bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The effect of long term under- and over-feeding on the expression of six major milk protein genes in the mammary tissue of sheep
Authors: Tsiplakou Eleni , Flemetakis Emmanouil , Kouri Evangelia-Diamanto , Karalias George , Sotirakoglou Kyriaki , Zervas George
Published: July 2015

Milk protein synthesis in the mammary gland involves expression of six major milk protein genes whose nutritional regulation remains poorly defined. In this study, the effect of long term under- and over-feeding on the expression of αs1-casein: CSN1S1, αs2-casein: CSN1S2, β-casein: CSN2, κ-casein: CSN3, α-lactalbumin: LALBA and β-lactoglobulin: BLG gene in sheep mammary tissue (MT) was examined. Twenty-four lactating dairy sheep, at 90–98 d in milk, were divided into three groups and fed the same ration, for 60 d, in quantities which met 70% (underfeeding), 100% (control) and 130% (overfeeding) of their energy and crude protein requirements. The results showed a significant reduction on mRNA of CSN1S1, CSN1S2, CSN2 and BLG gene in the MT of underfed sheep compared with the overfed ones and a significant reduction in CSN3 and LALBA gene expression compared with the respective control animals. Significant positive correlations were observed between the mRNA levels of milk proteins’ genes with the milk protein yield and milk yield respectively. In conclusion, the feeding level and consequently the nutrients availability, affected the milk protein yield and milk volume by altering the CSN1S1, CSN1S2, CSN2, CSN3, LALBA and BLG gene expression involved in their metabolic pathways.
What Do States Do? Politics and Economic History
Authors: Hoffman Philip T.
Published: July 2015

Although politics has a huge effect on economic outcomes, we still know too little about what public goods states furnish or what determines the laws, regulations, and policies that states adopt. Worse yet, we do not really understand how states arise in the first place and how they gain the ability to tax. There are numerous unanswered questions here that economic historians can profitably work on, and their research will be particularly valuable if they model the politics, gather data on taxation and spending by local and central governments, and pay serious attention to the historical details and to political behavior that may not involve optimization.
Spinning Tales about Japanese Cotton Spinning: Saxonhouse (1974) and Lessons from New Data
Authors: Braguinsky Serguey , Hounshell David A.
Published: July 2015

We revisit the story of technology adoption and diffusion in Japan's Meiji-era cotton spinning industry, the study of which was pioneered by Gary Saxonhouse (1974). Using a novel data set and modern methodology, we argue that both the ease with which the best technology diffused and the role of “slavish imitation” in this process may have been overstated. We find an important role played by market competition, including asset reallocation. Our analyses provide richer insights into the complex phenomena of technology diffusion, innovation, and economic growth.
Was the Classical Gold Standard Credible on the Periphery? Evidence from Currency Risk
Authors: Mitchener Kris James , Weidenmier Marc D.
Published: July 2015

We use a standard metric from international finance, the currency risk premium, to assess the credibility of fixed exchange rates during the classical gold standard era. Theory suggests that a completely credible and permanent commitment to join the gold standard would have zero currency risk or no expectation of devaluation. We find that, even five years after a typical emerging-market country joined the gold standard, the currency risk premium averaged at least 220 basis points. Fixed-effects, panel-regression estimates that control for a variety of borrower-specific factors also show large and positive currency risk premia. In contrast to core gold standard countries, such as France and Germany, the persistence of large premia, long after gold standard adoption, suggest that financial markets did not view the pegs in emerging markets as credible and expected that they devaluation.
Citizen science monitoring reveals a significant, ongoing decline of the Endangered Carnaby's black-cockatoo Calyptorhynchus latirostris
Authors: Williams Matthew R. , Yates Colin J. , Stock William D. , Barrett Geoff W. , Finn Hugh C.
Published: July 2015

Citizen science monitoring programmes are making increasingly important contributions to wildlife conservation, often at spatial and temporal scales unachievable by individual or teams of researchers. They are particularly valuable in estimating population trends and management impacts, and thus informing effective conservation decisions for declining species. The quality and potential biases of citizen science data are of concern, however, and appropriate experimental design and analysis are needed to ensure that the maximum scientific value is extracted. We investigated these issues in a citizen science survey of the Endangered Carnaby's black-cockatoo Calyptorhynchus latirostris. Since 2010, citizen scientists have conducted synchronized annual counts of Carnaby's black-cockatoo at roost sites to estimate the population trend. Survey effort was substantial, with c. 150 sites surveyed by > 260 volunteers each year. Relatively few sites were occupied, however, and only 42 (16%) of the 265 sites surveyed in total accounted for 95% of all observations. Many sites were empty and survey effort was often inconsistent. Taking these issues into account, analysis showed a statistically significant decline in roost occupancy rate and a non-significant decline in the mean size of roosting flocks, with an estimated overall trend of 14% decline per annum in the number of roosting birds. We highlight three important issues for citizen science monitoring programmes: the need to maintain regular surveys of sample sites to avoid patchy data, use an appropriate model that accounts for variable survey effort, high frequency of zero counts, and sampling site turnover, and incorporate information on site characteristics to help explain variation.
Norepinephrine ignites local hotspots of neuronal excitation: How arousal amplifies selectivity in perception and memory
Authors: Mather Mara , Clewett David , Sakaki Michiko , Harley Carolyn W.
Published: July 2015

