In The Odyssey of an Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas
(1922-2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian
boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and
Central Asia ...and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet
Russia to build a new life in Paris. Along the way, we get a rarely
seen portrait of the lives of working-class Jewish youth in
Telz/Telsiai, a religious town renowned for its yeshiva. We hear of
the games children played, the theft of apples from a Catholic
orchard, and Rozenbaumas's early apprenticeship as a tailor once
his father leaves the country. The war breaks out and the teenaged
Rozenbaumas flees Lithuania alone, unable to convince his mother
and sibling to go with him. We learn of his life as a starved
refugee in an Uzbek kolkhoz, his escape into the Red Army, and his
unlikely work in the reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. After
the war, Rozenbaumas is drafted into the Marxist-Leninist
university and as a cadre of the Communist Party, ultimately
escaping in 1956 with his family to Paris, where he and his wife
give an openly Jewish education to their children. In the vast
literature of memory written by Jewish witnesses before, during,
and after WWII, Rozenbaumas's account stands out for the
singularity of his experience and for his deft narration of events
of mythological dimension from a personal perspective. The
Odyssey of an Apple Thief offers not only invaluable testimony
of this historical moment but also an illuminating and original
portrait of Lithuanian Jews in the twentieth century.
During piglets' early life stage, especially during weaning, changes in diet, environment, and social structures can impact their long-term health. This includes physiological alterations, ...vulnerability to diseases like E. coli and porcine circovirus type 2, and changes in the gut microbiome associated with diarrhea or successful weaning. Understanding the factors affecting gut dysbiosis during weaning is crucial due to economic and health risks. Furthermore, transmission of essential gut microbes from sow to piglets, pathogens like Streptococcus suis, and the influence of climate and genetic background on the microbiome warrant further investigation. The main objective of this dissertation was to utilize 16S rRNA gene sequencing to characterize the microbial composition of fecal samples from sows and piglets. The study aimed to identify factors such as the sow, pen environment, and gender that contribute to similarities and differences in the piglet microbiome during lactation, with a focus on taxonomic, environmental, and genetic factors. Results of the study demonstrated the host effects of sex and genomics, and the extrinsic effect of pen environment on piglet gut microbiome composition and diversity.
A
bstract
Consistent coupling of quantum and classical degrees of freedom exists so long as there is both diffusion of the classical degrees of freedom and decoherence of the quantum system. In this ...paper, we derive the Newtonian limit of such classical-quantum (CQ) theories of gravity. Our results are obtained both via the gauge fixing of the recently proposed path integral theory of CQ general relativity and via the CQ master equation approach. In each case, we find the same weak field dynamics. We find that the New-tonian potential diffuses by an amount lower bounded by the decoherence rate into mass eigenstates. We also present our results as an unraveled system of stochastic differential equations for the trajectory of the hybrid classical-quantum state and provide a series of kernels for constructing figures of merit, which can be used to rule out part of the parameter space of classical-quantum theories of gravity by experimentally testing it via the decoherence-diffusion trade-off. We compare and contrast the weak field limit to previous models of classical Newtonian gravity coupled to quantum systems. Here, we find that the Newtonian potential and quantum state change in lock-step, with the flow of time being stochastic.
The Classical-Quantum Limit Layton, Isaac; Oppenheim, Jonathan
PRX quantum,
05/2024, Letnik:
5, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The standard notion of a classical limit, represented schematically by
ℏ
→
0
, provides a method for approximating a quantum system by a classical one. In this work, we explain why the standard ...classical limit fails when applied to subsystems, and show how one may resolve this by explicitly modeling the decoherence of a subsystem by its environment. Denoting the decoherence time by
τ
, we demonstrate that a double scaling limit in which
ℏ
→
0
and
τ
→
0
such that the ratio
E
f
=
ℏ
/
τ
remains fixed leads to an irreversible open-system evolution with well-defined classical and quantum subsystems. The main technical result is showing that, for arbitrary Hamiltonians, the generators of partial versions of the Wigner, Husimi, and Glauber-Sudarshan quasiprobability distributions may all be mapped in the above-mentioned double scaling limit to the same completely positive classical-quantum generator. This provides a regime in which one can study effective and consistent classical-quantum dynamics.
