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We study speed and skew deflection-angle dependence on skyrmion deformations
of a tightly bound two-skyrmion state in a synthetic ferrimagnet. We condsider
here, an in-plane uniaxial magnetocrystalline anisotropy-term in order to
induce lateral shape distortions and an overall size modulation of the
skyrmions due to a reduction of the effective out-of-plane anisotropy, thus
affecting the skyrmion speed, skew-deflection and inducing anisotropy in these
quantities with respect to the driving current-angle. Because of frustrated
dipolar interactions in a synthetic ferrimagnet, sizeable skyrmion deformations
can be induced with relatively small induced anisotropy constants and thus a
wide range of tuneability can be achieved. We also show analytically, that a
consequence of the skyrmion deformation can, under certain conditions cause a
skyrmion deflection with respect to driving-current angles, unrelated to the
topological charge. Results are analyzed by a combination of micromagnetic
simulations and a compound particle description within the Thiele-formalism
from which an over-all mobility tensor is constructed. This work offers an
additional path towards in-situ tuning of skyrmion dynamics.
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We consider induced pair production in an external field at finite
temperature. One-loop correction to the Green function of a meson is calculated
semiclassically within the framework of saddle-point analysis of Schwinger
proper time integrals. This correction appears to be exponentially small in
terms of inverse temperature dependence. Low-temperature limit is shown to be
in full agreement with previously obtained zero-temperature results. The
corrections in the low-temperature limits are estimated up to the leading
exponential and pre-exponential terms. Comparison is made to earlier
calculations of vacuum decay.
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Deep learning has become widely used in complex AI applications. Yet,
training a deep neural network (DNNs) model requires a considerable amount of
calculations, long running time, and much energy. Nowadays, many-core AI
accelerators (e.g., GPUs and TPUs) are designed to improve the performance of
AI training. However, processors from different vendors perform dissimilarly in
terms of performance and energy consumption. To investigate the differences
among several popular off-the-shelf processors (i.e., Intel CPU, NVIDIA GPU,
AMD GPU, and Google TPU) in training DNNs, we carry out a comprehensive
empirical study on the performance and energy efficiency of these processors by
benchmarking a representative set of deep learning workloads, including
computation-intensive operations, classical convolutional neural networks
(CNNs), recurrent neural networks (LSTM), Deep Speech 2, and Transformer.
Different from the existing end-to-end benchmarks which only present the
training time, We try to investigate the impact of hardware, vendor's software
library, and deep learning framework on the performance and energy consumption
of AI training. Our evaluation methods and results not only provide an
informative guide for end-users to select proper AI accelerators, but also
expose some opportunities for the hardware vendors to improve their software
library.
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Search-based approaches have been used in the literature to automate the
process of creating unit test cases. However, related work has shown that
generated unit-tests with high code coverage could be ineffective, i.e., they
may not detect all faults or kill all injected mutants. In this paper, we
propose CLING, an integration-level test case generation approach that exploits
how a pair of classes, the caller and the callee, interact with each other
through method calls. In particular, CLING generates integration-level test
cases that maximize the Coupled Branches Criterion (CBC). Coupled branches are
pairs of branches containing a branch of the caller and a branch of the callee
such that an integration test that exercises the former also exercises the
latter. CBC is a novel integration-level coverage criterion, measuring the
degree to which a test suite exercises the interactions between a caller and
its callee classes. We implemented CLING and evaluated the approach on 140
pairs of classes from five different open-source Java projects. Our results
show that (1) CLING generates test suites with high CBC coverage, thanks to the
definition of the test suite generation as a many-objectives problem where each
couple of branches is an independent objective; (2) such generated suites
trigger different class interactions and can kill on average 7.7% (with a
maximum of 50%) of mutants that are not detected by tests generated at the unit
level; (3) CLING can detect integration faults coming from wrong assumptions
about the usage of the callee class (32 for our subject systems) that remain
undetected when using automatically generated unit-level test suites.
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I have just seen this delightful classic again after many years, the next to last film directed by Henry Cornelius, who died three years later at the age of only 45 (the same age at which the film's male star Larry Harvey was also to die in 1973). Three future directors were in the crew: Jack Clayton (Associate Producer), Guy Green (cinematographer), and Clive Donner (editor). This film is based upon the autobiographical story 'Goodbye to Berlin' by the well-known British author Christopher Isherwood, which was first turned into a play by John van Druten, then made into this film, then turned into a musical, 'Cabaret', and finally filmed as 'Cabaret', which brought the amazing Liza Minelli to world attention, with her voice which can shatter a glass at the distance of a mile. Isherwood appears as a character in the film under his own name. He was gay, but in those days that was illegal and could land him in prison, so he disguises his proclivities under the description of being what he calls 'a confirmed bachelor'. This is the key to his Platonic relationship with the wildly eccentric, wacky, promiscuous, ever-cheerful and thoroughly unique character whom he calls Sally Bowles. The portrait of Sally Bowles in this film is a tour-de-force by the young Julie Harris, who sweeps every scene into a magical and captivating web of sparkling personal charm. What a vehicle for an actress with plenty of charm of her own! It is one of the great cinematic performances of the 1950s. Isherwood is played to perfection by the young Lawrence Harvey, in a finely-judged performance which never allows the comedy to go over the edge, and even the moments of farce bordering on slapstick remain somehow 'almost believable'. Larry is so funny at portraying a wimpish hypochondriac. What an irony, considering the total lack of hypochondria shown by his bravery and stoicism in the last year of his life as he died from terminal stomach cancer and behaved with such dignity and lack of complaint. I knew him well in the last three years or so, and he was a generous, warm, and modest person. He adored his little girl Domino, now alas also tragically dead.This film was his finest early performance, to be followed by his spectacular work in 'Room at the Top' (1959), 'Summer and Smoke' (1961) and 'The Manchurian Candidate' (1962). Larry was often undervalued in his lifetime because he was too handsome, was often cast as a cad, and glamour boys are not always accepted as good actors, but many of the finest actresses played opposite him, and they were in no doubt of his abilities, and he was a strong lead in many of the most important films of his time. If he had lived beyond middle age, he would have gone from strength to strength and become a 'grand old man' of the screen. Sitting in his house in Hampstead one day, he gave me a glass of his usual white wine from a huge barrel which he had brought from some foreign cellar. I said he always gave me such delicious wine, what was it? He proudly answered that it was a Sancerre which he had chosen himself at the vineyard in France and had shipped over specially. He then added with extreme wistfulness: 'You know, I've been waiting for four years for someone to comment on it and ask me what it is, and you are the first person who has ever done so.' What mattered to him was to be recognised for having taste in wine,and his more glamorous friends had denied him that satisfaction. In this film, Anton Diffring gives a touching early performance as an earnest young man (later he was to have to play Nazi officers far too much, poor fellow), and the young Shelley Winters plays a rich German Jewish girl, in her usual noisy but effective manner, but it was not too difficult, as she was a noisy Jewish girl herself anyway. This film has such an air of joie de vivre about it, that it is pure delight.
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In this paper, a modified teleparallel gravity action containing a coupling
between a scalar field potential and magnetism, in anisotropic and homogeneous
backgrounds, is investigated through Noether symmetry approach. The focus of
this work is to describe late-time-accelerated expansion. Since finding
analytical solutions carrying all conserved currents emerged by Noether
symmetry approach, is very difficult, hence regularly in the literature, the
authors split the total symmetry into sub-symmetries and then select, usually,
some of them to be carried by the solutions. This manner limits the forms of
unknown functions obtained. However, in ref. [68], B.N.S. approach was proposed
in order to solve such problems but its main motivation was carrying more
conserved currents by solutions. In this paper, by eliminating the
aforementioned limitation as much as possible, a trick leading to some graceful
forms of unknown functions is suggested. Through this fruitful approach, the
solutions may carry more conserved currents than usual ways and maybe new forms
of symmetries. I named this new approach to be CSSS-trick (Combination of
Sub-symmetries through Special Selections). With this approach, it is
demonstrated that the unified dark matter potential is deduced by the gauge
fields. Utilizing the $\mathfrak{B}\text{-function}$ method, a detailed data
analysis of results obtained yielding perfect agreements with recent
observational data are performed. And finally, the Wheeler-De Witt (WDW)
equation is discussed to demonstrate recovering the Hartle criterion due to the
oscillating feature of the wave function of the universe.
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We consider a general approach to the theory of continuous media starting
from Lagrangian formalism. This formalism which uses the trajectories if
constituents of media is very convenient for taking into account different
types of interaction between particles typical for different media. Building
the Hamiltonian formalism we discuss some issues which is not very well known,
such as relation of famous Thompson theorem with the symmetry with respect to
volume preserving diffeomorphisms. We also discuss the relation between Euler
and Lagrange description and present similar to Euler $C^2$ formulation of
continuous mechanics. In these general frameworks we consider as examples the
theory of plasma and gravitating gas.
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We report the direct measurement of the non-adiabatic component of the
spin-torque in domain walls. Our method is independent of both the pinning of
the domain wall in the wire as well as of the Gilbert damping parameter. We
demonstrate that the ratio between the non-adiabatic and the adiabatic
components can be as high as 1, and explain this high value by the importance
of the spin-flip rate to the non-adiabatic torque. Besides their fundamental
significance these results open the way for applications by demonstrating a
significant increase of the spin torque efficiency.
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We develop a theory of Brill-Noether divisors on the moduli space of stable
spin curves of genus g, and compute the classes of these loci. A spin
Brill-Noether cycle is defined in terms of the relative position of the spin
structure with respect to certain Raynaud theta-divisors in the Jacobian of the
curve.
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The Rosenbrock-Krylov family of time integration schemes is an extension of
Rosenbrock-W methods that employs a specific Krylov based approximation of the
linear system solutions arising within each stage of the integrator. This work
proposes an extension of Rosenbrock-Krylov methods to address stability
questions which arise for methods making use of inexact linear system solution
strategies. Two approaches for improving the stability and efficiency of
Rosenbrock-Krylov methods are proposed, one through direct control of linear
system residuals and the second through a novel extension of the underlying
Krylov space to include stage right hand side vectors. Rosenbrock-Krylov
methods employing the new approaches show a substantial improvement in
computational efficiency relative to prior implementations.
