Multiple Radial Cool Molecular Filaments in NGC 1275

We have extended our previous observation (Lim et al. 2008) of NGC1275 covering a central radius of ~10kpc to the entire main body of cool molecular gas spanning ~14kpc east and west of center. We find no new features beyond the region previously mapped, and show that all six spatially-resolved features on both the eastern and western sides (three on each side) comprise radially aligned filaments. Such radial filaments can be most naturally explained by a model in which gas deposited "upstream" in localized regions experiencing an X-ray cooling flow subsequently free falls along the gravitational potential of PerA, as we previously showed can explain the observed kinematics of the two longest filaments. All the detected filaments coincide with locally bright Halpha features, and have a ratio in CO(2-1) to Halpha luminosity of ~1e-3; we show that these filaments have lower star formation efficiencies than the nearly constant value found for molecular gas in nearby normal spiral galaxies. On the other hand, some at least equally luminous Halpha features, including a previously identified giant HII region, show no detectable cool molecular gas with a corresponding ratio at least a factor of ~5 lower; in the giant HII region, essentially all the pre-existing molecular gas may have been converted to stars. We demonstrate that all the cool molecular filaments are gravitationally bound, and without any means of support beyond thermal pressure should collapse on timescales ~< 1e6yrs. By comparison, as we showed previously the two longest filaments have much longer dynamical ages of ~1e7yrs. Tidal shear may help delay their collapse, but more likely turbulent velocities of at least a few tens km/s or magnetic fields with strengths of at least several ~10uG are required to support these filaments.Comment: 52 pages, 11 figures. Accepted to Ap

The linear span of projections in AH algebras and for inclusions of C*-algebras

A $C^*$-algebra is said to have the LP property if the linear span of projections is dense in a given algebra. In the first part of this paper, we show that an AH algebra $A = \underrightarrow{\lim}(A_i,\phi_i)$ has the LP property if and only if every real-valued continuous function on the spectrum of $A_i$ (as an element of $A_i$ via the non-unital embedding) belongs to the closure of the linear span of projections in $A$. As a consequence, a diagonal AH-algebra has the LP property if it has small eigenvalue variation. The second contribution of this paper is that for an inclusion of unital $C^*$-algebras $P \subset A$ with a finite Watatani Index, if a faithful conditional expectation $E\colon A \rightarrow P$ has the Rokhlin property in the sense of Osaka and Teruya, then $P$ has the LP property under the condition $A$ has the LP property. As an application, let $A$ be a simple unital $C^*$-algebra with the LP property, $G$ a finite group and $\alpha$ an action of $G$ onto $\mathrm{Aut}(A)$. If $\alpha$ has the Rokhlin property in the sense of Izumi, then the fixed point algebra $A^G$ and the crossed product algebra $A \rtimes_\alpha G$ have the LP property. We also point out that there is a symmetry on CAR algebra, which is constructed by Elliott, such that its fixed point algebra does not have the LP property.Comment: 24 page

An Envelope Disrupted by a Quadrupolar Outflow in the Pre-Planetary Nebula IRAS19475+3119

IRAS 19475+3119 is a quadrupolar pre-planetary nebula (PPN), with two bipolar lobes, one in the east-west (E-W) direction and one in the southeast-northwest (SE-NW) direction. We have observed it in CO J=2-1 with the Submillimeter Array at ~ 1" resolution. The E-W bipolar lobe is known to trace a bipolar outflow and it is detected at high velocity. The SE-NW bipolar lobe appears at low velocity, and could trace a bipolar outflow moving in the plane of the sky. Two compact clumps are seen at low velocity around the common waist of the two bipolar lobes, spatially coincident with the two emission peaks in the NIR, tracing dense envelope material. They are found to trace the two limb-brightened edges of a slowly expanding torus-like circumstellar envelope produced in the late AGB phase. This torus-like envelope originally could be either a torus or a spherical shell, and it appears as it is now because of the two pairs of cavities along the two bipolar lobes. Thus, the envelope appears to be disrupted by the two bipolar outflows in the PPN phase.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figure