Emotional arousal enhances perception and memory of high-priority information but impairs processing of other information. Here, we propose that, under arousal, local glutamate levels signal the current strength of a representation and interact with norepinephrine (NE) to enhance high priority representations and out-compete or suppress lower priority representations. In our "glutamate amplifies noradrenergic effects" (GANE) model, high glutamate at the site of prioritized representations increases local NE release from the locus coeruleus (LC) to generate “NE hotspots.” At these NE hotspots, local glutamate and NE release are mutually enhancing and amplify activation of prioritized representations. In contrast, arousal-induced LC activity inhibits less active representations via two mechanisms: 1) Where there are hotspots, lateral inhibition is amplified; 2) Where no hotspots emerge, NE levels are only high enough to activate low-threshold inhibitory adrenoreceptors. Thus, LC activation promotes a few hotspots of excitation in the context of widespread suppression, enhancing high priority representations while suppressing the rest. Hotspots also help synchronize oscillations across neural ensembles transmitting high-priority information. Furthermore, brain structures that detect stimulus priority interact with phasic NE release to preferentially route such information through large-scale functional brain networks. A surge of NE before, during, or after encoding enhances synaptic plasticity at NE hotspots, triggering local protein synthesis processes that enhance selective memory consolidation. Together, these noradrenergic mechanisms promote selective attention and memory under arousal. GANE not only reconciles apparently contradictory findings in the emotion-cognition literature but also extends previous influential theories of LC neuromodulation by proposing specific mechanisms for how LC-NE activity increases neural gain.
Economic-ecological evaluation of temporary biodiversity offsets in Alberta's boreal forest
Authors: WEBER MARIAN , HAUER GRANT , FARR DAN
Published: July 2015

To conserve biodiversity on forest landscapes, it is necessary to understand how incentives in an offset market affect the dynamics of habitat loss and restoration. In this study, a model of firm behaviour in a temporary biodiversity offset market is developed to understand the impact of offset rules on the dynamics of land use and offset policy costs and benefits for Alberta's boreal forest. Policy treatments include eligibility rules for restoration versus avoided loss; time lags for crediting restoration benefits; and geographic trading restrictions. The analysis highlights the assumptions and trade-offs embedded in offset principles such as additionality. Restoration-based policies, which require biodiversity benefits to be established prior to development, are over 200 times more costly than policies that include avoided loss. Geographic trading restrictions result in a significant redistribution of policy costs and ecological risks between regions, with little impact on aggregate policy costs and benefits. Including avoided loss results in a decline in biodiversity intactness by 2% to 2.2% compared to a decline of 3.6% under a no-offset policy. Increasing time lags for crediting restoration to match ecological recovery trajectories reduces restoration effort when policies include both restoration and avoided loss.
“The Peculiar Anomaly”: Same-Sex Infidelity in Postwar Divorce Courts
Authors: Lefkovitz Alison
Published: July 2015

It was a simple tale of betrayal. In 1950, a Pennsylvania husband returned home from a business trip to find his wife—known to us today only by her initials CD—having sex with the female athletic director of a local school. This wife was only one of many women caught having sex with other women in the era following World War II. Although many closeted men and women enjoyed vibrant sexual and social lives in gay and lesbian communities, sometimes commanding officers, bosses, and police officers caught and punished men and women engaging in “deviant” sexual activity. Punishments ranged from arrests during a bar raid to a dismissal from a job. A double life in the public sphere was fragile. Scholars have paid less attention, however, to the insecure closeted lives of husbands and wives such as CD. Although certainly not all men and women who engaged in same-sex encounters entered traditional heterosexual marriages, many did. Their motivations for marrying ranged from the hope that marriage would cure same-sex desire to financial concerns. Sometimes, a husband or wife discovered his or her spouse's homosexual infidelity. A potential punitive outcome for this encounter was not an arrest, pink slip, or a dishonorable discharge; instead a spouse could end up in divorce court. Like the federal government, the military, the local police, and private employers, then, divorce courts also had to devise strategies and philosophies with which to deal with the problem of homosexuality.
AUTHOR ATTRIBUTION AND LECTOTYPIFICATION OF THE NAME BAUHINIA DIPHYLLA (FABACEAE: CAESALPINIOIDEAE)
Authors: Bandyopadhyay S.
Published: July 2015

The authorship of the name Bauhinia diphylla (Fabaceae: Caesalpinioideae) has to be attributed to Banks instead of Buchanan-Hamilton. A lectotype is designated here for Bauhinia diphylla Banks [= Lysiphyllum diphyllum (Banks) de Wit].
ERIOCAULON BIAPPENDICULATUM, A NEW SPECIES OF ERIOCAULACEAE FROM THE SOUTHERN WESTERN GHATS, INDIA
Authors: Manudev K. M. , Robi A. J. , Nampy S.
Published: July 2015

