Preprints (earlier versions) of this paper are available at http://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/1826, first published Apr 13, 2011.
Background: Efficiently finding clinical examination studies—studies that quantify the value of symptoms and signs in the diagnosis of disease—is becoming increasingly difficult. Filters developed to retrieve studies of diagnosis from Medline lack specificity because they also retrieve large numbers of studies on the diagnostic value of imaging and laboratory tests.
Methods: We developed filters in a training dataset and validated them in a testing database. We created the training database by hand searching 161 journals (n = 52,636 studies). We evaluated the recall and precision of 65 candidate single-term filters in identifying studies that reported the sensitivity and specificity of symptoms or signs in the training database. To identify best combinations of these search terms, we used recursive partitioning. The best-performing filters in the training database as well as 13 previously developed filters were evaluated in a testing database (n = 431,120 studies). We also examined the impact of examining reference lists of included articles on recall.
Results: In the training database, the single-term filters with the highest recall (95%) and the highest precision (8.4%) were diagnosis[subheading] and "medical history taking"[MeSH], respectively. The multiple-term filter developed using recursive partitioning (the RP filter) had a recall of 100% and a precision of 89% in the training database. In the testing database, the Haynes-2004-Sensitive filter (recall 98%, precision 0.13%) and the RP filter (recall 89%, precision 0.52%) showed the best performance. The recall of these two filters increased to 99% and 94% respectively with review of the reference lists of the included articles.
Conclusions: Recursive partitioning appears to be a useful method of developing search filters. The empirical search filters proposed here can assist in the retrieval of clinical examination studies from Medline; however, because of the low precision of the search strategies, retrieving relevant studies remains challenging. Improving precision may require systematic changes in the tagging of articles by the National Library of Medicine.
In arriving at a diagnosis, clinicians often rely on clinical examination findings (ie, information from the patient's history and/or physical examination) [1-3]. Therefore, easy availability of results from clinical examination studies can greatly influence medical care. The number of studies published per year that focus on clinical examination has more than tripled since 1980. As this literature multiplies, the task of reliably and simply identifying sound studies is becoming increasingly challenging.
In many areas of medicine, filters have been developed to facilitate the search for relevant articles. Filters are pretested search strategies that help identify studies of a certain type from among all the other studies in Medline. Search filters that are optimized for the retrieval of studies of diagnosis, therapy, and clinical prediction rules are available [4-6]. These filters are routinely used by both clinicians (eg, PubMed Clinical Queries ) and systematic reviewers (eg, Cochrane Highly Sensitive Search Strategy for therapy articles ). No published filters, however, have been developed to facilitate the search for studies of clinical examination . A clinical examination filter may be useful to clinicians and authors of systematic reviews. Clinicians need to identify sound clinical examination articles in a timely fashion so that they can effectively care for their patients. With the commencement of Cochrane reviews of Diagnostic Test Accuracy , which will include reviews of clinical examination, there is a growing need for filters optimized for the retrieval of clinical examination studies.
The goal of this study was to develop and evaluate Medline filters that could facilitate retrieval of clinical examination studies.
The training and testing of the filters entailed 8 steps: (1) development of a training database, (2) identification of candidate single-term filters, (3) identification of single-term filters with the best performance in the training database, (4) identification of the multiple-term filter with the best performance in the training database using recursive partitioning, (5) development of a testing database, (6) evaluation of the performance of filters developed in this study in the testing database, (7) evaluation of the performance of previously developed filters in the testing database, and (8) examination of the impact of reviewing reference lists of included articles on recall. We performed our research using PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine's public search engine for accessing Medline.
We used the Clinical Hedges database, the methods of which have been previously described , as the starting point for this study. Briefly, the Hedges team conducted a hand search of articles published in the year 2000 in 161 prominent journals that met criteria for high quality; a total of 52,636 articles were reviewed. The team categorized articles as pertaining to diagnosis, therapy, or prognosis (among other categories) based on a priori criteria. For the project reported here, we reviewed the studies identified in the Clinical Hedges database as pertaining to diagnosis or prognosis to identify those that specifically pertained to clinical examination (n = 1347).
