Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are exoplanetesimals differentiated?

Metals observed in the atmospheres of white dwarfs suggest that many have recently accreted planetary bodies. In some cases, the compositions observed suggest the accretion of material dominantly from the core (or the mantle) of a differentiated planetary body. Collisions between differentiated exoplanetesimals produce such fragments. In this work, we take advantage of the large numbers of white dwarfs where at least one siderophile (core-loving) and one lithophile (rock-loving) species have been detected to assess how commonly exoplanetesimals differentiate. We utilise N-body simulations that track the fate of core and mantle material during the collisional evolution of planetary systems to show that most remnants of differentiated planetesimals retain core fractions similar to their parents, whilst some are extremely core-rich or mantle-rich. Comparison with the white dwarf data for calcium and iron indicates that the data are consistent with a model in which $66^{+4}_{-6}\%$ have accreted the remnants of differentiated planetesimals, whilst $31^{+5}_{-5}\%$ have Ca/Fe abundances altered by the effects of heating (although the former can be as high as $100\%$, if heating is ignored). These conclusions assume pollution by a single body and that collisional evolution retains similar features across diverse planetary systems. These results imply that both collisions and differentiation are key processes in exoplanetary systems. We highlight the need for a larger sample of polluted white dwarfs with precisely determined metal abundances to better understand the process of differentiation in exoplanetary systems.
Non-trivial ground state for gravitational perturbation in quadratic gravity

We consider gravitational perturbation around maximally symmetric background of a theory of gravity involving quadratic curvature correction. This leads to a decoupled model of the standard transverse, traceless graviton mode and an additional scalar degree of freedom. Evolution of the latter is governed by a Lagrangian, which depends on higher derivative terms, inherited from the quadratic curvature correction in the action. It turns out that stability of the gravitational theory allows the scalar sector to choose between possible lowest energy states (or, ground states), that can sustain periodic form of inhomogeneity, either in space or in time. The latter, with a restricted form of invariance in time translation, is possibly a variant form of the time crystal. Existence of these novel ground states are solely related to the presence of higher curvature terms in the action and thus these non-trivial condensate-like ground states describe the spacetime fabric itself by introducing fundamental length or time scales in the theory. Possible implications are also discussed.
Hybrid LiFi and WiFi Networks: A Survey

In order to tackle the rapidly growing number of mobile devices and their expanding demands for Internet services, network convergence is envisaged to integrate different technology domains. For indoor wireless communications, one promising approach is to coordinate light fidelity (LiFi) and wireless fidelity (WiFi), namely hybrid LiFi and WiFi networks (HLWNets). This hybrid network combines the high-speed data transmission of LiFi and the ubiquitous coverage of WiFi. In this article, we present a survey-style introduction to HLWNets, starting with a framework of system design in the aspects of network architectures, cell deployments, multiple access and modulation schemes, illumination requirements and backhaul. Key performance metrics and recent achievements are then reviewed to demonstrate the superiority of HLWNets against stand-alone networks. Further, the unique challenges facing HLWNets are elaborated on key research topics including user behavior modeling, interference management, handover and load balancing. Moreover, the potential of HLWNets in the application areas is presented, exemplified by indoor positioning and physical layer security. Finally, the challenges and future research directions are discussed.
Precision early universe thermodynamics made simple:Neffand neutrino decoupling in the Standard Model and beyond

Precision measurements of the number of effective relativistic neutrino species and the primordial element abundances require accurate theoretical predictions for early Universe observables in the Standard Model and beyond. Given the complexity of accurately modelling the thermal history of the early Universe, in this work, we extend a previous method presented by the author to obtain simple, fast and accurate early Universe thermodynamics. The method is based upon the approximation that all relevant species can be described by thermal equilibrium distribution functions characterized by a temperature and a chemical potential. We apply the method to neutrino decoupling in the Standard Model and find $N_{\rm eff}^{\rm SM} = 3.045$ -- a result in excellent agreement with previous state-of-the-art calculations. We apply the method to study the thermal history of the Universe in the presence of a very light ($1\,\text{eV}<m_\phi < 1\,\text{MeV}$) and weakly coupled ($\lambda \lesssim 10^{-9}$) neutrinophilic scalar. We find our results to be in excellent agreement with the solution to the exact Liouville equation. Finally, we release a code: NUDEC_BSM (available in both Mathematica and Python formats), with which neutrino decoupling can be accurately and efficiently solved in the Standard Model and beyond: this https URL .
Unifying and generalizing models of neural dynamics during decision-making

