An Artist's View of the History of Art from the Perspective of 'Analogic Representation'

This article is basically an artist's statement published in connection with a major interdisciplinary art project currently in development (completion date estimated to be 2020)

Link between S&P 500 and FTSE 100 and the comparison of that link before and after the S&P 500 peak in October 2007

The paper reviews the correlation between the S&P 500 and the FTSE 100 before and during the 2008 global financial crisis. It found that The S&P 500 has a strong causation effect on the FTSE 100, both before and since the financial crisis. This link seems to have increased after the October 2007 peak in the S&P 500. Since the crisis, the FTSE 100 appears to have a weak causation effect on the S&P 500. Before the crisis there was no apparent impact on the S&P 500’s movements from movements in the FTSE 100

Converting Serious Safety Events into Educational Opportunities

Over the past year, the Associate Director of the Simulation Center worked with the EM Quality and Safety Director to identify serious safety events (SSE) and critical incidents. As part of the case review, an informal root cause analysis (RCA) was conducted and root causes related to safety risks or breakdowns were identified. These system vulnerabilities were woven into simulation cases for hospital code team training. The cases focused on skills and attitudes that would help prevent, capture, or mitigate similar vulnerabilities while providing clinical care. The objective of this educational innovation was to intentionally translate lessons learned from SSE into changes in clinical practice through the use of RCA followed by simulation

B Physics at the TeVatron

The CDF and D\O\ experiments at the Tevatron $p\bar{p}$ collider established that extensive and detailed exploration of the $b$--quark dynamics is possible in hadron collisions, with results competitive and supplementary to those from $e^+e^-$ colliders. This provides a rich, and highly rewarding program that is currently reaching full maturity. I report a few recent world-leading results on rare decays, CP-violation in $B^0_s$ mixing, $b\to s$ penguin decays, and charm physics.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, proceedings for IFAE2011. To be published in the Nuovo Cimento C - Colloquia on Physic

Exo-Earth/Super-Earth Yield of JWST plus a Starshade External Occulter

We examine the scientific viability of an imaging mission to find exo-Earths combining the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with a starshade external occulter under a realistic set of astrophysical assumptions. We define an exo-Earth as a planet of 1 to 10 Earth masses orbiting in the habitable zone (HZ) of a solar-type star. We show that for a survey strategy that relies on a single image to detect an exo-Earth, roughly half of all exo-Earth detections will be false alarms. Here, a false alarm is a mistaken identification of a planet as an exo-Earth. We consider two survey strategies designed to mitigate the false alarm problem. The first is to require that for each potential exo-Earth, a sufficient number of detections are made to measure the orbit. When the orbit is known we can determine if the planet is in the habitable zone. With this strategy, we find that the number of exo-Earths found is on average 0.9, 1.9 and 2.7 for {\eta}_Earth = 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3. Here, {\eta}_Earth is the frequency of exo-Earths orbiting solar-type stars. There is a ~40% probability of finding zero exo-Earths for {\eta}_Earth = 0.1. A second strategy can be employed if a space astrometry mission has identified and measured the orbits and masses of the planets orbiting nearby stars. We find that with prior space-based astrometry from a survey of 60 nearby stars, JWST plus an external occulter can obtain orbital solutions for the majority (70% to 80%) of the exo-Earths orbiting these 60 stars. The exo-Earth yield is approximately five times higher than the yield for the JWST plus occulter mission without prior astrometry. With prior astrometry, the probability that an imaging mission will find zero exo-Earths is reduced to below 1% for the case of {\eta}_Earth = 0.1.Comment: Accepted by PASP. To appear in February 2010 issue. 15 pages, 2 figure

Interpolation of nonstationary high frequency spatial-temporal temperature data

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program is a U.S. Department of Energy project that collects meteorological observations at several locations around the world in order to study how weather processes affect global climate change. As one of its initiatives, it operates a set of fixed but irregularly-spaced monitoring facilities in the Southern Great Plains region of the U.S. We describe methods for interpolating temperature records from these fixed facilities to locations at which no observations were made, which can be useful when values are required on a spatial grid. We interpolate by conditionally simulating from a fitted nonstationary Gaussian process model that accounts for the time-varying statistical characteristics of the temperatures, as well as the dependence on solar radiation. The model is fit by maximizing an approximate likelihood, and the conditional simulations result in well-calibrated confidence intervals for the predicted temperatures. We also describe methods for handling spatial-temporal jumps in the data to interpolate a slow-moving cold front.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOAS633 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org