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We study the low-temperature regime of an atomic liquid on the hyperbolic
plane by means of molecular dynamics simulation and we compare the results to a
continuum theory of defects in a negatively curved hexagonal background. In
agreement with the theory and previous results on positively curved (spherical)
surfaces, we find that the atomic configurations consist of isolated defect
structures, dubbed "grain boundary scars", that form around an irreducible
density of curvature-induced disclinations in an otherwise hexagonal
background. We investigate the structure and the dynamics of these grain
boundary scars.
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(Abridged) We made use of X-ray observations with the X-ray telescope
on-board the \swift observatory to refine the X-ray position to 3-5" accuracy
of 12 INTEGRAL sources, so as to further identify their counterpart at optical,
infrared, and radio wavelengths, to try to unveil their true nature. We then
searched the online catalogues (e.g. NED, SIMBAD, 2MASS, 2MASX, and NVSS) to
search for counterparts at other wavelengths. For all sources, we give a
refined X-ray position, provide X-ray spectral parameters, identify infrared
counterparts, and give magnitudes at optical and ultra violet wavelengths seen
with UVOT when observations are available. We confirm the nature of six sources
formerly suspected to be AGN (IGR J02343+3229, J13149+4422, J14579-4308,
J16385-2057, J18559+1535, J19378-0617). Our analysis first leads us to suggest
that IGR J09523-6231 and IGR J10147-6354 are AGN. While the former has recently
been confirmed as a Seyfert 1.5 AGN, we suggest the latter is a Seyfert 2. All
other sources may be Galactic sources, in which case their spectral shape may
suggest that they are X-ray binaries. In one case (IGR J19308+0530), the
Galactic nature is confirmed through the identification of an F8 star as the
counterpart. We favour a distance to the source not greater than 1 kpc. The
source is likely to be a neutron star XRB or a CV. We also report the discovery
of six serendipitous sources of unknown nature.
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We report crystallographic, specific heat, transport, and magnetic properties
of the recently discovered noncentrosymmetric 5d-electron superconductors
CaIrSi3 (Tc = 3.6 K) and CaPtSi3 (Tc = 2.3 K). The specific heat suggests that
these superconductors are fully gapped. The upper critical fields are less than
1 T, consistent with limitation by conventional orbital depairing. High,
non-Pauli-limited {\mu}0 Hc2 values, often taken as a key signature of novel
noncentrosymmetric physics, are not observed in these materials because the
high carrier masses required to suppress orbital depairing and reveal the
violated Pauli limit are not present.
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An orthogonal involution $\sigma$ on a central simple algebra $A$, after
scalar extension to the function field $\mathcal{F}(A)$ of the Severi--Brauer
variety of $A$, is adjoint to a quadratic form $q_\sigma$ over
$\mathcal{F}(A)$, which is uniquely defined up to a scalar factor. Some
properties of the involution, such as hyperbolicity, and isotropy up to an
odd-degree extension of the base field, are encoded in this quadratic form,
meaning that they hold for the involution $\sigma$ if and only if they hold for
$q_\sigma$. As opposed to this, we prove that there exists non-totally
decomposable orthogonal involutions that become totally decomposable over
$\mathcal{F}(A)$, so that the associated form $q_\sigma$ is a Pfister form. We
also provide examples of nonisomorphic involutions on an index $2$ algebra that
yield similar quadratic forms, thus proving that the form $q_\sigma$ does not
determine the isomorphism class of $\sigma$, even when the underlying algebra
has index $2$. As a consequence, we show that the $e_3$ invariant for
orthogonal involutions is not classifying in degree $12$, and does not detect
totally decomposable involutions in degree $16$, as opposed to what happens for
quadratic forms.
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We consider in this paper the optimal approximations of convex univariate
functions with feed-forward Relu neural networks. We are interested in the
following question: what is the minimal approximation error given the number of
approximating linear pieces? We establish the necessary and sufficient
conditions and uniqueness of optimal approximations, and give lower and upper
bounds of the optimal approximation errors. Relu neural network architectures
are then presented to generate these optimal approximations. Finally, we
propose an algorithm to find the optimal approximations, as well as prove its
convergence and validate it with experimental results.
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In the so-called yukawaon model, where the effective Yukawa coupling
constants Y_f^{eff} (f=e,\nu,u,d) are given by vacuum expectation values (VEVs)
of gauge singlet scalars (yukawaons) Y_f with 3\times 3 components, i.e.
Y_f^{eff}= y_f < Y_f>/\Lambda, massless (and light) scalars appear because a
global flavor symmetry is assumed. In order to demonstrate whether such
massless scalars in the yukawaon model are harmless or not, yukawaon masses are
explicitly estimated, as an example, in the charged lepton sector.
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The interplay between superconductivity and magnetism gives rise to many
intriguing and exciting phenomena. In this Letter we report about a novel
manifestation of this interplay: a temperature induced phase transition between
different spontaneous vortex phases in lead superconducting films with embedded
magnetic nanoparticles. Unlike common vortices in superconductors the vortex
phase appears without any applied magnetic field. The vortices nucleate
exclusively due to the stray field of the magnetic nanoparticles, which serve
the dual role of providing the internal field and simultaneously acting as
pinning centers. As in usual superconductors, one can move the spontaneous
vortices with an applied electric current. Transport measurements reveal
dynamical phase transitions that depend on temperature (T) and applied field
(H) and support the obtained (H-T) phase diagram. In particular, we used a
scaling analysis to characterize a transition from a liquid to a novel
disordered solid resembling a vortex glass.
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In many applications we seek to maximize an expectation with respect to a
distribution over discrete variables. Estimating gradients of such objectives
with respect to the distribution parameters is a challenging problem. We
analyze existing solutions including finite-difference (FD) estimators and
continuous relaxation (CR) estimators in terms of bias and variance. We show
that the commonly used Gumbel-Softmax estimator is biased and propose a simple
method to reduce it. We also derive a simpler piece-wise linear continuous
relaxation that also possesses reduced bias. We demonstrate empirically that
reduced bias leads to a better performance in variational inference and on
binary optimization tasks.
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We address periodic-image errors arising from the use of periodic boundary
conditions to describe systems that do not exhibit full three-dimensional
periodicity. The difference between the periodic potential, as
straightforwardly obtained from a Fourier transform, and the potential
satisfying any other boundary conditions can be characterized analytically. In
light of this observation, we present an efficient real-space method to correct
periodic-image errors, based on a multigrid solver for the potential
difference, and demonstrate that exponential convergence of the energy with
respect to cell size can be achieved in practical calculations. Additionally,
we derive rapidly convergent expansions for determining the Madelung constants
of point-charge assemblies in one, two, and three dimensions.
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Let's see, progressives favor abortion, which is similar to some of the ways fascists treated people. Progressives want to ban the Bible from schools, even though to some people it is just literature, which resembles brown shirts. I won't back down from my thoughts on the progressive agenda. And I would have never gone down the fascism road if someone had not posted "men who wore belts that said "Mitt Gott" systemically killed 6 million people..." first. I think the Nazis were the worst thing that ever happened in world history. I truly believe that any comparison to Nazism is wrong. But I won't let a liberal make a false comparison to Nazism and conservatism without pointing out the truth. Go back and tell the person who posted "men who wore belts that said "Mitt Gott" systemically killed 6 million people..." that their words were unconscionable before speaking to me about what I posted.
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No return, no refund, no exchange
Worked great at first. Then suddenly quit working. It's past the return date policy. Imaging that. It would have been returned before the deadline but it was working up to that point. Not sure if a bad unit or not, Beware and watch your return date.
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Atrial fibrillation (AF) is associated with cognitive impairment/dementia,
independently of clinical cerebrovascular events (stroke/TIA). One of the
plausible mechanisms is the occurrence of AF-induced transient critical
hemodynamic events; however, it is presently unknown, if ventricular response
rate during AF may impact on cerebral hemodynamics. AF was simulated at
different ventricular rates (50, 70, 90, 110, 130 bpm) by two coupled lumped
parameter validated models (systemic and cerebral circulation), and compared to
corresponding control normal sinus rhythm simulations (NSR). Hemodynamic
outcomes and occurrence of critical events (hypoperfusions and hypertensive
events) were assessed along the internal carotid artery-middle cerebral artery
pathway up to the capillary-venous bed. At the distal cerebral circle level
(downstream middle cerebral artery), increasing ventricular rates lead to a
reduced heart rate-related dampening of hemodynamic signals compared to NSR
(p=0.003 and 0.002 for flow rate and pressure, respectively). This response
causes a significant progressive increase in critical events in the distal
cerebral circle (p<0.001) as ventricular rate increases during AF. On the other
side, at the lowest ventricular response rates (HR 50 bpm), at the
systemic-proximal cerebral circle level (up to middle cerebral artery)
hypoperfusions (p<0.001) occur more commonly, compared to faster AF
simulations. This computational study suggests that higher ventricular rates
relate to a progressive increase in critical cerebral hemodynamic events
(hypoperfusions and hypertensive events) at the distal cerebral circle. Thus, a
rate control strategy aiming to around 60 bpm could be beneficial in terms on
cognitive outcomes in patients with permanent AF.
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One form of type checking used in gradually typed language is transient type
checking: whenever an object 'flows' through code with a type annotation, the
object is dynamically checked to ensure it has the methods required by the
annotation. Just-in-time compilation and optimisation in virtual machines can
eliminate much of the overhead of run-time transient type checks. Unfortunately
this optimisation is not uniform: some type checks will significantly decrease,
or even increase, a program's performance.
