users' situations and goals, and to representation and retrieval strategies for IR systems, which would take account of such factors. Six facets of the judgment of document usefulness or relevance were identified, only two of which seem directly related to topical relevance. These facets are interpreted in the framework of user goals and situation, and some example strategies for their use in IR systems are presented.
SGR J1550−5418 BURSTS DETECTED WITH THE FERMI GAMMA-RAY BURST MONITOR DURING ITS MOST PROLIFIC ACTIVITY

We have performed detailed temporal and time-integrated spectral analysis of 286 bursts from SGR J1550−5418 detected with the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) in 2009 January, resulting in the largest uniform sample of temporal and spectral properties of SGR J1550−5418 bursts. We have used the combination of broadband and high time-resolution data provided with GBM to perform statistical studies for the source properties. We determine the durations, emission times, duty cycles, and rise times for all bursts, and find that they are typical of SGR bursts. We explore various models in our spectral analysis, and conclude that the spectra of SGR J1550−5418 bursts in the 8–200 keV band are equally well described by optically thin thermal bremsstrahlung (OTTB), a power law (PL) with an exponential cutoff (Comptonized model), and two blackbody (BB) functions (BB+BB). In the spectral fits with the Comptonized model, we find a mean PL index of −0.92, close to the OTTB index of −1. We show that there is an anti-correlation between the Comptonized Epeak and the burst fluence and average flux. For the BB+BB fits, we find that the fluences and emission areas of the two BB functions are correlated. The low-temperature BB has an emission area comparable to the neutron star surface area, independent of the temperature, while the high-temperature BB has a much smaller area and shows an anti-correlation between emission area and temperature. We compare the properties of these bursts with bursts observed from other SGR sources during extreme activations, and discuss the implications of our results in the context of magnetar burst models.
Prime-Time Representations of Female Federal Agents in Television Dramas

Television crime programs not only impart messages regarding the nature of crime and criminal justice but also aid in the creation of stereotypes regarding females working in law enforcement. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study analyzes a sample of prime-time crime dramas to examine issues of employment, discrimination, sexualization, and victimization within series episodes. Although portrayals of female law enforcement officers have improved, female characters continue to face issues of discrimination and victimization. The manner in which these messages may be cultivated and disseminated and what this means for consumers, especially women interested in law enforcement careers, are explored.
A novel video compression technique for very low bit-rate coding by combining H.264/AVC standard and 2-D wavelet transform

In this paper, we propose a new method for very low bit-rate video coding that combines H.264/AVC standard and two dimensional discrete wavelet transform. In this method, first a two dimensional wavelet transform is applied on each video frame independently to extract the low frequency components for each frame and then the low frequency parts of all frames are coded using H.264/AVC codec. On the other hand, the high frequency parts of the video frames are coded by run length coding algorithm, after applying a threshold to neglect the low value coefficients. Experiments show that our proposed method can achieve better rate-distortion performance at very low bit-rate applications below 16 kbits/s compared to applying H.264/AVC standard directly to all frames. Applications of our proposed video coding technique include video telephony, video conferencing, transmitting or receiving video over half-rate traffic channels of GSM networks and so on.
Practical Stability and Bounds of Heterogeneous AIMD/RED System with Time Delay

The Additive Increase and Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) congestion control algorithm of TCP protocol deployed in the end systems and the Random Early Detection (RED) queue management scheme deployed in the intermediate systems contribute to Internet stability and integrity. Previous research based on the fluid-flow model analysis indicated that an AIMD/RED system may not be asymptotically stable when the feedback delays or the link capacity becomes large [3]. However, as long as the system operates near its desired equilibrium, small oscillations are acceptable and the network performance is still satisfactory. Deriving the bounds of these oscillations for the heterogeneous AIMD/RED system with time delays is non-trivial. In this paper, we study the practical stability of the AIMD/RED system with heterogeneous flows and feedback delays, and obtain theoretical bounds of the AIMD flow window size and the RED queue length, as functions of number of flows, link capacity, RED queue parameters, and AIMD parameters. Numerical results with Matlab and simulation results with NS-2 are given to validate the correctness of the theorems and demonstrate the tightness of the derived bounds. The analytical and simulation results provide important insights on which system parameters contribute to higher oscillations of the system and how to set system parameters to ensure system efficiency with bounded delay and loss.
Moving to Segregation: Evidence from 8 Italian Cities

