The Highly Unusual Outgassing of Comet 103P/Hartley 2 from Narrowband Photometry and Imaging of the Coma

We report on photometry and imaging of Comet 103P/Hartley 2 obtained at Lowell Observatory from 1991 through 2011. We acquired photoelectric photometry on two nights in 1991, four nights in 1997/98, and 13 nights in 2010/11. We observed a strong secular decrease in water and all other observed species production in 2010/11 from the 1991 and 1997/98 levels. We see evidence for a strong asymmetry with respect to perihelion in the production rates of our usual bandpasses, with peak production occurring ~10 days post-perihelion and production rates considerably higher post-perihelion. The composition was "typical", in agreement with the findings of other investigators. We obtained imaging on 39 nights from 2010 July until 2011 January. We find that, after accounting for their varying parentage and lifetimes, the C2 and C3 coma morphology resemble the CN morphology we reported previously. These species exhibited an hourglass shape in October and November, and the morphology changed with rotation and evolved over time. The OH and NH coma morphology showed hints of an hourglass shape near the nucleus, but was also enhanced in the anti-sunward hemisphere. This tailward brightness enhancement did not vary significantly with rotation and evolved with the viewing geometry. We conclude that all five gas species likely originate from the same source regions on the nucleus, but that OH and NH were derived from small grains of water and ammonia ice that survived long enough to be affected by radiation pressure and driven in the anti-sunward direction. We detected the faint, sunward facing dust jet reported by other authors, and did not detect a corresponding gas feature. This jet varied little during a night but exhibited some variations from night to night, suggesting it is located near the total angular momentum vector.Comment: Accepted by Icarus; 20 pages of text (preprint style), 5 tables, 7 figure

Revealing Hidden Potentials of the q-Space Signal in Breast Cancer

Mammography screening for early detection of breast lesions currently suffers from high amounts of false positive findings, which result in unnecessary invasive biopsies. Diffusion-weighted MR images (DWI) can help to reduce many of these false-positive findings prior to biopsy. Current approaches estimate tissue properties by means of quantitative parameters taken from generative, biophysical models fit to the q-space encoded signal under certain assumptions regarding noise and spatial homogeneity. This process is prone to fitting instability and partial information loss due to model simplicity. We reveal unexplored potentials of the signal by integrating all data processing components into a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that is designed to propagate clinical target information down to the raw input images. This approach enables simultaneous and target-specific optimization of image normalization, signal exploitation, global representation learning and classification. Using a multicentric data set of 222 patients, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves clinical decision making with respect to the current state of the art.Comment: Accepted conference paper at MICCAI 201

Wave Function of a Brane-like Universe

Within the mini-superspace model, brane-like cosmology means performing the variation with respect to the embedding (Minkowski) time $\tau$ before fixing the cosmic (Einstein) time $t$. The departure from Einstein limit is parameterized by the 'energy' conjugate to $\tau$, and characterized by a classically disconnected Embryonic epoch. In contrast with canonical quantum gravity, the wave-function of the brane-like Universe is (i) $\tau$-dependent, and (ii) vanishes at the Big Bang. Hartle-Hawking and Linde proposals dictate discrete 'energy' levels, whereas Vilenkin proposal resembles $\alpha$-particle disintegration.Comment: Revtex, 4 twocolumn pages, 3 eps figures (accepted for publication in Class. Quan. Grav.

The Myth of the All-Destructive War: Afterthoughts on German Suffering, 1618–1648*

Like perhaps no other military struggle in German history, the Thirty Years War exemplifies a conflagration largely defined by immense suffering. It offers an optimal testcase for the analysis of suffering as an emotional category by historians. In the twentieth century, some (such as Dame C.V. Wedgewood or the SS officer Günther Franz) employed a political frame of reference to more recent events in German history. One of the inadequacies of this interpretative framework is its tendency to moralize and over-simplify the roles of victims and perpetrators. In fact, we now recognize that most suffering during the Thirty Years War related only indirectly to military conflict, resulting instead from economic disaster, famine and disease. As a direct outcome of the war, rape poignantly illustrates methodological difficulties facing historians of suffering, given the patriarchal character of seventeenth-century society. The present historiography overcomes a variety of obstacles through micro-historic methods employing so-called ego-documents and Selbstzeugnisse. Theoretically, William Reddy’s exploration of hyperbolic sentimentality during the French Revolution may offer us a better analytical framework for understanding suffering during the Thirty Years War. In our case, a hyperbolic sensitivity to suffering shared by victims and non-victims alike contributed to the cessation of hostilities at Münster/Osnabrück and enshrined principles of sovereignty and religious tolerance in the Western political vocabulary. Thus elevated, the mechanisms of emotional suffering assume a central explanatory role in our understanding of the Thirty Years War