In this paper, we refine the so called "Takikawa" protocol, and use it to
identify which type annotations have the greatest effects on performance. In
particular, we show how graphing the performance of such benchmarks when
varying which type annotations are present in the source code can be used to
discern potential patterns in performance. We demonstrate our approach by
testing the Moth virtual machine: for many of the benchmarks where Moth's
transient type checking impacts performance, we have been able to identify one
or two specific type annotations that are the likely cause. Without these type
annotations, the performance impact of transient type checking becomes
negligible.
Using our technique programmers can optimise programs by removing expensive
type checks, and VM engineers can identify new opportunities for compiler
optimisation.
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Look for something else
Despite some of the poor reviews, I decided to go ahead and give these a shot. I regret doing that. They jam up and get full of dirt easily. The bulb in the picture actually still has water in it due to the fact that it’s backed up, not because of the design. I am just barely outside of my return window and wish I could return these now.
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Actually, the law is very specific. Only dogs can be service animals. The rest are classified as "comfort" animals, and businesses, airlines, etc. are not required by the law to accomodate them. The may choose to like the airlines, but it is not required. This is a pet peeve of mine. These cheaters are making it more difficult for those who are in real need. It's time to license them so there is no question. Kinda like handicapped parking... I can't just say I have a disability, I have to apply for a handicapped permit and display it when using that parking. Licensing would solve the problem for everybody... another simple solution that should have been enacted a long time ago IMO. This situation would never have happened.
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Having loved 'Paris, Je T'aime', I highly anticipated this film and I admit I went in with high expectations, but was sorely disappointed for a number of reasons.<br /><br />Although, I was not expecting a re-make of 'Paris' in New York I was expecting the same structure. What I liked about 'Paris' was the breakup of the neighborhoods. You got a sense of each directors style and the story they wanted to tell. In 'NY', there is no clear separation of the stories, at different points in the film, characters from different stories run into each other which made me confused as to who I was watching and what exactly was going on. Also, the switch in directing was evident but confusing since there was no flow.<br /><br />Another thing I loved about the 'Paris' film was the different takes on love. It wasn't all romantic. There was love between parents and their children, unrequited love, a lonely, middle-aged woman yearning for love etc., it explored so many layers of the complexity of love between humans. 'NY' seemed to only go for an edgy, over-the-top sexuality. There were some redeemable shorts (the older couple having spent a lifetime together, Julie Christie's short), but overall the'NY' film didn't evoke any emotion for me. I didn't connect with any of the characters like I did with 'Paris'. I remember watching 'Paris' and feeling a deep sadness, loneliness, yearning, hopefulness, wonder... it just had so much soul. For me, there was no soul in the 'NY' film.<br /><br />Maybe if I had gone into it without having 'Paris' looming in the back of my brain as a comparison this film might have elicited a more favorable response, but as a self-titled re-take of 'Paris, Je T'aime' I was sorely disappointed.
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Multi-person pose estimation from a 2D image is an essential technique for
human behavior understanding. In this paper, we propose a human pose refinement
network that estimates a refined pose from a tuple of an input image and input
pose. The pose refinement was performed mainly through an end-to-end trainable
multi-stage architecture in previous methods. However, they are highly
dependent on pose estimation models and require careful model design. By
contrast, we propose a model-agnostic pose refinement method. According to a
recent study, state-of-the-art 2D human pose estimation methods have similar
error distributions. We use this error statistics as prior information to
generate synthetic poses and use the synthesized poses to train our model. In
the testing stage, pose estimation results of any other methods can be input to
the proposed method. Moreover, the proposed model does not require code or
knowledge about other methods, which allows it to be easily used in the
post-processing step. We show that the proposed approach achieves better
performance than the conventional multi-stage refinement models and
consistently improves the performance of various state-of-the-art pose
estimation methods on the commonly used benchmark. The code is available in
this https URL\footnote{\url{https://github.com/mks0601/PoseFix_RELEASE}}.
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Pretty good flavor
When I received these, they were extremely melted. So much so that it was difficult to open the individual packaging. Because it was melted, the candies had a weird texture, but it was a pretty good flavor, especially for so few carbs. But the condition it arrived in results in my giving it only two stars
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Fits great zips up easily
I am so excited to get this sweat vest! Fits great zips up easily. Fits and stays a lot better then a normal sweat band or waist trimmer. The smell of the material goes away as soon as you soak it in water with soap. But all and all great product.
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We report the discovery of two sources at z=3.867 and z=3.427 that exhibit
powerful starburst and AGN activities. They benefit from data from radio to X
rays from the CFHTLS-D1/SWIRE/XMDS surveys. Follow-up optical and near-infrared
spectroscopy, and millimeter IRAM/MAMBO observations are also available. We
performed an analysis of their spectral energy distributions to understand the
origin of their emission and constrain their luminosities. A comparison with
other composite systems at similar redshifts from the literature is also
presented. The AGN and starburst bolometric luminosities are ~10^13 Lsun. The
AGN emission dominates at X ray, optical, mid-infrared wavelengths, and
probably in the radio. The starburst emission dominates in the far-infrared.
The estimated star formation rates range from 500 to 3000Msun/yr. The AGN
near-infrared and X ray emissions are heavily obscured in both sources with an
estimated dust extinction Av>4, and Compton-thick gas column densities. The two
sources are the most obscured and most luminous AGNs detected at millimeter
wavelengths currently known. The sources presented in this work are heavily
obscured QSOs, but their properties are not fully explained by the standard AGN
unification model. In one source, the ultraviolet and optical spectra suggest
the presence of outflowing gas and shocks, and both sources show emission from
hot dust, most likely in the vicinity of the nucleus. Evidence of moderate
AGN-driven radio activity is found in both sources. The two sources lie on the
local M_BH-M_bulge relation. To remain on this relation, their star formation
rate has to decrease. Our results support evolutionary models that invoke radio
feedback as star formation quenching mechanism, and suggest that such a
mechanism might play a major role also in powerful AGNs.
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This paper introduces Taco-VC, a novel architecture for voice conversion
based on Tacotron synthesizer, which is a sequence-to-sequence with attention
model. The training of multi-speaker voice conversion systems requires a large
number of resources, both in training and corpus size. Taco-VC is implemented
using a single speaker Tacotron synthesizer based on Phonetic PosteriorGrams
(PPGs) and a single speaker WaveNet vocoder conditioned on mel spectrograms. To
enhance the converted speech quality, and to overcome over-smoothing, the
outputs of Tacotron are passed through a novel speechenhancement network, which
is composed of a combination of the phoneme recognition and Tacotron networks.
Our system is trained just with a single speaker corpus and adapts to new
speakers using only a few minutes of training data. Using mid-size public
datasets, our method outperforms the baseline in the VCC 2018 SPOKE
non-parallel voice conversion task and achieves competitive results compared to
multi-speaker networks trained on large private datasets.
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Advanced driver assistance and automated driving systems rely on risk
estimation modules to predict and avoid dangerous situations. Current methods
use expensive sensor setups and complex processing pipeline, limiting their
availability and robustness. To address these issues, we introduce a novel deep
learning based action recognition framework for classifying dangerous lane
change behavior in short video clips captured by a monocular camera. We
designed a deep spatiotemporal classification network that uses pre-trained
state-of-the-art instance segmentation network Mask R-CNN as its spatial
feature extractor for this task. The Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and
shallower final classification layers of the proposed method were trained on a
semi-naturalistic lane change dataset with annotated risk labels. A
comprehensive comparison of state-of-the-art feature extractors was carried out
to find the best network layout and training strategy. The best result, with a
0.937 AUC score, was obtained with the proposed network. Our code and trained
models are available open-source.
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...am i missing something here??? "unexpected plot developments"? "plot twisting with subversive glee"? are these viewers watching the same Arquette vehicle to which i just subjected myself (in an now-obvious sub(un)conscious bout of sadomasochism)...I just joined this site simply to make sure that no one else ever rents this stinker...this movie was an embarrassment to every single person involved...quick question: did Sir Stevie read the script before he gave the thumbs-up to Kate C.? if so, then it must be the same Spielberg who greenlighted "howard the duck"...don't give me that, "it was a hit play" crap--i'm guessing Mssr. Reddin ain't too pleased ...the DVD cover promised "surprising corners" and a "twisted story..." Story!!Story?? It's crap like this that make old Bobby McKee and his wandering band of Structuralists sound like geniuses...Sundance??Berlin??Toronto?? I have a home video of my cat farting that evokes more interest than Arquette's negatively-dimensional portrayal of anguished loss...and, talk about deux ex machina for Mr. Stanley T.; thank god, just in the nick o time he thought to have Dave call the cops! and thank shiva that the cops had just caught the true killer...what!!! up until the credits i was still waiting for it to be some kind of grift against Arquette and his "hidden millions"...no, Mrs. Spielberg, you don't escape unscathed: what the hell was that kitchen scene with the "athlete's foot in my crotch" gag??? are you worse in this or "just cause"?? i dunno...hey film lovers: why don't you make it a blockbuster night and rent this along with "jersey girl" and "white chicks" and then commit sepukka (or is it seppuka)...and take E. Dunsky with you....
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"La Bête" by Walerian Borowczyk is based on the short story "Lokis" written by Prosper Merimée.Lucy Broadhurst(Lisabeth Hummel),an American heiress betrothed to the son of an impoverished Marquis,arrives at the family's crumbling château and learns of a mythical ursine beast purported to prowl the nearby forest.It is fabled that a former lady of the house(Sirpa Lane)once engaged in perverse sex with the creature and Lucy finds herself consumed by dreams of the incident. "The Beast" is an art-house mix of surreal horror,explicit sleaze and porno.There's implied bestiality,assault and perversion in the priesthood,copious fake ejaculate smeared on bared breasts,masturbation with a rose and, most graphic of all,the eponymous beast toying with incredibly big phallus.Still this genuinely erotic film is wonderfully photographed and tasteless.The women here are stunningly beautiful and they are naked most of the time.Overall "La Bête" is a visual feast.Whether it be from the fetishistic attention to detail,or the visual motifs pregnant with information,Borowczyk's masterpiece should be watched with care and attention.A must-see for fans of European cult cinema.
