CHA: Categorical Hierarchy-based Attention for Next POI Recommendation

Next Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is a key task in improving location-related customer experiences and business operations, but yet remains challenging due to the substantial diversity of human activities and the sparsity of the check-in records available. To address these challenges, we proposed to explore the category hierarchy knowledge graph of POIs via an attention mechanism to learn the robust representations of POIs even when there is insufficient data. We also proposed a spatial-temporal decay LSTM and a Discrete Fourier Series-based periodic attention to better facilitate the capturing of the personalized behavior pattern. Extensive experiments on two commonly adopted real-world location-based social networks (LBSNs) datasets proved that the inclusion of the aforementioned modules helps to boost the performance of next and next new POI recommendation tasks significantly. Specifically, our model in general outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Kidney Cancer Risk Associated with Historic Groundwater Trichloroethylene Contamination

Trichloroethylene (TCE) is a well-documented kidney carcinogen based on a substantial body of evidence including mechanistic and animal studies, as well as reports from occupational settings. However, the cancer risks for those in residential exposures such as TCE contamination in groundwater are much less clear. The objective of this study was to perform a detailed spatio-temporal analysis of estimated residential TCE exposure in New Hampshire, US. We identified kidney cancer cases (n = 292) and age-, gender-matched controls (n = 448) from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System and queried a commercial financial database for address histories. We used publically available data on TCE levels in groundwater measured at contaminated sites in New Hampshire and then modeled the spatial dispersion and temporal decay. We overlaid geospatial residential locations of cases and controls with yearly maps of estimated TCE levels to estimate median exposures over the 5, 10, and 15-year epochs before diagnosis. The 50th–75th percentile of estimated residential exposure over a 15-year period was associated with increased kidney cancer risk (adjusted Odds Ratio (OR) 1.78 95% CI 1.05–3.03), compared to <50th percentile. This finding supports the need for groundwater monitoring of TCE contaminated sites to identify potential public health risks.

Long and short distance behavior of the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential

The imaginary part of the effective heavy-quark potential can be related to the total in-medium decay width of of heavy quark-antiquark bound states. We extract the static limit of this quantity using classical-statistical simulations of the real-time Yang-Mills dynamics by measuring the temporal decay of Wilson loops. By performing the simulations on finer and larger lattices we are able to show that the nonperturbative results follow the same form as the perturbative ones. For large quark-antiquark separations, we quantify the magnitude of the non-perturbative long-range corrections to the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential. We present our results for a wide range of temperatures, lattice spacings, and lattice volumes. We also extract approximations for the short-distance behavior of the classical potential.

Global Existence and Temporal Decay of Large Solutions for the Poisson--Nernst--Planck Equations in Low Regularity Spaces

We are concerned with the global existence and decay rates of large solutions for the Poisson–Nernst–Planck equations. Based on careful observation of algebraic structure of the equations and using the weighted Chemin–Lerner type norm, we obtain the global existence and optimal decay rates of large solutions without requiring the summation of initial densities of a negatively and positively charged species is small enough. Moreover, the large solution is obtained for initial data belonging to the low regularity Besov spaces with different regularity and integral indices for the different charged species, which indicates more specific coupling relations between the negatively and positively charged species.

The imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential from real-time Yang-Mills dynamics

We extract the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential using classical-statistical simulations of real-time Yang-Mills dynamics in classical thermal equilibrium. The r-dependence of the imaginary part of the potential is extracted by measuring the temporal decay of Wilson loops of spatial length r. We compare our results to continuum expressions obtained using hard thermal loop theory and to semi-analytic lattice perturbation theory calculations using the hard classical loop formalism. We find that, when plotted as a function of mDr, where mD is the hard classical loop Debye mass, the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential shows little sensitivity to the lattice spacing at small mDr ≲ 1 and agrees well with the semi-analytic hard classical loop result. For large quark-antiquark separations, we quantify the magnitude of the non-perturbative long-range corrections to the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential. We present our results for a wide range of temperatures, lattice spacings, and lattice volumes. This work sets the stage for extracting the imaginary part of the heavy-quark potential in an expanding non-equilibrium Yang Mills plasma.

A third COVID-19 vaccine shot markedly boosts neutralizing antibody potency and breadth

COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) vaccines have been rapidly developed and deployed globally as a measure to combat the disease. These vaccines have been demonstrated to confer significant protection, but there have been reports of temporal decay in antibody titer. Furthermore, several variants have been identified with variable degrees of antibody resistance. These two factors suggest that a booster vaccination may be worthy of consideration. While such a booster dose has been studied as a series of three homologous vaccines in healthy individuals, to our knowledge, information on a heterologous regimen remains unreported, despite the practical benefits of such a scheme. Here, in this observational study, we investigated the serological profile of four healthy individuals who received two doses of the BNT162b2 vaccine, followed by a third booster dose with the Ad26.COV2.S vaccine. We found that while all individuals had spike-binding antibodies at each of the timepoints tested, there was an appreciable drop in titer by four months following the second vaccination. The third vaccine dose robustly increased titers beyond that of two vaccinations, and these elicited antibodies had neutralizing capability against all SARS-CoV-2 strains tested in both a recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus-based pseudovirus assay and an authentic SARS-CoV-2 assay, except for one individual against B.1.351 in the latter assay. Thus, a third COVID-19 vaccine dose in healthy individuals promoted not just neutralizing antibody potency, but also induced breadth against dominant SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Coherence scale of magnetic fields generated in early time forward shocks of Gamma Ray Bursts

We report the earliest-ever detection of optical polarization from a GRB forward shock (GRB 141220A), measured 129.5 − 204.3 s after the burst using the multi-colour RINGO3 optical polarimeter on the 2-m fully autonomous robotic Liverpool Telescope. The temporal decay gradient of the optical light curves from 86 s to ∼2200 s post-burst is typical of classical forward shocks with α = 1.091 ± 0.008. The low optical polarization $P_{BV} = 2.8 _{- 1.6} ^{+ 2.0} \, \%$ (2σ) at mean time ∼168 s post-burst is compatible with being induced by the host galaxy dust (AV, HG = 0.71 ± 0.15 mag), leaving low polarization intrinsic to the GRB emission itself —as theoretically predicted for forward shocks and consistent with previous detections of low degrees of optical polarization in GRB afterglows observed hours to days after the burst. The current sample of early-time polarization data from forward shocks suggests polarization from (a) the Galactic and host galaxy dust properties (i.e. $P \sim 1\%-3\%$), (b) contribution from a polarized reverse shock (GRB deceleration time, jet magnetization) or (c) forward shock intrinsic polarization (i.e. $P \le 2\%$), which depends on the magnetic field coherence length scale and the size of the observable emitting region (burst energetics, circumburst density).