Eriocaulon biappendiculatum, a new species of Eriocaulaceae from the southern Western Ghats, India, is described and illustrated. The new species is close to Eriocaulon nairii but differs in having 5–17 peduncles, free male sepals, and both continuous ribbon-like and setiform appendages on the seeds.
CEDRELA NGOBE (MELIACEAE), A NEW SPECIES FROM PANAMA AND COSTA RICA
Authors: Köcke A. V. , Muellner-Riehl A. N. , Cáceres O. , Pennington T. D.
Published: July 2015

We present a new species of Meliaceae, Cedrela ngobe Köcke, T.D.Penn. & Muellner, from Panama and Costa Rica. A detailed description with illustrations and a distribution map are provided. Based on distribution data and climatic niche modelling, the species is classified as Vulnerable according to IUCN Red List categories.
How I Lost—or Found?—My Way in Bioethics
Authors: CALLAHAN DANIEL
Published: July 2015

When I was invited some months ago by Tomi Kushner to contribute my memories on how some of us early birds came into bioethics, I hesitated. At the end of 2013 I published a memoir of my life in bioethics over nearly 50 years: In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics (MIT Press). I felt I had said all I wanted to say in that book about my life and couldn’t imagine doing it again, even in a short article. I was terminally bored with the topic—me.
Epistocracy for Online Deliberative Bioethics
Authors: SCHIAVONE GIUSEPPE , MAMELI MATTEO , BONIOLO GIOVANNI
Published: July 2015

The suggestion that deliberative democratic approaches would suit the management of bioethical policymaking in democratic pluralistic societies has triggered what has been called the “deliberative turn” in health policy and bioethics. Most of the empirical work in this area has focused on the allocation of healthcare resources and priority setting at the local or national level. The variety of the more or less articulated theoretical efforts behind such initiatives is remarkable and has been accompanied, to date, by an overall lack of method specificity. We propose a set of methodological requirements for online deliberative procedures for bioethics. We provide a theoretical motivation for these requirements. In particular, we discuss and adapt an “epistocratic” proposal and argue that, regardless of its merits as a general political theory, a more refined version of its normative claims can generate a useful framework for the design of bioethical forums that combine maximal inclusiveness with informed and reasonable deliberation.
Unrequited
Authors: BAMFORD REBECCA
Published: July 2015

I raise several concerns with Earp and colleagues' analysis of enhancement through neurochemical modulation of love as a key issue in contemporary neuroethics. These include: (i) strengthening their deflation of medicalization concerns by showing how the objection that love should be left outside of the scope of medicine would directly undermine the goal of medicine; (ii) developing stronger analysis of the social and political concerns relevant to neurochemical modulation of love, by exploring and suggesting possible counters to ways in which 'wellbeing' may be used as a tool of oppression; (iii) providing reasons to support a broad need for ecological investigation of, and indeed ecological education concerning, neurotechnology; (iv) suggesting ways in which philosophy, and the humanities more broadly, remain directly relevant to responding effectively to issues in contemporary neuroethics.
Clipping the Angel’s Wings
Authors: HAUSKELLER MICHAEL
Published: July 2015

This is a critique of Earp, Sandberg and Savulescu’s argument in support of a possible future neuromodulation of love and love-related relationships. I argue that, contrary to what is suggested by Earp, Sandberg and Savulescu, we do have good reason to be concerned about that possibility as well as about the medicalization of love that its pursuit would bring about.
Introduction
Authors: BALISTER PAUL
Published: July 2015

This special issue is devoted to papers from the meeting on Combinatorics and Probability, held at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut in Oberwolfach from the 14th to 20th April 2013. The lectures at this meeting focused on the common themes of Combinatorics and Discrete Probability, with many of the problems studied originating in Theoretical Computer Science. The lectures, many of which were given by young participants, stimulated fruitful discussions. The fact that the participants work in different and yet related topics, and the open problems session held during the meeting, encouraged interesting discussions and collaborations.
Social networks and language change in Tudor and Stuart London – only connect?
Authors: NEVALAINEN TERTTU
Published: July 2015

Place is an integral part of social network analysis, which reconstructs network structures and documents the network members’ linguistic practices in a community. Historical network analysis presents particular challenges in both respects. This article first discusses the kinds of data, official documents, personal letters and diaries that historians have used in reconstructing social networks and communities. These analyses could be enriched by including linguistic data and, vice versa, historical sociolinguistic findings may often be interpreted in terms of social networks.