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Great quality! Best help w/ maintenance!
I bought this for my 2008 Jeep Wrangler JK. It was a super easy install. It has been an amazing help changing my oil. A lot of review videos show the person just draining the oil, closing valve and then refilling engine with new oil but I highly recommend draining oil and then removing valve and draining the 1-2mm of oil in the oil pan as this may have dirt or debris that didn’t flow through the valve. Other than that It has worked amazing. I don’t use a clip or metal band to lock the valve closed and I go off-roading a lot and it has never leaked nor come open by itself. It’s a solid valve and the spring that locks it into the closed position has never messed up. Great quality in the metals, springs and seals.
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We have compiled a sample of 699 stars from the recent literature with
detailed chemical abundance information (spanning -4.2 < [Fe/H] < +0.3), and we
compute their space velocities and Galactic orbital parameters. We identify
members of the inner and outer stellar halo populations in our sample based
only on their kinematic properties and then compare the abundance ratios of
these populations as a function of [Fe/H]. In the metallicity range where the
two populations overlap (-2.5 < [Fe/H] < -1.5), the mean [Mg/Fe] of the outer
halo is lower than the inner halo by ~0.1 dex. For [Ni/Fe] and [Ba/Fe], the
star-to-star abundance scatter of the inner halo is consistently smaller than
in the outer halo. The [Na/Fe], [Y/Fe], [Ca/Fe], and [Ti/Fe] ratios of both
populations show similar means and levels of scatter. Our inner halo population
is chemically homogeneous, suggesting that a significant fraction of the Milky
Way stellar halo originated from a well-mixed ISM. In contrast, our outer halo
population is chemically diverse, suggesting that another significant fraction
of the Milky Way stellar halo formed in remote regions where chemical
enrichment was dominated by local supernova events. We find no abundance trends
with maximum radial distance from the Galactic center or maximum vertical
distance from the Galactic disk. We also find no common kinematic signature for
groups of metal-poor stars with peculiar abundance patters, such as the
alpha-poor stars or stars showing unique neutron-capture enrichment patterns.
Several stars and dSph systems with unique abundance patterns spend the
majority of their time in the distant regions of the Milky Way stellar halo,
suggesting that the true outer halo of the Galaxy may have little resemblance
to the local stellar halo.
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We use the global embedding Minkowski space (GEMS) geometries of a
(3+1)-dimensional curved Reissner-Nordstr\"om(RN)-AdS black hole spacetime into
a (5+2)-dimensional flat spacetime to define a proper local temperature, which
remains finite at the event horizon, for freely falling observers outside a
static black hole. Our extended results include the known limiting cases of the
RN, Schwarzschild--AdS, and Schwarzschild black holes.
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Measuring longitudinally polarized vector boson scattering in the ZZ channel
is a promising way to investigate unitarity restoration with the Higgs
mechanism and to search for possible new physics. We investigated several deep
neural network structures and compared their ability to improve the measurement
of the longitudinal fraction Z_L Z_L. Using fast simulation with the Delphes
framework, a clear improvement is found using a previously investigated
'particle-based' deep neural network on a preprocessed dataset and applying
principle component analysis to the outputs.A significance of around 1.7
standard deviations can be achieved with the integrated luminosity of 3000 fb-1
that will be recorded at the High-Luminosity LHC.
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We experimentally probe the distribution of kink pairs resulting from driving
a one-dimensional quantum Ising chain through the paramagnet-ferromagnet
quantum phase transition, using a single trapped ion as a quantum simulator in
momentum space. The number of kink pairs after the transition follows a Poisson
binomial distribution, in which all cumulants scale with a universal power-law
as a function of the quench time in which the transition is crossed. We
experimentally verified this scaling for the first cumulants and report
deviations due to noise-induced dephasing of the trapped ion. Our results
establish that the universal character of the critical dynamics can be extended
beyond the paradigmatic Kibble-Zurek mechanism, which accounts for the mean
kink number, to characterize the full probability distribution of topological
defects.
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We present scanning SQUID microscopy data on the superconductors Sr2RuO4 (Tc
= 1.5 K) and PrOs$_4$Sb$_{12}$ (Tc = 1.8 K). In both of these materials,
superconductivity-related time-reversal symmetry-breaking fields have been
observed by muon spin rotation; our aim was to visualize the structure of these
fields. However in neither Sr$_2$RuO$_4$ nor PrOs$_4$Sb$_{12}$ do we observe
spontaneous superconductivity-related magnetization. In Sr$_2$RuO$_4$, many
experimental results have been interpreted on the basis of a $px \pm ipy$
superconducting order parameter. This order parameter is expected to give
spontaneous magnetic induction at sample edges and order parameter domain
walls. Supposing large domains, our data restrict domain wall and edge fields
to no more than ~0.1% and ~0.2% of the expected magnitude, respectively.
Alternatively, if the magnetization is of the expected order, the typical
domain size is limited to ~30 nm for random domains, or ~500 nm for periodic
domains.
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Bent, uneven, cheap
I was initially excited about this bedframe because it's lightweight and simple/cute design. However, putting it together was a NIGHTMARE with a million tiny pieces and tons of bent metal. Once it was put together, it did not sit evenly on the floor and "rocks" from end to end. Worst Amazon purchase yet.
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The Indian Air Force's rank structure is based on that of the Royal Air Force, the highest rank attainable in the Indian Air Force is Marshal of the Indian Air Force, conferred by the President of India, MIAF Arjan Singh is the only officer to have achieved this rank, he was an Indian Air Force marshal who served as Chief of the Air Staff from 1964, to which year?
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Doesnt work
I ordered this so that I can charge my phone and listen to music on my stereo/car at the same time and I kept getting an error message stating that it is not supported. and not only that but also this only worked to charge my phone. It would not work with any of my stereos.
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Momentum correlation functions at small relative momenta are calculated for
light particles $\left(n, p, d, t\right)$ emitted from $^{197}$Au + $^{197}$Au
collisions at different impact parameters and beam energies within the
framework of the isospin-dependent quantum molecular dynamics model
complemented by the $Lednick\acute{y}$ and $Lyuboshitz$ analytical method. We
first make sure our model is able to reproduce the FOPI data of proton-proton
momentum correlation in a wide energy range from 0.4$A$ GeV to 1.5$A$ GeV. Then
we explore more physics insights through the emission times and momentum
correlations among different light particles. The specific emphasize is the
effects of total pair momentum among different light particles, impact
parameters and in-medium nucleon-nucleon cross section. Both two-deuteron and
two-triton correlation functions are anti-correlation due to the final state
interaction, and they are affected by in-medium nucleon-nucleon cross section
for the higher total momentum of the particle pairs, but not for the lower
ones. In addition, impact parameter and in-medium nucleon-nucleon cross section
dependences of the emission source radii are extracted by fitting the momentum
correlation functions. The results indicate that momentum correlation functions
gating with total pair momentum is stronger for the smaller in-medium
nucleon-nucleon cross section factor $\left(\eta\right)$ or impact parameter
$\left(b\right)$. Non-identical particle correlations ($np, pd, pt, $ and $dt$)
are also investigated by the velocity-gated correlation functions which can
give information of the particles' emission sequence, and the result indicates
that heavier ones $\left(deuteron/triton\right)$ are, one the average, emitted
earlier than protons, in the small relative momentum region.
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I am one of those conservatives that voted for the NDP in protest against the failed PC government. Man was I shocked when they won.
Since then, at least as far as Notley's polices have resulted in a degree of social license for our resources, I have been pleasantly surprised by her stewardship of the struggling economy.
I was impressed by Alexander when he was Ambassador to Afghanistan. My impression of him tanked when he joined Harper's cabinet as immigration minister. If he ends up as PC leader I will be voting Liberal again.
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In this manuscript we examine an accelerated charged particle moving through
an optical medium, and explore the emission of accelerated-Cherenkov radiation.
The particle's reaction to acceleration creates a low-frequency spectral cutoff
in the Cherenkov emission that has a sharp resonance at the superluminal
threshold. Moreover, the effect of recoil on the radiation is incorporated
kinematically through the use of an Unruh-DeWitt detector by setting an energy
gap, i.e., the change in electron energy, to the recoil energy of the emitted
photon. The simultaneous presence of recoil and acceleration conspire to
produce a localized resonance peak in the emission. These theoretical
considerations could be used to construct high precision tests of radiation
reaction using Cherenkov emission under acceleration.
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Across- and within-recording variabilities in electroencephalographic (EEG)
activity is a major limitation in EEG-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
Specifically, gradual changes in fatigue and vigilance levels during long EEG
recording durations and BCI system usage bring along significant fluctuations
in BCI performances even when these systems are calibrated daily. We address
this in an experimental offline study from EEG-based BCI speller usage data
acquired for one hour duration. As the main part of our methodological
approach, we propose the concept of adversarial invariant feature learning for
BCIs as a regularization approach on recently expanding EEG deep learning
architectures, to learn nuisance-invariant discriminative features. We
empirically demonstrate the feasibility of adversarial feature learning on
eliminating drowsiness effects from event related EEG activity features, by
using temporal recording block ordering as the source of drowsiness
variability.
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Quality but zipper is annoying
Thought it would stand up straighter in its own. It’s kind of hard to zipper because the sides are not super sturdy and pucker in. I have to turn it on its side to be able to zipper it Which is pretty annoying. Other than that, it is super cute and a quality product!
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We perform Monte-Carlo computations of four-point cluster connectivities in
the critical 2d Potts model, for numbers of states $Q\in (0,4)$ that are not
necessarily integer. We compare these connectivities to four-point functions in
a CFT that interpolates between D-series minimal models. We find that 3
combinations of the 4 independent connectivities agree with CFT four-point
functions, down to the $2$ to $4$ significant digits of our Monte-Carlo
computations. However, we argue that the agreement is exact only in the special
cases $Q=0, 3, 4$. We conjecture that the Potts model can be analytically
continued to a double cover of the half-plane $\{\Re c <13\}$, where $c$ is the
central charge of the Virasoro symmetry algebra.