We use a new dataset and a novel identification strategy to analyze the effects of residential segregation on the employment of migrants in 8 Italian cities. Our data, which are representative of the population of both legal and illegal migrants, allow us to measure segregation at the very local level (the block) and include measures of house prices, commuting costs and migrants' linguistic ability. We find evidence that migrants who reside in areas with a high concentration of non-Italians are less likely to be employed compared to similar migrants who reside in less segregated areas. In our preferred specification, a 10 percentage points increase in residential segregation reduces the probability of being employed by 7 percentage points or about 8% over the average. Additionally, we also show that this effect emerges only above a critical threshold of 15-20% of migrants over the total local population, below which there is no statistically detectable effect. The negative externality associated with residential segregation arises only for the employment prospects of immigrants, whether legal or illegal. We do not find evidence of either spatial mismatch or skill bias as potential explanations of this effect. Statistical discrimination by native employers is the remaining suspect.
UVES Observations of QSO 0000–2620: Oxygen and Zinc Abundances in the Damped Lyα Galaxy at zabs = 3.3901

Observations of the QSO 0000-2620 with the Ultraviolet-Visual Echelle Spectrograph at the 8.2 m ESO Kueyen telescope are used for abundance analysis of the damped Lyα system at zabs = 3.3901. Several oxygen lines are identified in the Lyα forest, and a measure for the oxygen abundance is obtained at [O/H] = -1.85 ± 0.15 by means of the unsaturated O I λ925 and O I λ950 lines. This represents the most accurate O measurement in a damped Lyα galaxy so far. We have also detected Zn II λ2026 and Cr II λλ2056, 2062 redshifted at ≈8900 Å and found abundances [Zn/H] = -2.07 ± 0.10 and [Cr/H] = -1.99 ± 0.09. Furthermore, previous measurements of Fe, Si, Ni, and N have been refined, yielding [Fe/H] = -2.04 ± 0.09, [Si/H] = -1.90 ± 0.08, [Ni/H] = -2.27 ± 0.09, and [N/H] = -2.68 ± 0.12. The abundance of the nonrefractory element zinc is the lowest among the damped Lyα systems, showing that the associated intervening galaxy is indeed in the early stages of its chemical evolution. The fact that the Zn abundance is identical to that of the refractory elements Fe and Cr suggests that dust grains have not formed yet. In this damped Lyα system the observed [O, S, Si/Zn, Fe, Cr] ratios, in whatever combination are taken, are close to solar (i.e., 0.1-0.2 dex) and do not show the [α-element/Fe] enhancement observed in Milky Way stars of comparable metallicity. The observed behavior supports a galaxy evolution model characterized by either episodic or low star formation rate rather than a Milky Way-type evolutionary model.
The intestinal stem cell markers Bmi1 and Lgr5 identify two functionally distinct populations

The small intestine epithelium undergoes rapid and continuous regeneration supported by crypt intestinal stem cells (ISCs). Bmi1 and Lgr5 have been independently identified to mark long-lived multipotent ISCs by lineage tracing in mice; however, the functional distinctions between these two populations remain undefined. Here, we demonstrate that Bmi1 and Lgr5 mark two functionally distinct ISCs in vivo. Lgr5 marks mitotically active ISCs that exhibit exquisite sensitivity to canonical Wnt modulation, contribute robustly to homeostatic regeneration, and are quantitatively ablated by irradiation. In contrast, Bmi1 marks quiescent ISCs that are insensitive to Wnt perturbations, contribute weakly to homeostatic regeneration, and are resistant to high-dose radiation injury. After irradiation, however, the normally quiescent Bmi1+ ISCs dramatically proliferate to clonally repopulate multiple contiguous crypts and villi. Clonogenic culture of isolated single Bmi1+ ISCs yields long-lived self-renewing spheroids of intestinal epithelium that produce Lgr5-expressing cells, thereby establishing a lineage relationship between these two populations in vitro. Taken together, these data provide direct evidence that Bmi1 marks quiescent, injury-inducible reserve ISCs that exhibit striking functional distinctions from Lgr5+ ISCs and support a model whereby distinct ISC populations facilitate homeostatic vs. injury-induced regeneration.