Focusing on Early Modern London, I present two case studies, the first one investigating a sixteenth-century merchant family exchange network and the second discussing the seventeenth-century naval administrator Samuel Pepys, whose role as a community broker between the City and Westminster is assessed in linguistic terms. My results show how identifying the leaders and laggers of linguistic change can add to our understanding of the varied ways in which linguistic innovations spread to and from Tudor and Stuart London both within and across social networks.
What bimodal and unimodal bilinguals can tell us about bilingual language processing.
Authors: POARCH GREGORY J.
Published: July 2015

In their review, Emmorey, Giezen and Gollan (Emmorey, Giezen & Gollan) contrast bimodal bilinguals (individuals who are fluent in a signed and a spoken language) and unimodal bilinguals (individuals fluent in two spoken languages) to highlight the implications of bimodal bilingualism for language processing, the cognitive effects of bilingualism, and the neural organization of languages. For this purpose, the authors focus on the evidence for language mixing in bimodal bilinguals (so-called ‘code-blends’) by hearing children of deaf parents and explore how language co-activation and control differentially impacts the processing of languages compared to unimodal bilinguals. The sustained controlling of two languages from differing modalities in bimodal bilinguals, according to the authors, may lead to modality-specific cognitive advantages in contrast to unimodal bilinguals.
Archaeology and contemporaneity
Authors: Lucas Gavin
Published: July 2015

This paper discusses the concept of contemporaneity as it is used in archaeology. In particular, two general usages are examined. The first concerns the idea of contemporaneity in the context of archaeological dating and chronology, the second relates to the characterization of the archaeological record as a contemporary phenomenon. In both cases, related concepts are explored, namely synchronism and anachronism respectively. The paper offers a critique of these conventional usages of the idea of contemporaneity and argues for an alternative, linking this with the concept of consociation, a term coined by the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz in the early 20th century.
Archaeology and contemporaneousness
Authors: Olivier Laurent
Published: July 2015

Gavin Lucas has returned to the theme of archaeological time, which has long interested him, and, in this paper, to contemporaneousness in archaeology. For a historian, contemporaneousness is a straightforward matter. The First World War and the Russian Revolution, for example, are considered contemporaneous because the two events took place during the same period of time. Both significantly influenced the course of 20th-century history and influenced each other as well. But for an archaeologist, the very notion of chronology is fundamentally problematic. We date an archaeological object or feature on the basis of morphological attributes that allow us to estimate the time during which it was created. In other words, a historical date (the actual date when some vestige came to be) corresponds, in archaeology, to a probable length of time. Archaeological time floats.
Contemporizing the contemporary
Authors: Lucas Gavin
Published: July 2015

I would like to thank all my respondents for taking the time to read my paper and offer their critical and constructive feedback; in their varied responses, they have highlighted aspects which I had not considered, challenged me to elaborate on some of the less clear points I made and revealed ambiguities or even contradictions in how I have articulated the concept of contemporaneity. Rather than respond individually, I would like to try and answer what I see as the main points which collectively emerge from these comments.
Excavation methodologies and labour as epistemic concerns in the practice of archaeology. Comparing examples from British and Andean archaeology
Authors: Leighton Mary
Published: July 2015

Archaeologists’ excavation practices vary significantly from country to country and site to site. But variation in the most fundamental, ‘common-sense’ excavation practices is ‘black-boxed’ - it is not discussed outside casual, informal contexts, and is treated as having no effect on higher-level interpretation. These practices can, however, be a source of conflict when archaeologists from different communities of practice work together. In this paper, I explore what variation in excavation methodology reveals about the nature of archaeological knowledge itself. By comparing methodologies and the organization of labour on British and Andean excavations, I argue that archaeologists in different communities of practice have divergent understandings of what the object of archaeological investigation is, and of how it can be known, and by whom. This results in contrasting understandings of the nature of material/archaeological objects, as well as contrasting conceptualizations of excavation as an ‘expert’ practice – one requiring skills, knowledge and bodily practices that are specific to trained archaeologists. Situating these concerns in historical and ethnographic context, this paper suggests that archaeological excavation is, in fact, a far more complex, nuanced and variable practice than the lack of attention paid to it implies.
Detecting multi-scale filaments in galaxy distribution
Authors: Tempel Elmo
Published: July 2015

The main feature of the spatial large-scale galaxy distribution is its intricate network of galaxy filaments. This network is spanned by the galaxy locations that can be interpreted as a three-dimensional point distribution. The global properties of the point process can be measured by different statistical methods, which, however, do not describe directly the structure elements. The morphology of the large-scale structure, on the other hand, is an important property of the galaxy distribution. Here, we apply an object point process with interactions (the Bisous model) to trace and extract the filamentary network in the presently largest galaxy redshift survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS data release 10). We search for multi-scale filaments in the galaxy distribution that have a radius of about 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, and 4.0h−1Mpc. We extract the spines of the filamentary network and divide the detected network into single filaments.
Modelling Galaxy Populations in the Era of Big Data
Authors: Murray S. G. , Power C. , Robotham A. S. G.
Published: July 2015

The coming decade will witness a deluge of data from next generation galaxy surveys such as the Square Kilometre Array and Euclid. How can we optimally and robustly analyse these data to maximise scientific returns from these surveys? Here we discuss recent work in developing both the conceptual and software frameworks for carrying out such analyses and their application to the dark matter halo mass function. We summarise what we have learned about the HMF from the last 10 years of precision CMB data using the open-source HMFcalc framework, before discussing how this framework is being extended to the full Halo Model.
What we talk about when we talk about fields
Authors: Cameron Ewan
Published: July 2015