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Lowe returns to the nest after, yet another, failed relationship, to find he's been assigned to jury duty. It's in the plans to, somehow, get out of it, when he realizes the defendant is the girl he's had a serious crush on since the first grade.<br /><br />Through living in the past by telling other people about his feelings towards this girl (played by Camp), Lowe remembers those feelings and does everything in his power to clear Camp of attempted murder, while staying away from the real bad guys at the same time, and succeeding in creating a successful film at the same time.<br /><br />I've heard that St Augustine is the oldest city in the US, and I also know it has some ties to Ponce de Leon, so the backdrop is a good place to start. Unfortunately, it's the only thing good about this movie. The local police are inept, the judge is an idiot, and the defense counsel does everything in her power to make herself look like Joanie Cunningham! I don't know whether to blame the director for poor direction, or for just letting the cast put in such a hapless effort.<br /><br />In short, this movie was so boring, I could not even sleep through it! 1 out of 10 stars!
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Time4sys is a formalism developed by Thales, realizing a graphical
specification for real-time systems. However, this formalism does not allow to
perform formal analyses for real-time systems. So a translation of this tool to
a formalism equipped with a formal semantics is needed. We present here
Time4sys2imi, a tool translating Time4sys models into parametric timed automata
in the input language of IMITATOR. This translation allows not only to check
the schedulability of real-time systems, but also to infer some timing
constraints (e.g., deadlines, offsets) guaranteeing schedulability. We
successfully applied Time4sys2imi to various examples.
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Buckle quality is bad
This is the 3rd gentle lead I’ve purchased the product works really well with my dogs but the quality of the clip that goes around there nose is awful I’ve had it break on 2/3 of them. The buckle is also EXTREMELY hard to clip hence probably why they always break.
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Tons of mold.
I loved this stuff at first but unfortunately I can’t have it in my boas enclosure without it molding horribly within a couple days. I keep following the exact instructions on the bag but nothing’s working. I really wish I could say something good because this did seem like quality moss. Unfortunately I’ve only been able to get a little over a weeks worth of using it due to having to completely replace it over and over hoping it would work. I’m very disappointed.
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According to section 91 part 24 of the Canadian constitution, the Canadian federal government is responsible for "Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians".
So why is the Ontario provincial government providing tax money for mental health workers and health-care on Indian reserves in Ontario? Why isn't the Canadian federal government paying for it all?
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Talking points and flag waving nothing else. Tony Clement said the same things but when asked for "what exactly would you do differently?", he didn't ever explain and hung up on the CBC, and the priceless free air time he could have used to sell his plan, (if he really had one in the first place).
This reflects the same actions as Trumps Executive Order enacting the Muslim Ban. When pressed "what exactly is the threat, beyond talking points and flag waving?" and his crack team of US Attorneys had nothing. "See you in Court!" was his reaction and he hung up the phone on twitter.
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In this paper, we propose a geometric framework to analyze the convergence
properties of gradient descent trajectories in the context of linear neural
networks. We translate a well-known empirical observation of linear neural nets
into a conjecture that we call the \emph{overfitting conjecture} which states
that, for almost all training data and initial conditions, the trajectory of
the corresponding gradient descent system converges to a global minimum. This
would imply that the solution achieved by vanilla gradient descent algorithms
is equivalent to that of the least-squares estimation, for linear neural
networks of an arbitrary number of hidden layers. Built upon a key invariance
property induced by the network structure, we first establish convergence of
gradient descent trajectories to critical points of the square loss function in
the case of linear networks of arbitrary depth. Our second result is the proof
of the \emph{overfitting conjecture} in the case of single-hidden-layer linear
networks with an argument based on the notion of normal hyperbolicity and under
a generic property on the training data (i.e., holding for almost all training
data).
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We present an algorithm to determine topological invariants of inhomogeneous
systems, such as alloys, disordered crystals, or amorphous systems. Based on
the kernel polynomial method, our algorithm allows us to study samples with
more than $10^7$ degrees of freedom. Our method enables the study of large
complex compounds, where disorder is inherent to the system. We use it to
analyse Pb$_{1-x}$Sn$_{x}$Te and tighten the critical concentration for the
phase transition.
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Cosmic-rays with energies up to $3\times10^{20}$ eV have been observed. The
nuclear composition of these cosmic rays is unknown but if the incident nuclei
are protons then the corresponding center of mass energy is $\sqrt{s_{nn}} =
700$ TeV. High energy muons can be used to probe the composition of these
incident nuclei. The energy spectra of high-energy ($>$ 1 TeV) cosmic ray
induced muons have been measured with deep underground or under-ice detectors.
These muons come from pion and kaon decays and from charm production in the
atmosphere.
Terrestrial experiments are most sensitive to far-forward muons so the
production rates are sensitive to high-$x$ partons in the incident nucleus and
low-$x$ partons in the nitrogen/oxygen targets. Muon measurements can
complement the central-particle data collected at colliders. This paper will
review muon production data and discuss some non-perturbative (soft) models
that have been used to interpret the data. I will show measurements of TeV muon
transverse momentum ($p_T$) spectra in cosmic-ray air showers from MACRO, and
describe how the IceCube neutrino observatory and the proposed Km3Net detector
will extend these measurements to a higher $p_T$ region where perturbative QCD
should apply. With a 1 km$^2$ surface area, the full IceCube detector should
observe hundreds of muons/year with $p_T$ in the pQCD regime.
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We present the Insertion Transformer, an iterative, partially autoregressive
model for sequence generation based on insertion operations. Unlike typical
autoregressive models which rely on a fixed, often left-to-right ordering of
the output, our approach accommodates arbitrary orderings by allowing for
tokens to be inserted anywhere in the sequence during decoding. This
flexibility confers a number of advantages: for instance, not only can our
model be trained to follow specific orderings such as left-to-right generation
or a binary tree traversal, but it can also be trained to maximize entropy over
all valid insertions for robustness. In addition, our model seamlessly
accommodates both fully autoregressive generation (one insertion at a time) and
partially autoregressive generation (simultaneous insertions at multiple
locations). We validate our approach by analyzing its performance on the WMT
2014 English-German machine translation task under various settings for
training and decoding. We find that the Insertion Transformer outperforms many
prior non-autoregressive approaches to translation at comparable or better
levels of parallelism, and successfully recovers the performance of the
original Transformer while requiring only logarithmically many iterations
during decoding.
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I really liked this film about love between two adults in postwar Britain. The high standards of BBC TV is evident in the production, and superb lead actors (Claire Bloom and Joss Ackland) make this an uplifting experience. Bloom and Ackland have previously worked together in theatre, and their chemistry and interaction is splendid. I recommend this version of Shadowlands over the film version of 1993.
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The nucleosynthetic site of the rapid ($r$) neutron-capture process is
currently being debated. The direct detection of the neutron star merger
GW170817, through gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation, has
confirmed such events as important sources of the $r$-process elements.
However, chemical evolution models are not able to reproduce the observed
chemical abundances in the Milky Way when neutron star mergers are assumed to
be the only $r$-process site and realistic time distributions of such events
are taken into account. Now for the first time, we combine all the available
observational evidence of the Milky Way and its dwarf galaxy satellites to show
that the data can only be explained if there are (at least) two distinct
$r$-process sites: a quick source with timescales comparable to core-collapse
supernovae, $t_{quick}\lesssim10^8$ yr, and a delayed source with
characteristic timescales $t_{delayed}\gtrsim4$ Gyr. The delayed $r$-process
source most probably originates in neutron star mergers, as the timescale fits
well with that estimated for GW170817. Given the short timescales of the quick
source, it is likely associated with massive stars, though a specific
fast-track channel for compact object mergers cannot be excluded at this point.
Our approach demonstrates that only by looking at all the available data will
we be able to solve the puzzle that is the $r$-process.
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We use extensive new observations of the very rich z ~ 0.4 cluster of
galaxies A851 to examine the nature and origin of starburst galaxies in
intermediate-redshift clusters. New HST observations, Spitzer photometry and
ground-based spectroscopy cover most of a region of the cluster about 10 arcmin
across, corresponding to a clustercentric radial distance of about 1.6 Mpc.
This spatial coverage allows us to confirm the existence of a
morphology-density relation within this cluster, and to identify several large,
presumably infalling, subsystems. We confirm our previous conclusion that a
very large fraction of the starforming galaxies in A851 have recently undergone
starbursts. We argue that starbursts are mostly confined to two kinds of sites:
infalling groups and the cluster center. At the cluster center it appears that
infalling galaxies are undergoing major mergers, resulting in starbursts whose
optical emission lines are completely buried beneath dust. The aftermath of
this process appears to be proto-S0 galaxies devoid of star formation. In
contrast, major mergers do not appear to be the cause of most of the starbursts
in infalling groups, and fewer of these events result in the transformation of
the galaxy into an S0. Some recent theoretical work provides possible
explanations for these two distinct processes, but it is not clear whether they
can operate with the very high efficiency needed to account for the very large
starburst rate observed.
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We consider Riemannian 4d BF lattice gauge theory, on a triangulation of
spacetime. Introducing the simplicity constraints which turn BF theory into
simplicial gravity, some geometric quantities of Regge calculus, areas, and 3d
and 4d dihedral angles, are identified. The parallel transport conditions are
taken care of to ensure a consistent gluing of simplices. We show that these
gluing relations, together with the simplicity constraints, contain the
constraints of area-angle Regge calculus in a simple way, via the group
structure of the underlying BF gauge theory. This provides a precise road from
constrained BF theory to area-angle Regge calculus. Doing so, a framework
combining variables of lattice BF theory and Regge calculus is built. The
action takes a form {\it \`a la Regge} and includes the contribution of the
Immirzi parameter. In the absence of simplicity constraints, the standard spin
foam model for BF theory is recovered. Insertions of local observables are
investigated, leading to Casimir insertions for areas and 6j-symbols for 3d
angles. The present formulation is argued to be suitable for deriving spin foam
models from discrete path integrals.
