Extended search for point sources of neutrinos below and above the horizon: Covering energies from TeV to EeV with IceCube

Point source searches with neutrino telescopes like IceCube are normally restricted to one hemisphere, due to the selection of up-going events as a way of rejecting the atmospheric muon background. In this work we show that the down-going region above the horizon can be included in the search by suppressing the background through energy-sensitive selection procedures. This approach increases the reach to the EeV regime of the signal spectrum, which was previously not accessible due to the absorption of neutrinos with energies above a PeV inside the Earth. We present preliminary results of this analysis, which for the first time includes up-going as well as down-going muon events in a combined approach. We used data collected with IceCube in a configuration of 22 strings. No significant excess above the atmospheric background is observed. While other analyses provided results for the Northern hemisphere, this new approach extends the field of view to a large part of the Southern sky, which was previously not covered with IceCube.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. To be published in the proceedings of the 2nd Heidelberg workshop "High-Energy Gamma-rays and Neutrinos from Extra-Galactic Sources", 2009 (Journal of Modern Physics D

ADEPT2 - Next Generation Process Management Technology

If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. In particular, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of single process instances at runtime (e.g., to add, delete or shift process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration, i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running instances. These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed and solved in the ADEPT2 Process Management System. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation process management technology which can be used in a variety of application domains

Evolution of the Dark Matter Distribution at the Galactic Center

Annihilation radiation from neutralino dark matter at the Galactic center (GC) would be greatly enhanced if the dark matter were strongly clustered around the supermassive black hole (SBH). The existence of a dark-matter "spike" is made plausible by the observed, steeply-rising stellar density near the GC SBH. Here the time-dependent equations describing gravitational interaction of the dark matter particles with the stars are solved. Scattering of dark matter particles by stars would substantially lower the dark matter density near the GC SBH over 10^10 yr, due both to kinetic heating, and to capture of dark matter particles by the SBH. This result suggests that enhancements in the dark matter density around a SBH would be modest whether or not the host galaxy had experienced the scouring effects of a binary SBH.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letter

Quantitative evaluation of multiband photographic techniques Final report

Quantitative evaluation of multiband photographic techniques using combination of black and white and color photo

Parental investment and child health in a Yanomamö village suffering short-term food stress

The 1998 El Niño significantly reduced garden productivity in the Upper Orinoco region in Venezuela. Consequently, parents were forced to allocate food carefully to their children. Nutrition data collected from village children combined with genealogical data allowed the determination of which children suffered most, and whether the patterns of food distribution accorded with predictions from parental investment theory. For boys, three social variables accounted for over 70% of the variance in subcutaneous fat after controlling for age: number of siblings, age of the mother’s youngest child, and whether the mother was the senior or junior co-wife, or was married monogamously. These results accord well with parental investment theory. Parents experiencing food stress faced a trade-off between quantity and quality, and between investing in younger versus older offspring. In addition, boys with access to more paternal investment (i.e. no stepmother) were better nourished. These variables did not account for any of the variance in female nutrition. Girls’ nutrition was associated with the size of their patrilineage and the number of non-relatives in the village, suggesting that lineage politics may have played a role. An apparent lack of relationship between orphan status and nutrition is also interesting, given that orphans suffered high rates of skin flea infections. The large number of orphans being cared for by only two grandparents suggests that grooming time may have been the resource in short supply. Introductio

The Black Hole Mass-Bulge Luminosity Relationship for Active Galactic Nuclei from Reverberation Mapping and Hubble Space Telescope Imaging

We investigate the relationship between black hole mass and bulge luminosity for AGNs with reverberation-based black hole mass measurements and bulge luminosities from two-dimensional decompositions of Hubble Space Telescope host galaxy images. We find that the slope of the relationship for AGNs is 0.76-0.85 with an uncertainty of ~0.1, somewhat shallower than the M_BH \propto L^{1.0+/-0.1} relationship that has been fit to nearby quiescent galaxies with dynamical black hole mass measurements. This is somewhat perplexing, as the AGN black hole masses include an overall scaling factor that brings the AGN M_BH-sigma relationship into agreement with that of quiescent galaxies. We discuss biases that may be inherent to the AGN and quiescent galaxy samples and could cause the apparent inconsistency in the forms of their M_BH-L_bulge relationships.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures and 2 tables, submitted to ApJ Letter

ADEPT - Next Generation Process Management Technology

In the ADEPT project we have been working on the design and implementation of a next generation process management technology for several years. Based on a conceptual framework for dynamic process changes, on innovative process support functions, and on advanced implementation concepts, the developed system enables the realization of adaptive, process-aware information systems (PAIS). Basically, process changes can take place at the process type as well as the process instance level: Changes of single process instances may have to be carried out in an ad-hoc manner (e.g., to deal with an exceptional situation) and must not affect system robustness and consistency. Process type changes, in turn, must be quickly accomplished in order to adapt the PAIS to business process changes. This may also include the migration of (thousands of) instances to the new process schema (if desired). Important requirements are to perform respective migrations on-the-fly, to preserve correctness, and to avoid performance penalties