In astronomical and cosmological studies one often wishes to infer some properties of an infinite-dimensional field indexed within a finite-dimensional metric space given only a finite collection of noisy observational data. Bayesian inference offers an increasingly-popular strategy to overcome the inherent ill-posedness of this signal reconstruction challenge. However, there remains a great deal of confusion within the astronomical community regarding the appropriate mathematical devices for framing such analyses and the diversity of available computational procedures for recovering posterior functionals. In this brief research note I will attempt to clarify both these issues from an “applied statistics” perpective, with insights garnered from my post-astronomy experiences as a computational Bayesian / epidemiological geostatistician.
Distribution of Maximal Luminosity of Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Authors: Regős E. , Szalay A. , Rácz Z. , Taghizadeh M. , Ozogany K.
Published: July 2015

Extreme value statistics (EVS) is applied to the pixelized distribution of galaxy luminosities in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We analyze the DR8 Main Galaxy Sample (MGS) as well as the Luminous Red Galaxy Sample (LRGS). A non-parametric comparison of the EVS of the luminosities with the Fisher-Tippett-Gumbel distribution (limit distribution for independent variables distributed by the Press-Schechter law) indicates a good agreement provided uncertainties arising both from the finite size of the samples and from the sample size distribution are accounted for. This effectively rules out the possibility of having a finite maximum cutoff luminosity.
Optimal observables in galaxy surveys
Authors: Carron Julien , Szapudi István
Published: July 2015

The sufficient statistics of the one-point probability density function of the dark matter density field is worked out using cosmological perturbation theory and tested to the Millennium simulation density field. The logarithmic transformation is recovered for spectral index close to -1 as a special case of the family of power transformations. We then discuss how these transforms should be modified in the case of noisy tracers of the field and focus on the case of Poisson sampling. This gives us optimal local transformations to apply to galaxy survey data prior the extraction of the spectrum in order to capture most efficiently the information encoded in large scale structures.
Non-Gaussian inference from non-linear and non-Poisson biased distributed data
Authors: Ata Metin , Kitaura Francisco-Shu , Müller Volker
Published: July 2015

We study the statistical inference of the cosmological dark matter density field from non-Gaussian, non-linear and non-Poisson biased distributed tracers. We have implemented a Bayesian posterior sampling computer-code solving this problem and tested it with mock data based onN-body simulations.
Photometric classification of Supernovae from the SUDARE survey
Authors: Pignata Giuliano
Published: July 2015

I present first results from the algorithm we developed to photometrically classify the Supernovae discovered by the Supernova Diversity and Rate Evolution (SUDARE). The classification outcome is compared with that of the public available code SNANA.
The potential of likelihood-free inference of cosmological parameters with weak lensing data
Authors: Vespe Michael
Published: July 2015

In the statistical framework of likelihood-free inference, the posterior distribution of model parameters is explored via simulation rather than direct evaluation of the likelihood function, permitting inference in situations where this function is analytically intractable. We consider the problem of estimating cosmological parameters using measurements of the weak gravitational lensing of galaxies; specifically, we propose the use a likelihood-free approach to investigate the posterior distribution of some parameters in the ΛCDM model upon observing a large number of sheared galaxies. The choice of summary statistic used when comparing observed data and simulated data in the likelihood-free inference framework is critical, so we work toward a principled method of choosing the summary statistic, aiming for dimension reduction while seeking a statistic that is as close as possible to being sufficient for the parameters of interest.
The impact of superstructures in the Cosmic Microwave Background
Authors: Ilić Stéphane , Langer Mathieu , Douspis Marian
Published: July 2015

In 2008, Granett et al. claimed a direct detection of the integrated Sachs- Wolfe (iSW) effect by a stacking approach of patches of the CMB, at the positions of identified superstructures. However, the high amplitude of their measured signal seems to be at odds with predictions from the standard model of cosmology. However, multiple questions arise from these results and their expected value : I propose here an original theoretical prediction of the iSW effect produced by such superstructures. I use simulations based on GR and the LTB metric to reproduce cosmic structures and predict their exact full theoretical iSW effect. Expected amplitudes are consistent with the measured signal ; however the latter shows non-reproducible features that are hardly compatible with ΛCDM predictions.
Deep Source-Counting at 3 GHz
Authors: Vernstrom Tessa , Wall Jasper , Scott Douglas
Published: July 2015

We describe an analysis of 3-GHz confusion-limited data from the Karl J. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). We show that with minimal model assumptions, P(D), Bayesian and Markov-Chain Mone-Carlo (MCMC) methods can define the source count to levels some 10 times fainter than the conventional confusion limit. Our verification process includes a full realistic simulation that considers known information on source angular extent and clustering. It appears that careful analysis of the statistical properties of an image is more effective than counting individual objects.
OCAAT: automated analysis of star cluster colour-magnitude diagrams for gauging the local distance scale
Authors: Perren Gabriel I. , Vázquez Ruben A. , Piatti Andrés E. , Moitinho André
Published: July 2015

Star clusters are among the fundamental astrophysical objects used in setting the local distance scale. Despite its crucial importance, the accurate determination of the distances to the Magellanic Clouds (SMC/LMC) remains a fuzzy step in the cosmological distance ladder. The exquisite astrometry of the recently launched ESA Gaia mission is expected to deliver extremely accurate statistical parallaxes, and thus distances, to the SMC/LMC. However, an independent SMC/LMC distance determination via main sequence fitting of star clusters provides an important validation check point for the Gaia distances. This has been a valuable lesson learnt from the famous Hipparcos Pleiades distance discrepancy problem. Current observations will allow hundreds of LMC/SMC clusters to be analyzed in this light.