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Quadruply lensed quasars are extremely rare objects, but incredibly powerful
cosmological tools. Only few dozen are known in the whole sky. Here we present
the spectroscopic confirmation of two new quadruplets WG0214-2105 and
WG2100-4452 discovered by Agnello & Spiniello (2018) within the Dark Energy
Survey (DES) public footprints. We have conducted spectroscopic follow-up of
these systems with the Southern African Large Telescope as part of a program
that aims at confirming the largest possible number of optically selected
strong gravitational lensing systems in the Equatorial and Southern Hemisphere.
For both systems, we present the spectra for the sources and deflectors that
allowed us to estimate the source redshifts and unambiguously confirm their
lensing nature. For the brighter deflector (WG2100-4452), we measure the
stellar velocity dispersion from the spectrum. We also obtain photometry for
both lenses, directly from DES multi-band images, isolating the lens galaxies
from the quasar images. One of the quadruplets, WG0214-2105, was also observed
by Pan-STARRS, allowing us to estimate the apparent brightness of each quasar
image at two different epochs, and thus to find evidence for flux variability.
This result could suggest a microlensing event for the faintest components,
although intrinsic variability cannot be excluded with only two epochs.
Finally, we present simple lens models for both quadruplets, obtaining Einstein
radii, SIE velocity dispersions, ellipticities, and position angles of the lens
systems, as well as time delay predictions assuming a concordance cosmological
model.
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Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are in process of overlaying their
conventional macro cellular networks with shorter range cells such as outdoor
pico cells. The resultant increase in network complexity creates substantial
overhead in terms of operating expenses, time, and labor for their planning and
management. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers the potential for MNOs to
operate their networks in a more organic and cost-efficient manner. We argue
that deploying AI in 5G and Beyond will require surmounting significant
technical barriers in terms of robustness, performance, and complexity. We
outline future research directions, identify top 5 challenges, and present a
possible roadmap to realize the vision of AI-enabled cellular networks for
Beyond-5G and 6G.
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SINGAPORE: Singapore has benefited enormously from globalisation and it must resist the temptation to be otherwise, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said.Lee made the remarks in his New Year Message on Wednesday (Jan 1) to his fellow Singaporeans.He also noted that the state of the world worries Singaporeans as the global slowdown has affected the economy.Many societies are under stress despite economic growth as the fruits of economic growth have not been shared equitably, with income gaps widening, he said.Singapore has to stay open and connected to the world, the prime minister said, adding, "A Singapore turned inwards cannot survive."In November, the Trade and Industry Ministry said the economy is expected to grow only by 0.5 to 1% in 2019.But Lee assured Singaporeans the upcoming Budget on Jan 18 will have measures to help businesses, workers, families as well as the poor, elderly and the vulnerable. And with that, he is confident will have a good and memorable year in 2020.While companies will get help to raise their productivity and build new capabilities, workers, especially mid-career PMETs - professionals, managers, executives and technicians - will be given a hand to retrain, find new jobs and stay employable, he added.The social safety nets that protect the poor, elderly and vulnerable will be improved, and "we will help households with their cost of living", the Prime Minister said in a message recorded at the Bicentennial Experience exhibition in Fort Canning.The showcase of important moments in Singapore's history was a key event to commemorate the country's Bicentennial year, which Lee said provided a vivid reminder of how much the island has changed over the centuries, and how far the Republic has come."Recounting this history has enhanced our collective consciousness of the past, strengthened our sense of togetherness in the present, and boosted our confidence in a shared future," he said."In Singapore, the aim is to build a fair and just society, where growth and prosperity benefits everyone, and the human spirit can flourish." - Asian News Network
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This great movie has failed to register a higher rating than 5!Why not!It is a great portrayal of the life of Christ without the ruthless sensationalism of The Passion of The Christ.Johnny Cash did great things for God which amazingly are shunned and neglected in areas where they should matter most,like our churches.The film itself took less than a month to film as Johnny felt the strong presence of God guiding him through it.Great credit to everyone involved in this overwhelmingly sincere movie which will always be cherished by its fans.At least the Billy Graham crusade rated it highly enough to use it as a prime source of education for new Christians.Thanks Fox for producing it.As Walk the Line proved that it was freakish that this man survived yet alone produced such an underrated masterpiece.Movies are not canonized through popular vote as this production proves! In summary I believe that this film is one of the worlds great documentaries as it is forthright, honestly portrayed and a great witness to the Christian faith!
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Stopped working after a few months
I liked these cables initially - seemed to be good quality. I liked having a really long one for work. And a good price... But before 3 months of use, two stopped working and now 3 of the 4 have stopped charging my iPhone 8. When you plug it in to the iPhone, it makes it look like it will charge, but then comes a message that "this device may not be supported" and no charging follows. I would not recommend this product.
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We show that the spin-current response of a semiconductor crystal to an
external electric field is considerably more complex than previously assumed.
While in systems of high symmetry only the spin-Hall components are allowed, in
systems of lower symmetry other non-spin-Hall components may be present. We
argue that, when spin-orbit interactions are present only in the band
structure, the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic contributions to the
spin current is not useful. We show that the generation of spin currents and
that of spin densities in an electric field are closely related, and that our
general theory provides a systematic way to distinguish between them in
experiment. We discuss also the meaning of vertex corrections in systems with
spin-orbit interactions.
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Handle Gently
Cheeply made, but does the job. Be careful when inserting the cord from the iron into the top plastic feed or it will break. Once the cord is in you are ok. The clamp onto the ironing board is also a plastic screw. Don't get rough with it. Will see how long this Cord Minder lasts with careful use. Also there is nothing "silver powder coated" about it. The Silver is ALL plastic.
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We present continuum models that describe the evolution of the position of a
random walker on a growing network using four different growth algorithms.
Three of these involve a random element, including one in which the motility
rate of the random walker controls the network topology. For motility rates in
which the position of the walker can be treated as quasi-stationary, we present
accurate approximations to replace pair probabilities that allow us to
numerically solve an otherwise intractable system of equations.
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When a negative slope of the dispersion curve is encountered, the propagating
light may be either 'fast light' or 'backward propagating'. We show that
causality considerations select only one of which for each scenario, and
demonstrate that the same photonic (plasmonic) system can support both type of
solutions depending on parameters.
|
Exploiting spectral properties of symmetric banded Toeplitz matrices, we
describe simple sufficient conditions for positivity of a trigonometric
polynomial formulated as linear matrix inequalities (LMI) in the coefficients.
As an application of these results, we derive a hierarchy of convex LMI inner
approximations (affine sections of the cone of positive definite matrices of
size $m$) of the nonconvex set of Schur stable polynomials of given degree $n <
m$. It is shown that when $m$ tends to infinity the hierarchy converges to a
lifted LMI approximation (projection of an LMI set defined in a lifted space of
dimension quadratic in $n$) already studied in the technical literature.
|
An inflation model based on dimensional (de)construction of a massive gauge
theory is proposed. The inflaton in this model is the "zero-mode" of a
component of the massive gauge field in the (de)constructed extra dimensions.
The inflaton potential originates from the gauge invariant Stueckelberg
potential. At low energy, the field range of the inflaton is enhanced by a
factor $N^{\frac{d}{2}}$ compared to the field range of the original fields in
the model, where $d$ is the number of the (de)constructed extra dimensions and
$N$ is the number of the lattice points in each (de)constructed dimension. This
enhancement of the field range is used to achieve a trans-Planckian inflaton
field excursion. The extension of the mechanism ``excursions through KK modes''
to the case of (de)constructed extra dimensions is also studied. The burst of
particle productions by this mechanism may have observable consequences in a
region of the model parameter space.
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We report the properties of two new isostructural compounds, U3Bi4Ni3 and
U3Bi4Rh3. The first of these compounds is non-metallic, and the second is a
nearly ferromagnetic metal, both as anticipated from their electron count
relative to other U-based members of the larger 3-4-3 family. For U3Bi4Rh3, a
logarithmic increase of C/T below 3 K, a resistivity proportional to T^4/3, and
the recovery of Fermi-liquid behavior in both properties with applied fields
greater than 3T, suggest that U3Bi4Rh3 may be a new example of a material
displaying ferromagnetic quantum criticality.
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Sorry, I didn't make clear I was responding to the snark about toppling statues of Lincoln.
But...Lincoln's ostensibly racist comments didn't necessarily reflect his views. I'd be curious to hear what you think of this article by James McPherson, "What Did He Really Think About Race?":
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/03/29/what-did-he-really-think-about-race/
At any rate, it's simply false to insist that Lincoln was "as racist as anyone."
|
As part of the effort to improve quality and to reduce national healthcare
costs, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are responsible for
creating and maintaining an array of clinical quality measures (CQMs) for
assessing healthcare structure, process, outcome, and patient experience across
various conditions, clinical specialties, and settings. The development and
maintenance of CQMs involves substantial and ongoing evaluation of the evidence
on the measure's properties: importance, reliability, validity, feasibility,
and usability. As such, CMS conducts monthly environmental scans of the
published clinical and health service literature. Conducting time consuming,
exhaustive evaluations of the ever-changing healthcare literature presents one
of the largest challenges to an evidence-based approach to healthcare quality
improvement. Thus, it is imperative to leverage automated techniques to aid CMS
in the identification of clinical and health services literature relevant to
CQMs. Additionally, the estimated labor hours and related cost savings of using
CMS Sematrix compared to a traditional literature review are roughly 818 hours
and 122,000 dollars for a single monthly environmental scan.
|
We describe the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the
first professional scientific organization based exclusively in virtual worlds
(VWs). The goals of MICA are to explore the utility of the emerging VR and VWs
technologies for scientific and scholarly work in general, and to facilitate
and accelerate their adoption by the scientific research community. MICA itself
is an experiment in academic and scientific practices enabled by the immersive
VR technologies. We describe the current and planned activities and research
directions of MICA, and offer some thoughts as to what the future developments
in this arena may be.
|
The placement scheme of virtual machines (VMs) to physical servers (PSs) is
crucial to lowering operational cost for cloud providers. Evolutionary
algorithms (EAs) have been performed promising-solving on virtual machine
placement (VMP) problems in the past. However, as growing demand for cloud
services, the existing EAs fail to implement in large-scale virtual machine
placement (LVMP) problem due to the high time complexity and poor scalability.
