Friday, January 22, 2016

Mario Weick: Walking blindfolded unveils unique contributions of behavioural approach and inhibition to lateral spatial bias

Mario Weick
Healthy individuals display a tendency to allocate attention unequally across space, and this bias has implications for how individuals interact with their environments. However, the origins of this phenomenon remain relatively poorly understood. The present research examined the joint and independent contributions of two fundamental motivational systems – behavioural approach and inhibition systems (BAS and BIS) – to lateral spatial bias in a locomotion task. Participants completed self-report measures of trait BAS and BIS, then repeatedly traversed a room, blindfolded, aiming for a straight line. We obtained locomotion data from motion tracking to capture variations in the walking trajectories. Overall, walking trajectories deviated to the left, and this tendency was more pronounced with increasing BIS scores. Meanwhile, BAS was associated with relative rightward tendencies when BIS was low, but not when BIS was high. These results demonstrate for the first time an association between BIS and lateral spatial bias independently of variations in BAS. The findings also contribute to clarify the circumstances in which BAS is associated with a rightward bias. We discuss the implications of these findings for the neurobiological underpinnings of BIS and for the literature on spatial bias.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027715301050 

Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown: Evidence of a Ninth Planet

Konstantin Batygin
Mike Brown

Joe Hisaishi (久石譲): 29 Song Golden Collection

Joe Hisaishi

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Curtis Cooper: New World-Record Largest Prime Ever Found!

Curtis Cooper



  • Mersenne prime (メルセンヌ数)

How they found the World's Biggest Prime Number

Snowflake: Straight to the light


Snowtime



  • Snowflake
  • 氷晶
  • Ice crystals

Bradley Schaefer: KIC 8462852 Faded at an Average Rate of 0.165+-0.013 Magnitudes Per Century From 1890 To 1989

Bradley Schaefer
The star KIC 8462852 is a completely-ordinary F3 main sequence star, except that the light curve from the Kepler spacecraft shows episodes of unique and inexplicable day-long dips with up to 20% dimming. Here, I provide a light curve of 1232 Johnson B-band magnitudes from 1890 to 1989 taken from archival photographic plates at Harvard. KIC 8462852 displays a highly significant and highly confident secular dimming at an average rate of 0.165+-0.013 magnitudes per century. From the early 1890s to the late 1980s, KIC 8462852 has faded by 0.193+-0.030 mag. This century-long dimming is completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star. So the Harvard light curve provides the first confirmation (past the several dips seen in the Kepler light curve alone) that KIC 8462852 has anything unusual going on. The century-long dimming and the day-long dips are both just extreme ends of a spectrum of timescales for unique dimming events, so by Ockham's Razor, all this is produced by one physical mechanism. This one mechanism does not appear as any isolated catastrophic event in the last century, but rather must be some ongoing process with continuous effects. Within the context of dust-occultation models, the century-long dimming trend requires 10^4 to 10^7 times as much dust as for the one deepest Kepler dip. Within the context of the comet-family idea, the century-long dimming trend requires an estimated 648,000 giant comets (each with 200 km diameter) all orchestrated to pass in front of the star within the last century.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03256 

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

AppleScript: iTunes: Creating a playlist with songs with lyrics

--Variables
set outputPlaylistName to "Songs with lyrics"
set maxTrackCount to 100000

-- Dialog Text input
display dialog "Enter the playlist name you want to search from" default answer ""
set inputPlaylist to text returned of result

-- Check input text
if inputPlaylist is not "" then

tell application "iTunes"

-- Playlist name present?
if (not (exists playlist inputPlaylist)) then
display dialog "No such playlist"
return
end if

-- Check number of result
set trackCount to count of tracks of playlist inputPlaylist

-- If number of tracks are over max
if (trackCount ≥ maxTrackCount) then
display dialog "Too many files in the playlist: " & trackCount
return
end if

-- Does the output playlist name exists?
if (exists user playlist outputPlaylistName) then
try
delete tracks of user playlist outputPlaylistName
end try
else
make new user playlist with properties {name:outputPlaylistName}
end if

-- Iterate through the input playlist
set resultTracks to every file track of playlist inputPlaylist
repeat with aTrack in resultTracks
if ((location of aTrack as string) is not equal to "missing value") then
-- if lyrics exists in the input track
if (not (lyrics of aTrack is equal to "")) then
-- Add to the output playlist
try
duplicate aTrack to user playlist outputPlaylistName
on error
log ("unknown error: " & (artist of aTrack as string) & " - " & (name of aTrack as string))
end try
end if
else
log (location of aTrack as string)
log ("file couldn't found: " & (artist of aTrack as string) & " - " & (name of aTrack as string))
end if
end repeat
end tell
end if

Monday, January 18, 2016

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Number theory: Shtukas and the Taylor expansion of L-functions

Wei Zhang
Zhiwei Yun
Shtukas and the Taylor expansion of L-functions
Abstract. We define the Heegner–Drinfeld cycle on the moduli stack of Drinfeld Shtukas of rank two with r-modifications for an even integer r. We prove an identity between
(1) The r-th central derivative of the quadratic base change L-function associated to an
everywhere unramified cuspidal automorphic representation π of PGL2;
(2) The self-intersection number of the π-isotypic component of the Heegner–Drinfeld cycle. This identity can be viewed as a function-field analog of the Waldspurger and Gross–Zagier formula for higher derivatives of L-functions.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02683

Math Quartet

Number theory
Xinyl Yuan
Wei Zhang
Algebraic geometry
Xinwen Zhu
Zhiwei Yun

David Bowie: I Can't Give Everything Away

David Bowie