An open question in systems and computational neuroscience is how neural circuits accumulate evidence towards a decision. Fitting models of decision-making theory to neural activity helps answer this question, but current approaches limit the number of these models that we can fit to neural data. Here we propose a unifying framework for modeling neural activity during decision-making tasks. The framework includes the canonical drift-diffusion model and enables extensions such as multi-dimensional accumulators, variable and collapsing boundaries, and discrete jumps. Our framework is based on constraining the parameters of recurrent state-space models, for which we introduce a scalable variational Laplace-EM inference algorithm. We applied the modeling approach to spiking responses recorded from monkey parietal cortex during two decision-making tasks. We found that a two-dimensional accumulator better captured the trial-averaged responses of a set of parietal neurons than a single accumulator model. Next, we identified a variable lower boundary in the responses of an LIP neuron during a random dot motion task.
Distributed $\mathscr{H}_2$ Control for Interconnected Discrete-Time Systems: A Dissipativity-based Approach

This work is concerned with the analysis, existence and synthesis of distributed output-feedback controllers, that achieve stability and $\mathscr{H}_2$ performance for discrete-time linear interconnected systems. We consider an interconnection structure of local controllers that resembles the plant's interconnection structure, which may correspond to an arbitrary graph. The dissipativity-based approach to distributed discrete-time $\mathscr{H}_2$ control presented in this paper complements other dissipativity-based approaches in the literature to distributed continuous-time $\mathscr{H}_2$ control and distributed $\mathscr{H}_\infty$ control. Moreover, the developed method yields a convex alternative to state-of-the-art methods for distributed discrete-time $\mathscr{H}_2$ control, which are typically not convex or consider unstructured problems. We provide an overview of related results and show the relation between sufficient conditions for $\mathscr{H}_2$ and $\mathscr{H}_\infty$ performance, for both discrete- and continuous-time interconnected linear systems. Sufficient conditions are stated for the existence of a distributed controller achieving a pre-specified $\mathscr{H}_2$ performance. A method for subsequent controller reconstruction is provided by an algebraic procedure. We illustrate the controller synthesis for a large-scale oscillator network, for which the central $\mathscr{H}_2$ control problem can be computationally intractable on a modern PC.
Disentanglement by Nonlinear ICA with General Incompressible-flow Networks (GIN)

A central question of representation learning asks under which conditions it is possible to reconstruct the true latent variables of an arbitrarily complex generative process. Recent breakthrough work by Khemakhem et al. (2019) on nonlinear ICA has answered this question for a broad class of conditional generative processes. We extend this important result in a direction relevant for application to real-world data. First, we generalize the theory to the case of unknown intrinsic problem dimension and prove that in some special (but not very restrictive) cases, informative latent variables will be automatically separated from noise by an estimating model. Furthermore, the recovered informative latent variables will be in one-to-one correspondence with the true latent variables of the generating process, up to a trivial component-wise transformation. Second, we introduce a modification of the RealNVP invertible neural network architecture (Dinh et al. (2016)) which is particularly suitable for this type of problem: the General Incompressible-flow Network (GIN). Experiments on artificial data and EMNIST demonstrate that theoretical predictions are indeed verified in practice. In particular, we provide a detailed set of exactly 22 informative latent variables extracted from EMNIST.
What's growing on your patients' hearing aids? A study gives you an idea

Hearing aid services are sought by patients varying widely across several factors, including age, underlying diseases, socioeconomic status, and history of pharmacologic interventions. Because these factors directly influence the immune system’s ability to defend and protect the human body from a variety of potentially infectious micro-organisms, dispensing professionals provide hearing aid services, both knowingly and unknowingly, to individuals with compromised immunity.1-3 Such patients have a heightened susceptibility to microorganisms that commonly reside within many healthy persons or on various surfaces. While these microbes do not pose a threat to healthy individuals with intact immune systems, even mildly immuno-compromised patients may be at an increased risk of developing opportunistic infections. Opportunistic infections originate from commonplace microbes that take the opportunity to infect a body with a weakened immune system.1 These micro-organisms may lead to a level of infection that ultimately results in serious, life-threatening complications. In the hearing aid clinic, micro-organisms may be transmitted in a variety of ways. However, contact transmission remains the most common means of cross-contamination and possible disease transmission.3,4 Contact transmission occurs when a clinician or patient touches another individual or object. For example, removing a hearing aid from a patient’s ear or accepting a hearing aid from a patient with bare hands may allow inadvertent cross-infection via contact transmission. If transmission occurs, microbes naturally seek entry into the body by traditional routes, including natural orifices (nose, eyes, and ears) or via the epithelial layer of the skin.4 Given the nature of the practice of hearing aid dispensing and servicing, the concern for cross-infection cannot be overlooked. Although hearing aids have not been previously identified as a source of infection, providing hearing aid services potentially exposes clinicians and patients to bodily fluids, including ear drainage, blood, and, particularly, cerumen. Cerumen is not considered an infectious agent unless it is contaminated with blood or mucus. However, due to its color and viscosity, visual detection of blood or ear drainage contaminants cannot be made with predictable accuracy and, therefore, cerumen should be treated as if it is a potentially infectious agent.5
Symptoms Among Male Psychiatric Outpatients