Recently, the multi-factorial optimization (MFO) technology has surfaced as a
new search paradigm in evolutionary computing. It offers the ability to evolve
multiple optimization tasks simultaneously during the evolutionary process.
This paper aims to apply the MFO technology to the LVMP problem in
heterogeneous environment. Firstly, we formulate a deployment cost based VMP
problem in the form of the MFO problem. Then, a multi-factorial evolutionary
algorithm (MFEA) embedded with greedy-based allocation operator is developed to
address the established MFO problem. After that, a re-migration and merge
operator is designed to offer the integrated solution of the LVMP problem from
the solutions of MFO problem. To assess the effectiveness of our proposed
method, the simulation experiments are carried on large-scale and extra
large-scale VMs test data sets. The results show that compared with various
heuristic methods, our method could shorten optimization time significantly and
offer a competitive placement solution for the LVMP problem in heterogeneous
environment.
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In this work, we investigate the problem of simultaneously learning and
controlling a system subject to adversarial choices of disturbances and system
parameters. We study the problem for a scalar system with $l_\infty$-norm
bounded disturbances and system parameters constrained to lie in a known
bounded convex polytope. We present a controller that is globally stabilizing
and gives continuously improving bounds on the worst-case state deviation. The
proposed controller simultaneously learns the system parameters and controls
the system. The controller emerges naturally from an optimization problem and
balances exploration and exploitation in such a way that it is able to
efficiently stabilize unstable and adversarial system dynamics. Specifically,
if the controller is faced with large uncertainty, the initial focus is on
exploration, retrieving information about the system by applying state-feedback
controllers with varying gains and signs. In a pre-specified bounded region
around the origin, our control strategy can be seen as passive in the sense
that it learns very little information. Only once the noise and/or system
parameters act in an adversarial way, leading to the state exiting the
aforementioned region for more than one time-step, our proposed controller
behaves aggressively in that it is guaranteed to learn enough about the system
to subsequently robustly stabilize it. We end by demonstrating the efficiency
of our methods via numerical simulations.
|
(various spoilers follow)<br /><br />Gene Kelly. Not Georges Guetary, who is sometimes criticized for being too young and un-French. Not Leslie Caron, who is sometimes criticized for her very green performance. Not even Oscar Levant, who more often than not annoys the dickens out of me.<br /><br />No, it would definitely be Gene Kelly. There's something about his screen persona that's too ambitious and focused for him to be convincing as a penniless artist in Paris, content to put off facing the critics indefinitely, frolicking with little kids and old ladies and painting in the streets. That's what made him so effective in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN and other movies where he played ambitious, focused characters. Jerry Mulligan is in some ways a cousin to Tommy Albright in BRIGADOON, another Lerner story with Kelly miscast as an American at loose ends who falls in love with a picturesque European place and an innocent female who embodies its virtues.<br /><br />Except that Jerry isn't as likeable as even poor dazed Tommy. That's another galling thing about this film. Jerry is sometimes a cad to Milo, and even worse to Lise. When he first sees the latter at a club, he pulls a dirty trick to get her to dance with him. When she sits down again he pulls an even dirtier trick to get her phone number. When he calls her the next day she hangs up on him, which he takes as a cue to drop in at her workplace. And throughout all this it's obvious she wants NOTHING to do with him. When she starts laughing at his jokes in the perfume shop, it's about as believable as Milo's interest in his paintings. Sure he's good-looking and playful, but why should that sway her when she's got Henri, who seems like a gentleman to boot?<br /><br />Admittedly it comes off so distasteful partly because of the actress. If a role like Lise was played by, say, Judy Garland, she would shower Jerry with indignant insults and glares. If she was played by Cyd Charisse, one would admire his guts. But when she's played by first-timer Leslie Caron she looks and acts like a shy, vulnerable teenager, and as a result Jerry just seems like a creep. And why DID they choose these other actors (though personally I'd rather they'd solved things by changing the lead) when the whole story hinges on the romance of these two young poor sweethearts disentangling themselves from their loveless commitments to older rich people? Not only is Gene Kelly a few years above Guetary and Foch, he's old enough to be Caron's father.<br /><br />In short I think it all would have been improved by casting some young comedic-relief type dancer as Jerry, the kind that usually turned up in musical supporting roles...e.g. Ray MacDonald in GOOD NEWS or Bobby Van in SMALL TOWN GIRL. Maybe not them necessarily but someone LIKE them. Someone who could have chased Lise and made it seem harmlessly playful; someone who would have appeared genuinely happy living in that Chaplinesque hole-in-the-wall; someone whose humor and naivete would have contrasted better with Oscar Levant's sarcastic grumpiness. It probably also would have made the ballet seem less ponderous. And it might have provided a voice that could sing Gershwin better.<br /><br />All this may give the impression that I don't like Gene Kelly. I do like him. He was terrific in most of his films, just not this one (well, and a few others). I don't despise AAIP itself, either; it has good points, like the art direction. And Leslie Caron, who despite her inexperience is rather charming, and really does look like she just stepped out of a painting. Georges Guetary does a fine job and his "Stairway to Paradise" is my favorite number in the movie. Nina Foch is beautiful and touching and should have ended up with SOMEBODY. But not Jerry Mulligan. I wouldn't wish that on her.
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I saw this film at the International Film Festival Of Brussels. I also met the director of the film. I heard that Ed Wood wrote the story in 10 years! I'm sure he thought his would be his masterpiece - his triumph.<br /><br />Well, if you take the film seriously (like mr. Wood did) it is really one of the worst films you will ever see. And this is cool. The big joke of I Woke Up Early The Day I Died is that it doesn't even try to be a decent film.<br /><br />This makes the film very, very good. The script is filled with nihilism and anarchism - a lot of black humour. Billy Zane's role is absolutely excellent. You see, this is either high art...or low rubbish.<br /><br />****/*****
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Not a Strainer
The thing I dislike most about this is the post is immovable. You push the whole strainer down and then there's no way to pull it up slightly for water to drain when done. You have to remove the whole unit or it gets sucked down and plugs the hole again. How can it be called a strainer if it doesn't strain? It should just be called a drain plug because that's all it's good for.
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In this paper we present the expressions for the energy of a regular class of
exact black hole solutions of Einstein's equations coupled with a nonlinear
electrodynamics source. We calculate the energy distribution using the
Einstein, Weinberg and M{\o}ller prescriptions. We make a discussion of the
results in function of two specific parameters, a sort of dipole and quadrupole
moments of the nonlinear source $\alpha$ and $\beta$, and in addition a study
of some particular cases is performed.
|
The coupling of unparticles to the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson leads to a
breaking of conformal symmetry which produces an effective mass term in the
unparticle propagator. Simultaneously, the unparticle couplings to other SM
fields produces an effective unparticle decay width via one-loop self-energy
graphs. The resulting unparticle propagator then leads to a rather unique
appearance for the shape of unparticle resonances that are not of the usual
Breit-Wigner variety when they form in high energy collisions. In this paper we
explore whether or not such resonances, appearing in the Drell-Yan channel at
the LHC, can be differentiated from more conventional $Z'$-like structures
which are representative of the typical Breit-Wigner lineshape. We will
demonstrate that even with the high integrated luminosities available at the
LHC it may be difficult to differentiate these two types of resonance
structures for a substantial range of the unparticle model parameters.
|
Yang-Mills gauge theory on Minkowski space supports a
Batalin-Vilkovisky-infinity algebra structure, all whose operations are local.
To make this work, the axioms for a BV-infinity algebra are deformed by a
quadratic element, here the Minkowski wave operator. This homotopy structure
implies BCJ/color-kinematics duality; a cobar construction yields a strict
algebraic structure whose Feynman expansion for Yang-Mills tree amplitudes
complies with the duality. It comes with a `syntactic kinematic algebra'.
|
" the role of Zionists in the Bolshevik/Communist revolutions"
Veritas, to be clear, Zionists did not play a major role in the Russian Bolshevik revolution-- they were opposing ideologies, which is what Churchill meant by the struggle for Jewish hearts. Jewish activists had to choose between the Zionist dream of a happy Jewish homeland in Palestine or the Marxist vision of heaven on Earth following a Communist/Socialist/Anarchist revolution in Russia.
Indeed, many Russian Jews, particular those of a more secular background, chose Bolshevism. Many others, however, were leaders in more moderate, democratic socialist organizations in Russia, as the Mensheviks. It's ironic that while many of the leading Bolsheviks were Jewish, Stalinist Russia became cruelly anti-Semitic.