Published by the American Physical Society
2024
The shear volumes of data generated from earth observation and remote sensing technologies continue to make major impact; leaping key geospatial applications into the dual data and compute-intensive ...era. As a consequence, this rapid advancement poses new computational and data processing challenges. We implement a novel remote sensing data flow (RESFlow) for advancing machine learning to compute with massive amounts of remotely sensed imagery. The core contribution is partitioning massive amounts of data into homogeneous distributions for fitting simple models. RESFlow takes advantage of Apache Spark and the availability of modern computing hardware to harness the acceleration of deep learning inference on expansive remote sensing imagery. The framework incorporates a strategy to optimize resource utilization across multiple executors assigned to a single worker. We showcase its deployment in both computationally and data-intensive workloads for pixel-level labeling tasks. The pipeline invokes deep learning inference at three stages; during deep feature extraction, deep metric mapping, and deep semantic segmentation. The tasks impose compute-intensive and GPU resource sharing challenges motivating for a parallelized pipeline for all execution steps. To address the problem of hardware resource contention, our containerized workflow further incorporates a novel GPU checkout routine and the ticketing system across multiple workers. The workflow is demonstrated with NVIDIA DGX accelerated platforms and offers appreciable compute speed-ups for deep learning inference on pixel labeling workloads; processing 21 028 TB of imagery data and delivering output maps at area rate of 5.245 sq.km/s, amounting to 453 168 sq.km/day-reducing a 28 day workload to 21 h.
OBJECTIVEThe purpose of this retrospective cross-sectional study was to investigate whether changes in white matter integrity are related to slower processing speed in sickle cell anemia.
...METHODSThirty-seven patients with silent cerebral infarction, 46 patients with normal MRI, and 32 sibling controls (age range 8–37 years) underwent cognitive assessment using the Wechsler scales and 3-tesla MRI. Tract-based spatial statistics analyses of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging (NODDI) parameters were performed.
RESULTSProcessing speed index (PSI) was lower in patients than controls by 9.34 points (95% confidence interval4.635–14.855, p = 0.0003). Full Scale IQ was lower by 4.14 scaled points (95% confidence interval−1.066 to 9.551, p = 0.1), but this difference was abolished when PSI was included as a covariate (p = 0.18). There were no differences in cognition between patients with and without silent cerebral infarction, and both groups had lower PSI than controls (both p < 0.001). In patients, arterial oxygen content, socioeconomic status, age, and male sex were identified as predictors of PSI, and correlations were found between PSI and DTI scalars (fractional anisotropy r = 0.614, p < 0.00001; r = −0.457, p < 0.00001; mean diffusivity r = −0.341, p = 0.0016; radial diffusivity r = −0.457, p < 0.00001) and NODDI parameters (intracellular volume fraction r = 0.364, p = 0.0007) in widespread regions.
CONCLUSIONOur results extend previous reports of impairment that is independent of presence of infarction and may worsen with age. We identify processing speed as a vulnerable domain, with deficits potentially mediating difficulties across other domains, and provide evidence that reduced processing speed is related to the integrity of normal-appearing white matter using microstructure parameters from DTI and NODDI.
Curious case of a leaky mitochondria Nguyen, Jonathan T; Kit Chan, Chun; Layton, Jacob ...
Biophysical journal,
2023-Feb-10, Letnik:
122, Številka:
3S1
Journal Article
Background
Acne affects more than 80% of adolescents and young adults, who most often develop acne scars. Supporting data on the effect of acne scars on patient’s health-related quality of life ...(HRQOL) are limited.
Objective
The aim was to determine how the severity of acne scars impacts the HRQOL of afflicted individuals.
Methods
In this population-based cross-sectional study, 723 adults with facial acne scars but without active acne lesions self-completed the Self-assessment of Clinical Acne-Related Scars (SCARS) questionnaire formulated to investigate degree of acne scarring. The Facial Acne Scar Quality of Life (FASQoL), Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI), and Dysmorphic Concern Questionnaire (DCQ) were completed to assess the attitude of these patients toward their scars and the impact of scarring on their HRQOL.
Results
The mean (standard error) DLQI score for facial acne scars was 6.26 (0.22). Acne scars were considered a ‘very large’ or ‘extremely large’ concern by 19.3% of participants with mild scars as compared to 20.1% and 34.0% of participants with moderate and severe/very severe scars, respectively (
P
= 0.003). Higher FASQoL scores were associated with increased severity of scarring (
P
= 0.001). In total, 16.9% of participants had clinical features of dysmorphia (i.e., DCQ > 13). DCQ scores were significantly higher among participants with more severe scarring (mean DCQ score of 8.04 0.28, 8.40 0.18, and 10.13 0.08 among participants with mild, moderate, and severe/very severe acne scars, respectively;
P
= 0.001). Most commonly reported signs of emotional distress were self-consciousness (68.0%) and worry about scars not going away (74.8%).
Conclusions
This study highlights the significant psychosocial impact of atrophic acne scars in the form of embarrassment and self-consciousness. Individuals with mild scars also expressed significant impact on quality of life that increased with aggravation of scar severity. Patient-reported outcomes provide an insight into the physical, functional, and psychological impact of acne scarring from the patient’s perspective.
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