EFL TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS ABOUT IMPLEMENTING ACTIVE LEARNING TECHNIQUES IN TEACHING SPEAKING

Active learning has indicated its important role in learners’ speaking process and involved students in classroom activities. Therefore, there is a pressing need for implementing active learning techniques to engage students in speaking English. The research entitled “The EFL Teachers’ Perceptions about Implementing Active Learning Techniques in Teaching Speaking” was conducted to obtain two research aims, including (1) to find out teachers’ perceptions about implementing active learning techniques in their speaking classrooms; (2) to investigate the benefits and difficulties of implementing active learning techniques in teaching speaking. This is descriptive research using mix-methods. The participants were 56 teachers who are from two English language centers in Can Tho City responding to the questionnaire. Besides, semi-structured interviews were also administrated to investigate the benefits and difficulties teachers faced when implementing active learning techniques in teaching speaking. The findings show that teachers had positive perceptions of implementing active learning techniques in their speaking classrooms in the Mekong Delta and provided some valuable information for further topic-related research.  Article visualizations

Magnetic Fields in Evolved Stars: Imaging the Polarized Emission of High-Frequency SiO Masers

We present Submillimeter Array observations of high frequency SiO masers around the supergiant VX Sgr and the semi-regular variable star W Hya. The J=5-4, v=1 28SiO and v=0 29SiO masers of VX Sgr are shown to be highly linearly polarized with a polarization from ~5-60%. Assuming the continuum emission peaks at the stellar position, the masers are found within ~60 mas of the star, corresponding to ~100 AU at a distance of 1.57 kpc. The linear polarization vectors are consistent with a large scale magnetic field, with position and inclination angles similar to that of the dipole magnetic field inferred in the H2O and OH maser regions at much larger distances from the star. We thus show for the first time that the magnetic field structure in a circumstellar envelope can remain stable from a few stellar radii out to ~1400 AU. This provides further evidence supporting the existence of large scale and dynamically important magnetic fields around evolved stars. Due to a lack of parallactic angle coverage, the linear polarization of masers around W Hya could not be determined. For both stars we observed the 28SiO and 29SiO isotopologues and find that they have a markedly different distribution and that they appear to avoid each other. Additionally, emission from the SO 5_5-4_4 line was imaged for both sources. Around W Hya we find a clear offset between the red- and blue-shifted SO emission. This indicates that W Hya is likely host to a slow bipolar outflow or a rotating disk-like structure.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ. Online table will be available with published versio

Improving Multi-task Learning via Seeking Task-based Flat Regions

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a widely-used and powerful learning paradigm for training deep neural networks that allows learning more than one objective by a single backbone. Compared to training tasks separately, MTL significantly reduces computational costs, improves data efficiency, and potentially enhances model performance by leveraging knowledge across tasks. Hence, it has been adopted in a variety of applications, ranging from computer vision to natural language processing and speech recognition. Among them, there is an emerging line of work in MTL that focuses on manipulating the task gradient to derive an ultimate gradient descent direction to benefit all tasks. Despite achieving impressive results on many benchmarks, directly applying these approaches without using appropriate regularization techniques might lead to suboptimal solutions on real-world problems. In particular, standard training that minimizes the empirical loss on the training data can easily suffer from overfitting to low-resource tasks or be spoiled by noisy-labeled ones, which can cause negative transfer between tasks and overall performance drop. To alleviate such problems, we propose to leverage a recently introduced training method, named Sharpness-aware Minimization, which can enhance model generalization ability on single-task learning. Accordingly, we present a novel MTL training methodology, encouraging the model to find task-based flat minima for coherently improving its generalization capability on all tasks. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on a variety of applications to demonstrate the merit of our proposed approach to existing gradient-based MTL methods, as suggested by our developed theory.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures, 6 table