Of 125 consecutive male patients at an adult psychiatric outpatient clinic, 48% reported histories of sexual abuse and/or physical abuse. The mean scores on the global severity index of the SCL-90-R at the first visit were significantly higher for those who reported histories of abuse than for those who had no such history. Childhood abuse also was associated with high levels ofpsychiatric symptoms in these men. (Am J Psychiatry 1990; 147:632-636)
Optimal Coordination of Platoons of Connected and Automated Vehicles at Signal-Free Intersections

In this paper, we address the problem of coordinating platoons of connected and automated vehicles crossing a signal-free intersection. We present a decentralized, two-level optimal framework to coordinate the platoons with the objective to minimize travel delay and fuel consumption of every platoon crossing the intersection. At the upper-level, each platoon leader derives a proven optimal schedule to enter the intersection. At the low-level, the platoon leader derives their optimal control input (acceleration/deceleration) for the optimal schedule derived in the upper-level. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in simulation and show significant improvements both in travel delay and fuel consumption compared to the baseline scenarios where platoons enter the intersection based on first-come-first-serve and longest queue first - maximum weight matching scheduling algorithms.
HUMBI: A Large Multiview Dataset of Human Body Expressions

This paper presents a new large multiview dataset called HUMBI for human body expressions with natural clothing. The goal of HUMBI is to facilitate modeling view-specific appearance and geometry of gaze, face, hand, body, and garment from assorted people. 107 synchronized HD cam- eras are used to capture 772 distinctive subjects across gen- der, ethnicity, age, and physical condition. With the mul- tiview image streams, we reconstruct high fidelity body ex- pressions using 3D mesh models, which allows representing view-specific appearance using their canonical atlas. We demonstrate that HUMBI is highly effective in learning and reconstructing a complete human model and is complemen- tary to the existing datasets of human body expressions with limited views and subjects such as MPII-Gaze, Multi-PIE, Human3.6M, and Panoptic Studio datasets.
Stellar Cores in the Sh 2-305 H ii Region

Using our deep optical and near-infrared photometry along with multiwavelength archival data, we here present a detailed study of the Galactic H ii region Sh 2-305 to understand the star/star-cluster formation. On the basis of excess infrared emission, we have identified 116 young stellar objects (YSOs) within a field of view of ∼18. ′5 × 18. ′5 around Sh 2-305. The average age, mass, and extinction (AV) for this sample of YSOs are 1.8 Myr, 2.9 M⊙, and 7.1 mag, respectively. The density distribution of stellar sources along with minimal spanning tree calculations on the location of YSOs reveals at least three stellar subclusterings in Sh 2-305. One cluster is seen toward the center (i.e., Mayer 3), while the other two are distributed toward the north and south directions. Two massive O-type stars (VM2 and VM4; ages ∼5 Myr) are located at the center of the Sh 2-305 H ii region. The analysis of the infrared and radio maps traces the photon-dominant regions (PDRs) in Sh 2-305. The association of the younger generation of stars with the PDRs is also investigated in Sh 2-305. This result suggests that these two massive stars might have influenced the star formation history in Sh 2-305. This argument is also supported by the calculation of various pressures driven by massive stars, the slope of the mass function/K-band luminosity function, star formation efficiency, fraction of Class i sources, and mass of the dense gas toward the subclusterings in Sh 2-305.
On Centralizers of Finite Lattices and Semilattices

We study centralizer clones of finite lattices and semilattices. For semilattices, we give two characterizations of the centralizer and also derive formulas for the number of operations of a given essential arity in the centralizer. We also characterize operations in the centralizer clone of a distributive lattice, and we prove that the essential arity of operations in the centralizer is bounded for every finite (possibly nondistributive) lattice. Using these results, we present a simple derivation for the centralizers of clones of Boolean functions.
NR-U and WiGig Coexistence in 60 GHz Bands

In December 2019, the 3GPP defined the road-map for Release-17, which includes new features on the operation of New Radio (NR) in millimeter-wave bands with highly directional communications systems, i.e., up to 52.6 GHz. In this paper, a system-level simulation based study on the coexistence of NR-based access to unlicensed spectrum (NR-U) and an IEEE technology, i.e., 802.11ad Wireless Gigabit (WiGig), at 60 GHz bands is conducted. For NR-U, an extension of NR Release-15 based model is used such that the 60 GHz regulatory requirements are satisfied. First, the design and capabilities of the developed open source ns-3 based simulator are presented and then end-to-end performance results of coexistence with different channel access mechanisms for NR-U in a 3GPP indoor scenario are discussed. It is shown that NR-U with Listen-Before-Talk channel access mechanism does not have any adverse impact on WiGig performance in terms of throughput and latency, which demonstrates that NR-U design fulfills the fairness coexistence objective, i.e., NR-U and WiGig coexistence is proven to be feasible.
Grandmotherhood : meaning, experience and practice