Additionally, many of the early Zionist settlers in Palestine were also socialist, resulting in the famous kibbutz communities.
|
New type of quantum kinetic equations of the Fermi particles are derived. The
Bogolyubov's type of dispersion relation, which is valid for the Bose fluid, is
disclosed. Model of neutral Bose atoms in dense strongly coupled plasmas with
attractive interaction is discussed. A set of fluid equations describing the
quantum plasmas is obtained. Furthermore, the equation of state of a degenerate
Fermi plasma is derived.
|
We demonstrate that many-body localization of two-dimensional weakly
interacting bosons in disorder remains stable in the thermodynamic limit at
sufficiently low temperatures. Highly energetic particles destroy the localized
state only above a critical temperature, which increases with the strength of
the disorder. If the particle distribution is truncated at high energies, as it
does for cold atom systems, the localization can be stable at any temperature.
|
Great fan
Great fan, moves a lot of air compared to some other brands we tried. We use it mostly to move air from our living area down the hall to the bedrooms. The multiple speed feature is nice. Would have given it five stars if the brackets allowed for it to sit flush against a wall, it kind of juts out and looks a little odd in a doorway corner
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but anyway i i think that um we are paying a lot in taxes but i think that we have a government and we have a lot of freedoms and we have a lot of things that uh you know the governments doing with our money um we're probably one of the the only countries in the world that has all the things that we have the you know as far as the quality of the streets the school systems um the hospital stuff that the the government gives money to um the you know all the things that the government does like that i uh i think they need to manage it a little bit better but i don't think uh anybody is just going to come in and fix it in a couple of weeks because they've been messing it up for many years now so yeah
|
Pidgin is fun, easy, and natural to talk on the playground when you’re a kid. You don’t need to learn it in the classroom, because it has so few rules; it’s also easier to learn if formal English is your second language. While it’s a fine exercise to study it at UH, it doesn’t need to be taught in schools, where the rigor of learning English is difficult enough for many; oddly while easy to speak, it’s very difficult to write, let alone spell check on a computer, which may be why it is facing some decline among text addicted youth, who are developing their own slang for that media. If you could only speak Pidgin, or Hawaiian for that matter, your prospects for employment are very limited, and non-existent if you ever leave Hawai‘i. On the other hand, if you can’t at least understand some Pidgin, you aren’t really experiencing Hawai‘i, just visiting it.
|
We propose a topic-guided variational autoencoder (TGVAE) model for text
generation. Distinct from existing variational autoencoder (VAE) based
approaches, which assume a simple Gaussian prior for the latent code, our model
specifies the prior as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) parametrized by a neural
topic module. Each mixture component corresponds to a latent topic, which
provides guidance to generate sentences under the topic. The neural topic
module and the VAE-based neural sequence module in our model are learned
jointly. In particular, a sequence of invertible Householder transformations is
applied to endow the approximate posterior of the latent code with high
flexibility during model inference. Experimental results show that our TGVAE
outperforms alternative approaches on both unconditional and conditional text
generation, which can generate semantically-meaningful sentences with various
topics.
|
We construct twisted instanton solutions of CP(n) models. Generically a
charge-k instanton splits into k(n+1) well-separated and almost static
constituents carrying fractional topological charges and being ordered along
the noncompact direction. The locations, sizes and charges of the constituents
are related to the moduli parameters of the instantons. We sketch how solutions
with fractional total charge can be obtained. We also calculate the fermionic
zero modes with quasi-periodic boundary conditions in the background of twisted
instantons for minimally and supersymmetrically coupled fermions. The zero
modes are tracers for the constituents and show a characteristic hopping. The
analytical findings are compared to results extracted from Monte-Carlo
generated and cooled configurations of the corresponding lattice models.
Analytical and numerical results are in full agreement and it is demonstrated
that the fermionic zero modes are excellent filters for constituents hidden in
fluctuating lattice configurations.
|
The hybrid design of the Pierre Auger Observatory allows for the measurement
of a number of properties of extensive air showers initiated by ultra-high
energy cosmic rays. By comparing these measurements to predictions from air
shower simulations, it is possible to both infer the cosmic ray's mass
composition and test hadronic interactions beyond the energies reached by
accelerators. In this paper, we will present a compilation of results of air
shower measurements by Pierre Auger Observatory which are sensitive to the
properties of hadronic interactions and can be used to constrain the hadronic
interaction models. The inconsistencies found between the interpretation of
different observables with regard to primary composition and between their
measurements and simulations show that none of the currently used hadronic
interaction models can provide a proper description of air showers and, in
particular, of the muon production.
|
Stationary rotating strings can be viewed as geodesic motions in appropriate
metrics on a two-dimensional space. We obtain all solutions describing
stationary rotating strings in flat spacetime as an application. These rotating
strings have infinite length with various wiggly shapes. Averaged value of the
string energy, the angular momentum and the linear momentum along the string
are discussed.
|
In this paper we give a bijection between the class of permutations that can
be drawn on an X-shape and a certain set of permutations that appears in
[Knuth] in connection to sorting algorithms. A natural generalization of this
set leads us to the definition of almost-increasing permutations, which is a
one-parameter family of permutations that can be characterized in terms of
forbidden patterns. We find generating functions for almost-increasing
permutations by using their cycle structure to map them to colored Motzkin
paths. We also give refined enumerations with respect to the number of cycles,
fixed points, excedances, and inversions.
|
We generalise a recent example by F. Bracci, J. Raissy and B. Stens{\o}nes to
construct automorphisms of $\mathbb{C}^{d}$ admitting an arbitrary finite
number of non-recurrent Fatou components, each biholomorphic to
$\mathbb{C}\times(\mathbb{C}^{*})^{d-1}$ and all attracting to a common
boundary fixed point. These automorphisms can be chosen such that each Fatou
component is invariant or such that the components are grouped into periodic
cycles of any common period. We further show that no orbit in these attracting
Fatou components can converge tangent to a complex submanifold, and that every
stable orbit near the fixed point is contained either in these attracting
components or in one of $d$ invariant hypersurfaces tangent to each coordinate
hyperplane on which the automorphism acts as an irrational rotation.
|
ImportanceSARS-CoV-2 enters the nasopharynx to replicate; nasal irrigation soon after diagnosis could reduce viral load and inhibit furin cleavage necessary for cell entry, thereby reducing morbidity and mortality.
ObjectiveTo determine whether initiating nasal irrigation after COVID-19 diagnosis reduces hospitalizations and death in high-risk outpatients, and whether irrigant composition impacts severity.
DesignUnblinded randomized clinical trial of two nasal irrigation protocols in older outpatients PCR positive for SARS-CoV-2, with an observational arm using laboratory-confirmed cases in the CDC COVID-19 Case Surveillance dataset.
SettingSingle-lab community testing facility associated with the emergency department (ED) in Augusta, GA.
ParticipantsA consecutive sample of high-risk adults were enrolled within 24 hours of a positive COVID-19 test between September 24 and December 21 of 2020. Patients aged 55 and older were remotely consented. Among 826 screened, 321 of 694 eligible patients were unable to be reached, 294 refused participation, and 79 participants were enrolled.
InterventionsParticipants were randomly assigned adding 2.5 mL povidone-iodine 10% or 2.5 mL sodium bicarbonate to 240 mL of isotonic nasal irrigation twice daily for 14 days.
Main Outcomes and MeasuresThe primary outcome was hospitalization or death from COVID-19 within 28 days of enrollment by daily self-report confirmed with phone calls and hospital records, compared to the CDC Surveillance Dataset covering the same time. Secondary outcomes compared symptom resolution by irrigant additive.
ResultsSeventy-nine high-risk participants were enrolled (mean [SD] age, 64 [8] years; 36 [46%] women; 71% Non-Hispanic White), with mean BMI 30.3. Analyzed by intention-to-treat, by day 28, COVID-19 symptoms resulted in one ED visit and no hospitalizations in 42 irrigating with alkalinization, one hospitalization of 37 in the povidone-iodine group, (1.27%) and no deaths. Of nearly three million CDC cases, 9.47% were known to be hospitalized, with an additional 1.5% mortality in those without hospitalization data. The total risk of hospitalization or death (11%) was 8.57 times that of enrolled patients (SE=2.74; P=.006). 62 completed daily surveys (78%), averaging 1.8 irrigations/day. Eleven had irrigation complaints, and four discontinued. There were no significant differences by additive.
ConclusionSARS-CoV-2+ participants initiating nasal irrigation were over 8 times less likely to be hospitalized than the national rate.
Trial RegistrationClinicalTrial.gov Identifier: NCT04559035
Author ApprovalAll authors have filled out ICMJE and approved submission.
Conflict of Interest StatementMaterials were provided by Neilmed Inc. and Rhinosystems Inc. The study was supported by funding from the Bernard and Anne Gray Donor Advised Fund Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, Neilmed Inc., and Rhinosystems. No authors have conflict of interest.
Key PointsO_ST_ABSQuestionC_ST_ABSAfter testing positive for COVID-19, will rapidly initiating nasal irrigation reduce the risk of morbidity and mortality compared to a national dataset?
FindingsA consecutive sample of 79 high-risk adults (mean age 64, BMI 30.3) were randomized to initiate one of two nasal irrigation protocols within 24 hours of a positive COVID-19 test. Compared to a CDC COVID-19 National Dataset observational arm, 1.27% of participants initiating twice daily nasal irrigation were hospitalized or died, compared to 11%, a significant difference.
MeaningIn high-risk outpatients testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 who initiated nasal irrigation rapidly after diagnosis, risk of hospitalization or death was eight times lower than national rates reported by the CDC.
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This is a pretty bad movie. But not so bad as it's reputation suggests. The production values aren't too bad and there is the odd effective scene. And it does have an 80's cheezoid veneer that means that it is always kind of fun. Watch out, too, for Jimmy Nail's brief appearance - his attempt at an American accent is so astoundingly rubbish it's fantastic. Fantastic too are Sybil Danning's breasts - they make a brief appearance in the movie but the scene is repeated umpteen times in the end credits in what can only be described as the 12" remix of Sybil Danning's boobs. Has to be seen to be believed. As a horror movie it isn't scary, the effects are silly and Christopher Lee turns up to sleepwalk through his performance. I guess he was buying a new house and needed some cash for the deposit. The two central characters - the man and the woman - were so negligible that I have forgotten almost everything about them and I just watched this movie earlier tonight. The werewolves are noticeably less impressive than in the original movie, in fact, bizarrely, they sometimes look more like badly burned apes. The eastern European setting is quite good and the music provided by the new wave band Babel, while being pretty terrible, does at least give the film some added cheese.<br /><br />Overall? Good for a laugh. Not good quality but did you seriously expect it to be? And, at the very least, you've always got Sybil's knockers.
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