Today, the most common approach for star cluster main sequence fitting is still by eye. The process is intrinsically subjective and affected by large uncertainties, especially when applied to poorly populated clusters. It is also, clearly, not an efficient route for addressing the analysis of hundreds, or thousands, of star clusters. These concerns, together with a new attitude towards advanced statistical techniques in astronomy and the availability of powerful computers, have led to the emergence of software packages designed for analyzing star cluster photometry. With a few rare exceptions, those packages are not publicly available.

Here we present OCAAT (Open Cluster Automated Analysis Tool), a suite of publicly available open source tools that fully automatises cluster isochrone fitting. The code will be applied to a large set of hundreds of open clusters observed in the Washington system, located in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. This will allow us to generate an objective and homogeneous catalog of distances up to ~ 60 kpc along with its associated reddening, ages and metallicities and uncertainty estimates.
Euclid space mission: a cosmological challenge for the next 15 years
Authors: Scaramella R. , Mellier Y. , Amiaux J. , Burigana C. , Carvalho C.S. , Cuillandre J.C. , da Silva A. , Dinis J. , Derosa A. , Maiorano E. , Franzetti P. , Garilli B. , Maris M. , Meneghetti M. , Tereno I. , Wachter S. , Amendola L. , Cropper M. , Cardone V. , Massey R. , Niemi S. , Hoekstra H. , Kitching T. , Miller L. , Schrabback T. , Semboloni E. , Taylor A. , Viola M. , Maciaszek T. , Ealet A. , Guzzo L. , Jahnke K. , Percival W. , Pasian F. , Sauvage M. ,   the Euclid Collaboration
Published: July 2015

Euclid is the next ESA mission devoted to cosmology. It aims at observing most of the extragalactic sky, studying both gravitational lensing and clustering over ~15,000 square degrees. The mission is expected to be launched in year 2020 and to last six years. The sheer amount of data of different kinds, the variety of (un)known systematic effects and the complexity of measures require efforts both in sophisticated simulations and techniques of data analysis. We review the mission main characteristics, some aspects of the the survey and highlight some of the areas of interest to this meeting.
Concluding Remarks from a Cosmologist
Authors: Jaffe Andrew H.
Published: July 2015

I conclude the SCCC21 conference highlighting some of the contrasts we heard about, some specific topics (the statistics of random fields), and discuss how some of these play out in the analysis of cosmic microwave background data. I conclude with a hopeful look at the efficacy of blind analyses in the CMB and elsewhere in cosmology.
Bayesian large-scale structure inference: initial conditions and the cosmic web
Authors: Leclercq Florent , Wandelt Benjamin
Published: July 2015

We describe an innovative statistical approach for theab initiosimultaneous analysis of the formation history and morphology of the large-scale structure of the inhomogeneous Universe. Our algorithm explores the joint posterior distribution of the many millions of parameters involved via efficient Hamiltonian Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling. We describe its application to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 7 and an additional non-linear filtering step. We illustrate the use of our findings for cosmic web analysis: identification of structures via tidal shear analysis and inference of dark matter voids.
Data-Rich Astronomy: Mining Sky Surveys with PhotoRApToR
Authors: Cavuoti Stefano , Brescia Massimo , Longo Giuseppe
Published: July 2015

In the last decade a new generation of telescopes and sensors has allowed the production of a very large amount of data and astronomy has become a data-rich science. New automatic methods largely based on machine learning are needed to cope with such data tsunami. We present some results in the fields of photometric redshifts and galaxy classification, obtained using the MLPQNA algorithm available in the DAMEWARE (Data Mining and Web Application Resource) for the SDSS galaxies (DR9 and DR10). We present PhotoRApToR (Photometric Research Application To Redshift): a Java based desktop application capable to solve regression and classification problems and specialized for photo-z estimation.
Fundamental Cosmology with the E-ELT
Authors: Martins C. J. A. P. , Leite A. C. O. , Pedrosa P. O. J.
Published: July 2015

The evidence for the acceleration of the universe shows that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete, and that new physics is out there, waiting to be discovered. Forthcoming high-resolution ultra-stable spectrographs will play a key role in this quest for new physics. Here we focus on astrophysical tests of the stability of nature's fundamental couplings, and by taking existing VLT data as a starting point we discuss how forthcoming improvements (in particular with the E-ELT) will impact on fundamental cosmology.
A New Model to Predict Weak Lensing Peak Counts
Authors: Lin Chieh-An , Kilbinger Martin
Published: July 2015

