IZw18 has been recurrently claimed to be a young galaxy, but stars of increasingly older ages are found every time deeper magnitude levels are reached with high-resolution photometry: from the original few Myrs to, possibly, several Gyrs. We summarize the history of IZw18s age and an HST project which will allow us to derive both its distance and age.
Two-party secure function evaluation (SFE) has become significantly more feasible, even on resource-constrained devices, because of advances in server-aided computation systems. However, there are still bottlenecks, particularly in the input validation stage of a computation. Moreover, SFE research has not yet devoted sufficient attention to the important problem of retaining state after a computation has been performed so that expensive processing does not have to be repeated if a similar computation is done again. This paper presents PartialGC, an SFE system that allows the reuse of encrypted values generated during a garbled-circuit computation. We show that using PartialGC can reduce computation time by as much as 96% and bandwidth by as much as 98% in comparison with previous outsourcing schemes for secure computation. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with two sets of experiments, one in which the garbled circuit is evaluated on a mobile device and one in which it is evaluated on a server. We also use PartialGC to build a privacy-preserving friend finder application for Android. The reuse of previous inputs to allow stateful evaluation represents a new way of looking at SFE and further reduces computational barriers.
By borrowing the wisdom of human in gaze following, we propose a two-stage solution for gaze point prediction of the target persons in a scene. Specifically, in the first stage, both head image and its position are fed into a gaze direction pathway to predict the gaze direction, and then multi-scale gaze direction fields are generated to characterize the distribution of gaze points without considering the scene contents. In the second stage, the multi-scale gaze direction fields are concatenated with the image contents and fed into a heatmap pathway for heatmap regression. There are two merits for our two-stage solution based gaze following: i) our solution mimics the behavior of human in gaze following, therefore it is more psychological plausible; ii) besides using heatmap to supervise the output of our network, we can also leverage gaze direction to facilitate the training of gaze direction pathway, therefore our network can be more robustly trained. Considering that existing gaze following dataset is annotated by the third-view persons, we build a video gaze following dataset, where the ground truth is annotated by the observers in the videos. Therefore it is more reliable. The evaluation with such a dataset reflects the capacity of different methods in real scenarios better. Extensive experiments on both datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods, which validates the effectiveness of our solution for gaze following. Our dataset and codes are released in https://github.com/svip-lab/GazeFollowing.
I study the behaviour of the maximum rms fractional amplitude, $r_{rm max}$ and the maximum coherence, $Q_{rm max}$, of the kilohertz quasi-periodic oscillations (kHz QPOs) in a dozen low-mass X-ray binaries. I find that: (i) The maximum rms amplitudes of the lower and the upper kHz QPO, $r^{ell}_{rm max}$ and $r^{rm u}_{rm max}$, respectively, decrease more or less exponentially with increasing luminosity of the source; (ii) the maximum coherence of the lower kHz QPO, $Q^{ell}_{rm max}$, first increases and then decreases exponentially with luminosity; (iii) the maximum coherence of the upper kHz QPO, $Q^{rm u}_{rm max}$, is more or less independent of luminosity; and (iv) $r_{rm max}$ and $Q_{rm max}$ show the opposite behaviour with hardness of the source, consistent with the fact that there is a general anticorrelation between luminosity and spectral hardness in these sources. Both $r_{rm max}$ and $Q_{rm max}$ in the sample of sources, and the rms amplitude and coherence of the kHz QPOs in individual sources show a similar behaviour with hardness. This similarity argues against the interpretation that the drop of coherence and rms amplitude of the lower kHz QPO at high QPO frequencies in individual sources is a signature of the innermost stable circular orbit around a neutron star.
We report the discovery of a new changing-look quasar, SDSS J101152.98+544206.4, through repeat spectroscopy from the Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey. This is an addition to a small but growing set of quasars whose blue continua and broad optical emission lines have been observed to decline by a large factor on a time scale of approximately a decade. The 5100 Angstrom monochromatic continuum luminosity of this quasar drops by a factor of > 9.8 in a rest-frame time interval of < 9.7 years, while the broad H-alpha luminosity drops by a factor of 55 in the same amount of time. The width of the broad H-alpha line increases in the dim state such that the black hole mass derived from the appropriate single-epoch scaling relation agrees between the two epochs within a factor of 3. The fluxes of the narrow emission lines do not appear to change between epochs. The light curve obtained by the Catalina Sky Survey suggests that the transition occurs within a rest-frame time interval of approximately 500 days. We examine three possible mechanisms for this transition suggested in the recent literature. An abrupt change in the reddening towards the central engine is disfavored by the substantial difference between the timescale to obscure the central engine and the observed timescale of the transition. A decaying tidal disruption flare is consistent with the decay rate of the light curve but not with the prolonged bright state preceding the decay, nor can this scenario provide the power required by the luminosities of the emission lines. An abrupt drop in the accretion rate onto the supermassive black hole appears to be the most plausible explanation for the rapid dimming.
In order to reject the notion that information is always about something, the It from Bit idea relies on the nonexistence of a realistic framework that might underly quantum theory. This essay develops the case that there is a plausible underlying reality: one actual spacetime-based history, although with behavior that appears strange when analyzed dynamically (one time-slice at a time). By using a simple model with no dynamical laws, it becomes evident that this behavior is actually quite natural when analyzed all-at-once (as in classical statistical mechanics). The It from Bit argument against a spacetime-based reality must then somehow defend the importance of dynamical laws, even as it denies a reality on which such fundamental laws could operate.