Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Pathfinder

A pathfinder version of CHIME (the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) is currently being commissioned at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, BC. The instrument is a hybrid cylindrical interferometer designed to measure the large scale neutral hydrogen power spectrum across the redshift range 0.8 to 2.5. The power spectrum will be used to measure the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale across this poorly probed redshift range where dark energy becomes a significant contributor to the evolution of the Universe. The instrument revives the cylinder design in radio astronomy with a wide field survey as a primary goal. Modern low-noise amplifiers and digital processing remove the necessity for the analog beamforming that characterized previous designs. The Pathfinder consists of two cylinders 37\,m long by 20\,m wide oriented north-south for a total collecting area of 1,500 square meters. The cylinders are stationary with no moving parts, and form a transit instrument with an instantaneous field of view of $\sim$100\,degrees by 1-2\,degrees. Each CHIME Pathfinder cylinder has a feedline with 64 dual polarization feeds placed every $\sim$30\,cm which Nyquist sample the north-south sky over much of the frequency band. The signals from each dual-polarization feed are independently amplified, filtered to 400-800\,MHz, and directly sampled at 800\,MSps using 8 bits. The correlator is an FX design, where the Fourier transform channelization is performed in FPGAs, which are interfaced to a set of GPUs that compute the correlation matrix. The CHIME Pathfinder is a 1/10th scale prototype version of CHIME and is designed to detect the BAO feature and constrain the distance-redshift relation.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures. submitted to Proc. SPIE, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation (2014

Developing identities in family musical involvement:A qualitative study

In both Chinese and Western cultures, the family plays an important role in shaping musical identity. However, family involvement in musical engagement is likely to be different in the two social and cultural contexts. We carried out a qualitative investigation into family musical involvement (FMI) in the Chinese context. A total of 16 members of six urban families in Chengdu, Sichuan, China took part in semi-structured interviews, which were analyzed using thematic analysis. All the participating families had experienced the one-child policy and their narratives included retrospective accounts. Our findings were consistent in suggesting that these Chinese families typically consist of a powerful mother, a weaker father, and an obedient child. Although the culture of Chinese family culture is traditionally considered to be male-dominated and patriarchal, mothers have a dominant status in FMI because they often provide key opinions and make decisions for the whole family. Children are at the core of FMI as a Chinese family’s FMI is often child-centered. The roles that individual family members play can reflect their status and how they perceive the status of music in the family, which is also helpful for understanding the mechanisms underlying FMI.</p

Developing categories for children’s creative and responsive musical actions in group improvisation:A mixed methods action research study

Defining categories of musical actions in improvisation with young children is challenging due to the spontaneous, creative and emergent nature of interactions. Following a literature review, two new constructs were proposed to circumscribe and classify different types of events in improvisation, Creative Musical Agency (CMA) and Socio-Musical Aptitude (S-MA). These were refined and tested through eight phases of mixed-methods research. Two cycles of improvisation workshops were video-recorded. Multimodal Video Analysis of musical, gaze and gestural Modes of Communication contextualized with field notes was used to refine constructs. Two raters independently observed and rated children’s improvisations as showing CMA, S-MA or neither, giving reasons for difficulty or ambiguity in using constructs in separate interviews. Raters demonstrated fair agreement for CMA (Κappa 0.21) and moderate agreement for S-MA (Kappa 0.5). Development of these constructs offers a valuable way of understanding the complexity of young children’s musical actions and mental processes in improvisation.</p

Microbial ligand costimulation drives neutrophilic steroid-refractory asthma

Funding: The authors thank the Wellcome Trust (102705) and the Universities of Aberdeen and Cape Town for funding. This research was also supported, in part, by National Institutes of Health GM53522 and GM083016 to DLW. KF and BNL are funded by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, BNL is the recipient of an European Research Commission consolidator grant and participates in the European Union FP7 programs EUBIOPRED and MedALL. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Data Characterization and Map Making

We present a description of the data reduction and mapmaking pipeline used for the 2008 observing season of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). The data presented here at 148 GHz represent 12% of the 90 TB collected by ACT from 2007 to 2010. In 2008 we observed for 136 days, producing a total of 1423 hours of data (11 TB for the 148 GHz band only), with a daily average of 10.5 hours of observation. From these, 1085 hours were devoted to a 850 deg^2 stripe (11.2 hours by 9.1 deg) centered on a declination of -52.7 deg, while 175 hours were devoted to a 280 deg^2 stripe (4.5 hours by 4.8 deg) centered at the celestial equator. We discuss sources of statistical and systematic noise, calibration, telescope pointing, and data selection. Out of 1260 survey hours and 1024 detectors per array, 816 hours and 593 effective detectors remain after data selection for this frequency band, yielding a 38% survey efficiency. The total sensitivity in 2008, determined from the noise level between 5 Hz and 20 Hz in the time-ordered data stream (TOD), is 32 micro-Kelvin sqrt{s} in CMB units. Atmospheric brightness fluctuations constitute the main contaminant in the data and dominate the detector noise covariance at low frequencies in the TOD. The maps were made by solving the least-squares problem using the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient method, incorporating the details of the detector and noise correlations. Cross-correlation with WMAP sky maps, as well as analysis from simulations, reveal that our maps are unbiased at multipoles ell > 300. This paper accompanies the public release of the 148 GHz southern stripe maps from 2008. The techniques described here will be applied to future maps and data releases.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figures, 6 tables, an ACT Collaboration pape