Peak statistics from weak gravitational lensing have been shown to be a promising tool for cosmology. Here we propose a new approach to predict weak lensing peak counts. For an arbitrary cosmology, we draw dark matter halos from the halo mass function, and calculate the number of peaks from the projected halo mass distribution. This procedure is much faster than time-consuming N-body simulations. By comparing these “fast simulations” to N-body runs, we find that the peak abundance is in very good agreement. Furthermore, our model is able to discriminate cosmologies with different sets of parameters, using high signal-to-noise peaks (≳ 4). This encourages us to examine the optimal combinations of parameters to this approach in the future.
A Close Examination of CMB Mirror-Parity
Authors: Ben-David Assaf , Kovetz Ely D.
Published: July 2015

We revisit recent claims of significant mirror-parity in CMB data from WMAP and Planck with a careful analysis using statistical estimators in both harmonic and pixel spaces. While the data indeed show significant signs of odd mirror-parity under some circumstances, the broad study shows that the results are not in significant tension with ΛCDM.
Effects of primordial magnetic fields on CMB
Authors: Hortúa Héctor J. , Castañeda Leonardo
Published: July 2015

The origin of large-scale magnetic fields is an unsolved problem in cosmology. In order to overcome, a possible scenario comes from the idea that these fields emerged from a small primordial magnetic field (PMF), produced in the early universe. This field could lead to the observed large-scales magnetic fields but also, would have left an imprint on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this work we summarize some statistical properties of this PMFs on the FLRW background. Then, we show the resulting PMF power spectrum using cosmological perturbation theory and some effects of PMFs on the CMB anisotropies.
Combining cosmological constraints from cluster counts and galaxy clustering
Authors: Lacasa F.
Published: July 2015

Present and future large scale surveys offer promising probes of cosmology. For example the Dark Energy Survey (DES) is forecast to detect ~300 millions galaxies and thousands clusters up to redshift ~1.3. I here show ongoing work to combine two probes of large scale structure : cluster number counts and galaxy 2-point function (in real or harmonic space). The halo model (coupled to a Halo Occupation Distribution) can be used to model the cross-covariance between these probes, and I introduce a diagrammatic method to compute easily the different terms involved. Furthermore, I compute the joint non-Gaussian likelihood, using the Gram-Charlier series. Then I show how to extend the methods of Bayesian hyperparameters to Poissonian distributions, in a first step to include them in this joint likelihood.
Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): luminosity function evolution
Authors: Loveday Jon ,   the GAMA team
Published: July 2015

We describe modifications to the joint stepwise maximum likelihood method of Cole (2011) in order to simultaneously fit the GAMA-II galaxy luminosity function (LF), corrected for radial density variations, and its evolution with redshift. The whole sample is reasonably well-fit with luminosity (Q) and density (P) evolution parameters Q, P ≈ 0.8, 1.7. Red galaxies show larger luminosity but smaller density evolution than blue galaxies, as expected.
Darth Fader: Analysing galaxy spectra at low signal-to-noise
Authors: Leonard Adrienne , Machado Daniel P. , Abdalla Filipe B. , Starck Jean-Luc
Published: July 2015

Spectroscopic redshift surveys are an incredibly valuable tool in cosmology, allowing us to trace the distribution of galaxies as a function of distance and, thus, trace the evolution of structure formation in the Universe. However, estimating the redshifts from spectra with low signal-to-noise is difficult, and such data are often either discarded or require human classification of spectral lines to obtain the galaxy redshift. Darth Fader offers an automated method for estimating the redshifts of galaxies in the low signal-to-noise regime. Using a sophisticated, wavelet-based technique, galaxy spectra can be separated into continuum, line and noise components, and the lines can then be cross-correlated with template spectra in order to estimate the redshifts. Cross-matching of the identified lines then allows for a cleaning of the resulting catalogue, effectively removing the vast majority of erroneous redshift estimates and resulting in a highly pure, highly accurate redshift catalogue. Darth Fader allows us to effectively use low signal-to-noise galaxy spectra, and dramatically reduces the number of human hours required to do this, allowing spectroscopic surveys to probe deeper into the formation history of the Universe.
The probability distribution of ellipticity: implications for weak lensing measurement
Authors: Viola Massimo
Published: July 2015

The weak lensing effect generates spin-2 distortions, referred to as shear, on the observable shape of distant galaxies, induced by intervening gravitational tidal fields. Traditionally, the spin-2 distortion in the light distribution of distant galaxies is measured in terms of a galaxy ellipticity. This is a very good unbiased estimator of the shear field in the limit that a galaxy is measured at infinite signal-to-noise. However, the ellipticity is always defined as a ratio between two quantities (for example, between the polarisation and measurement of the galaxy size, or between the semi-major and semi-minor axis of the galaxy) and therefore requires some non-linear combination of the image pixels. This means, in any realistic case, this would lead to biases in the measurement of the shear (and hence in the cosmological parameters) whenever noise is present in the image. This type of bias can be understood from the particular shape of the 2D probability distribution of the ellipticity of an object measured from data. Moreover this probability distribution can be used to explore strategies for calibration of noise biases in present and future weak lensing surveys (e.g. KiDS, DES, HSC,Euclid, LSST...)
A high-dimensional look at VIPERS galaxies
Authors: Granett Benjamin R. ,   the VIPERS Team
Published: July 2015