This thesis presents a contemporary view of wider kinship relations from the perspective of twenty grandmothers living in the rural area of North Yorkshire. My research adopts a feminist methodology and uses a qualitative method in the form of in depth interviews. Applying a feminist life course approach to the data my findings are that grand mothering plays a significant role in this group of women's lives highlighting the demographic and social changes that have resulted in many of the women being more closely involved in caring for wider kin than previous generations. While acknowledging that the practice of grandmothering is varied and complex, my findings are that being a grandmother is often experienced as a continuation of mothering, framed within the dominant ideals of maternal discourse and the current childcentred ness of family life. By applying a 'gendered lens' (Calasanti and Slevin, 2001) to the data the assumed universality of the 'I' of late modernity's individual and 'the self as project' (Giddens, 1992) and dominant male understandings of time are brought into question. I argue that part of the participants' sense of self as grandmothers is gained vicariously through their input into the lives of their children and grandchildren, their sense of self being experienced in relation to and through the lives of others, and, as such, they are the co-authors of others' biographies. Through an analysis of the women's stories I contend that older women as grandmothers are located at the intersection of the traditional notion of female identity as that of 'living for the family' and contemporary ideas of individualization and 'living a life of one's own'. They are located differently in the life course than mothers thus providing a different perspective on the self and the family. I propose that as grandmothers their sense of self is actively, self-reflexively composed from multiple times and lives thereby developing an integrated, multi-layered, denser, sense of self.
From 'foreign natives' to 'native foreigners' : explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa : citizenship and nationalism, identity and politics

The CODESRIA Monograph Series is published to stimulate debate, comments, and further research on the subjects covered. The Series will serve as a forum for works based on the findings of original research, which however are too long for academic journals but not long enough to be published as books, and which deserve to be accessible to the research community in Africa and elsewhere. Such works may be case studies, theoretical debates or both, but they incorporate significant findings, analyses, and critical evaluations of the current literature on the subjects in question.
Neuropsychology, A Clinical Approach

theorizing on interhemispheric transfer, cerebral lateralization and dominance, and the relationship of the brain to language, memory, and intelligence. Whether they will ultimately turn out to be right or wrong in their own conclusions, they have used available data judiciously and have defended their position well. My biggest problem in dealing with any study of split-brain patients, including the studies described here, stems from the fact that surgical operations to divide forebrain commissures are always carried out on people with damaged brains. No study of a single hemisphere in the split brain patient should ignore the fact that the hemisphere being studied has been subjected to years of pathologic development and the potential for considerable reorganization of neural circuitry. Gazzaniga and LeDoux are, of course, well aware of this problem; but a t times they make statements that fail to take this fact into account, e.g., “The idea here is that the single isolated hemisphere is qualitatively intact, having a nearly complete system of intrahemispheric circuitry. ” (p. 105) The least satisfactory section of this book is the last chapter, in which the authors express judgments on the nature of consciousness and the mind. Here, they leave the cautious and rigorous approach adopted for early chapters and enter the realm of philosophical speculation. Now there is noapriori reason why they shouldn’t. We all have at least some sense of the distinctions between right and wrong, the nature of goodness, the meaning of the mind; and these authors, just as any of us perhaps, are entitled to publish opinions on topics of philosophical interest. But philosophy is a disciplinejust as neuropsychology-with its own rules and tradition, specialized jargon, and methodology. What Gazzaniga and LeDoux have demanded of themselves in earlier chapters for exposition of brain-behavior relationships, they no longer demand of themselves in their discussion of the “mind. ” Arguments become looser and more circular; the logical connections from one point to the next become more difficult to follow; definitions of ambiguous terms are lacking; and statements demanding evidence are unsupported. For example, “The person is engaged in much more activity than can possibly enter consciousness at once, and in our opinion, much of what does enter is registered by the verbal system. It is the one system that is capable of continuously monitoring our overt behavioral activities, as well as our perceptions, thoughts, and moods. ” (p. 146) If my judgment of this book depended on the last chapter alone, it would not be as positive. More than enough valuable material has been provided in the rest of the book, however, for me to consider this work a major contribution to neurology and neuropsychology . I can recommend the book en thus ias t ica l ly t o neurologists, regardless of level of experience or primary area of interest.
Do They Have a Role in the Measurement of Preferences for Health States

Visual analog scales (VASs) have long been used as a method of measuring preferences for health outcomes. They are easy and inexpensive to implement, can be administered quickly, and lend themselves to self-completion. Over time, however, disturbing questions have emerged concerning the validity of the VAS approach. This article reviews briefly the history, theory, practice, problems, and advantages of VASs; presents some suggestions to improve the validity of VASs; and recommends a limited but useful role for VASs in the process of