Molecular profiling of signet ring cell colorectal cancer provides a strong rationale for genomic targeted and immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies

We would like to thank all patients whose samples were used in this study. We are also thankful to the Northern Ireland Biobank and Grampian Biorepository for providing us with tissue blocks and patient data; and Dr HG Coleman (Queen’s University Belfast) for her advice on statistical analyses. This work has been carried out with financial support from Cancer Research UK (grant: C11512/A18067), Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre Network (grant: C36697/A15590 from Cancer Research UK and the NI Health and Social Care Research and Development Division), the Sean Crummey Memorial Fund and the Tom Simms Memorial Fund. The Northern Ireland Biobank is funded by HSC Research and Development Division of the Public Health Agency in Northern Ireland and Cancer Research UK through the Belfast CRUK Centre and the Northern Ireland Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre; additional support was received from Friends of the Cancer Centre. The Northern Ireland Molecular Pathology Laboratory which is responsible for creating resources for the Northern Ireland Biobank has received funding from Cancer Research UK, Friends of the Cancer Centre and Sean Crummey Foundation.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Exploring approaches to community music delivery by practitioners with and without additional support needs:A qualitative study

Previous community music research indicates a diverse field with many forms of practice. Understanding the views of community music practitioners about their approaches offers an important way to understand their professional identities and strategies they employ. A qualitative study interviewed five community music practitioners from the same company to investigate their approaches. Two had 30 years of experience and were training three practitioners in workshop leading; one trainee (Joseph) has additional support needs (ASN). Two lay researchers with ASN contributed to thematic analysis. Two themes were identified: pedagogical identities accentuated personalization and enacting inclusivity as key dimensions of being a workshop leader; interpersonal processes demonstrated the crucial nature of individualized communication, humour and building relationships. Although Joseph’s interview shared these themes, he also identified confidence, adaptability and creativity as key qualities for himself to develop and expressed a strong personal identification with participants’ development of self-efficacy. While interviewees had varied musical backgrounds and skills, common principles may offer a basis for the translatable beneficial impacts of community music across the highly diverse facilitators and settings that characterize this field. Appreciating pedagogical contributions of practitioners with ASN can help in envisaging new identities and ways of being creative and inclusive in community music practice

Everyday micro-influencers and their impact on corporate brand reputation

Social media influencers (SMIs) are an important actor within the social media domain impacting upon organisations and brands. Traditionally SMIs are seen as individuals with millions of followers (Audrezet et al., 2018), however, there are also micro-influencers who have a relatively small follower base of less than 10,000 followers (Lin, Bruning, & Swarna, 2018). These micro-influencers are now being recognised in the practitioner domain as having higher engagement and trust factors than a professional-type of influencer/ celebrity with their millionplus follower-base (Main, 2017; Hyman, 2018). There remains a dearth of research on (EDMIs) everyday micro-influencers (unpaid, noncommercial, social media micro-influencers who share their experiences of corporate brands with their followers as a part of their daily lives). This study sought to understand the impact that EDMIs can have on a firm's corporate brand reputation through receivers being exposed to their positive and negative experiences. Secondly, we aimed to establish the specific variables that influence a receiver's evaluation of a firm's corporate brand reputation after exposure to positive and negative tweets from EDMI

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Cosmological parameters from three seasons of data

We present constraints on cosmological and astrophysical parameters from high-resolution microwave background maps at 148 GHz and 218 GHz made by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in three seasons of observations from 2008 to 2010. A model of primary cosmological and secondary foreground parameters is fit to the map power spectra and lensing deflection power spectrum, including contributions from both the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect and the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) effect, Poisson and correlated anisotropy from unresolved infrared sources, radio sources, and the correlation between the tSZ effect and infrared sources. The power ell^2 C_ell/2pi of the thermal SZ power spectrum at 148 GHz is measured to be 3.4 +\- 1.4 muK^2 at ell=3000, while the corresponding amplitude of the kinematic SZ power spectrum has a 95% confidence level upper limit of 8.6 muK^2. Combining ACT power spectra with the WMAP 7-year temperature and polarization power spectra, we find excellent consistency with the LCDM model. We constrain the number of effective relativistic degrees of freedom in the early universe to be Neff=2.79 +\- 0.56, in agreement with the canonical value of Neff=3.046 for three massless neutrinos. We constrain the sum of the neutrino masses to be Sigma m_nu < 0.39 eV at 95% confidence when combining ACT and WMAP 7-year data with BAO and Hubble constant measurements. We constrain the amount of primordial helium to be Yp = 0.225 +\- 0.034, and measure no variation in the fine structure constant alpha since recombination, with alpha/alpha0 = 1.004 +/- 0.005. We also find no evidence for any running of the scalar spectral index, dns/dlnk = -0.004 +\- 0.012.Comment: 26 pages, 22 figures. This paper is a companion to Das et al. (2013) and Dunkley et al. (2013). Matches published JCAP versio