We investigate how galaxies in VIPERS (the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey) inhabit the cosmological density field by examining the correlations across the observable parameter space of galaxy properties and clustering strength. The high-dimensional analysis is made manageable by the use of group-finding and regression tools. We find that the major trends in galaxy properties can be explained by a single parameter related to stellar mass. After subtracting this trend, residual correlations remain between galaxy properties and the local environment pointing to complex formation dependencies. As a specific application of this work we build subsamples of galaxies with specific clustering properties for use in cosmological tests.
Supervoid Origin of the Cold Spot in the Cosmic Microwave Background
Authors: Kovács András , Szapudi István , Granett Benjamin R. , Frei Zsolt , Silk Joseph , Burgett Will , Cole Shaun , Draper Peter W. , Farrow Daniel J. , Kaiser Nicholas , Magnier Eugene A. , Metcalfe Nigel , Morgan Jeffrey S. , Price Paul , Tonry John , Wainscoat Richard
Published: July 2015

We use a WISE-2MASS-Pan-STARRS1 galaxy catalog to search for a supervoid in the direction of the Cosmic Microwave Background Cold Spot. We obtain photometric redshifts using our multicolor data set to create a tomographic map of the galaxy distribution. The radial density profile centred on the Cold Spot shows a large low density region, extending over 10's of degrees. Motivated by previous Cosmic Microwave Background results, we test for underdensities within two angular radii, 5°, and 15°. Our data, combined with an earlier measurement by Granett et al. 2010, are consistent with a large Rvoid=(192 ± 15)h−1 Mpc (2σ) supervoid with δ ≃ −0.13 ± 0.03 centered at z=0.22 ± 0.01. Such a supervoid, constituting a ∼3.5 σ fluctuation in the ΛCDM model, is a plausible cause for the Cold Spot.
Transformationally decoupling clustering and tracer bias
Authors: Neyrinck Mark C.
Published: July 2015

Gaussianizing transformations are used statistically in many non-cosmological fields, but in cosmology, we are only starting to apply them. Here I explain a strategy of analyzing the 1-point function (PDF) of a spatial field, together with the ‘essential’ clustering statistics of the Gaussianized field, which are invariant to a local transformation. In cosmology, if the tracer sampling is sufficient, this achieves two important goals. First, it can greatly multiply the Fisher information, which is negligible on nonlinear scales in the usual δ statistics. Second, it decouples clustering statistics from a local bias description for tracers such as galaxies.
Cosmography with high-redshift probes
Authors: Vitagliano Vincenzo
Published: July 2015

I discuss how the cosmographic approach to the determination of cosmological parameters can be implemented with the inclusion of high-redshift data. I argue on the viability of such high-z probes for cosmographic purposes, and resume some statistical issues in finding the most reliable cosmographic truncation.
The Value of H0 from Gaussian Processes
Authors: Busti Vinicius C. , Clarkson Chris , Seikel Marina
Published: July 2015

A new non-parametric method based on Gaussian Processes (GP) was proposed recently to measure the Hubble constant H0. The freedom in this approach comes in the chosen covariance function, which determines how smooth the process is and how nearby points are correlated. We perform coverage tests with a thousand mock samples within the ΛCDM model in order to determine what covariance function provides the least biased results. The function Matérn(5/2) is the best with sligthly higher errors than other covariance functions, although much more stable when compared to standard parametric analyses.
Simulation of the analysis of interferometric microwave background polarization data
Authors: Bunn Emory F. , Karakci Ata , Sutter Paul M. , Zhang Le , Tucker Gregory S. , Timbie Peter T. , Wandelt Benjamin D.
Published: July 2015

We present results from an end-to-end simulation pipeline of interferometric observations of cosmic microwave background polarization. We use both maximum-likelihood and Gibbs sampling techniques to estimate the power spectrum. In addition, we use Gibbs sampling for image reconstruction from interferometric visibilities. The results indicate the level to which various systematic errors (e.g., pointing errors, gain errors, beam shape errors, cross polarization) must be controlled in order to successfully detect and characterize primordial B modes and achieve other scientific goals. In addition, we show that Gibbs sampling is an effective method of image reconstruction for interferometric data in other astrophysical contexts.
Density field projection analysis in search for WHIM
Authors: Liivamägi Lauri Juhan
Published: July 2015

We study the possibilities of using line-of-sight projected luminosity density and filament probability fields to find the best locations in the sky to attempt to observe the elusive Warm-Hot Intergalactic Matter (WHIM). We calculate galaxy luminosity fields on a regular grid and then project those to the plane of sky. Column densities are then found by integrating along multiple lines of sight. We also create the projections of the filament probability fields. The results are presented as sky maps of the potentially suitable areas and the corresponding fractions of sky coverage.