One investigator (author NS) initially reviewed the title and abstract (if an abstract was available) and full text, if necessary, of the 1347 studies and classified each article as a clinical examination (gold standard article) or a non–clinical examination article (Figure 1). Gold standard articles were those that met our a priori criteria for quantifying the value of the clinical examination. We only considered physical examination findings that could be elicited with commonly available props such as a stethoscope or ophthalmoscope. We included articles that reported both sensitivity and specificity for at least one symptom, sign, or a combination of signs and symptoms (Figure 1). We included multivariable diagnostic rules if they were composed of only signs or symptoms; studies describing a multivariable rule that included imaging or laboratory findings were not considered because these studies can easily be found using existing, more general filters designed for the detection of diagnostic tests. For example, the Breese score—a validated scoring system to diagnose streptococcal pharyngitis in children—was not considered a clinical examination study because, in addition to signs and symptoms, a white blood cell count is required to calculate a total score . We excluded studies of prognostic factors, that is, those focusing on the prediction of future disease (eg, prediction of mortality based on findings on admission to the intensive care unit). Articles with less than 10 patients were excluded because these studies, due to their very small sample size, cannot provide accurate estimates of sensitivity or specificity. Studies that could not be easily categorized were independently reviewed by a second reviewer (author RGB) and differences were resolved by discussion. This process resulted in 60 of 52,636 articles meeting the gold standard criteria (Figure 1).
We then recreated the Clinical Hedges dataset by entering the 161 journals in Medline and by restricting the publication year to 2000 (Figure 1). We placed the articles into two collections stored in an account at PubMed. One collection contained the articles that met our criteria for gold standard, and the other collection contained the remaining articles.
Figure 1. Flow sheet describing development of the training database.
We generated a list of 65 candidate search terms in PubMed syntax with the help of two clinicians, three reference librarians, and a thorough review of the literature. The expert searchers independently reviewed our lists of candidate terms and suggested additional terms. We used terms pertaining to clinical examination and diagnosis as well as negated terms (eg, NOT MRI). (See Multimedia Appendix 1 for a list of the search terms used.) The following PubMed syntax was used: [tw] = text word; [MeSH] = National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Heading; [sh] = MeSH subheading; [TIAB] = Title or abstract; [pt] = publication type; [ti] = title; du[sh] = diagnostic use MeSH subheading; noexp = do not explode (ie, do not automatically include the more specific terms beneath the MeSH term in the MeSH hierarchy).
We evaluated each individual filter against the training database to determine its recall (proportion of the clinical examination articles that the filter detected), precision (proportion of articles retrieved that were relevant), F-measure (an overall measure combining recall and precision), "fallout" (the proportion of nonrelevant articles that were retrieved), and the number needed to read (the average number of articles the searcher will need to look at to find each relevant article) . Of the clinical examination terms, 7 had a recall of greater than 25% and a fallout of less than 50%. We evaluated all possible combinations (2-term combinations, 3-term combinations, 4-term combinations, 5-term combinations, 6-term combinations, and one 7-term combination) of these 7 terms to identify the combinations with the highest recall, precision, and F-measure. We repeated this process for all possible combination of the 8 diagnosis terms with a recall of greater than 25% and a fallout of less than 50%.
Because testing all combinations of single-term filters would have been prohibitive, we used recursive partitioning to develop the best multiple term filter (hereinafter referred to as the recursive partitioning filter) . Recursive partitioning is a form of nonparametric discriminant analysis that repeatedly stratifies the group into smaller mutually exclusive subgroups according to a set of predictor variables. Apart from its efficiency, an added advantage of recursive partitioning is its ability to create filters including both Boolean terms, OR and AND. Recursive partitioning also adds the ability to vary misclassification costs (cost of a false positive vs costs of a false negative) in order to identify terms that best address the objectives of the analysis. For each of the 41 terms with a recall of greater than 25% or fallout less than 75%, we calculated the recall, precision, F-measure, and fallout against the training database. To decide on the first branching point in the tree, we chose the term with the lowest weighted error rate (weight based on the prevalence of clinical examination studies among all studies in the database) . Once the term with the lowest error rate was found (ie, diagnosis[tw]), we created 4 new datasets in PubMed ("clinical examination" AND diagnosis[tw]; "clinical exam" NOT diagnosis[tw]; "non clinical examination" AND diagnosis[tw]; "Non clinical exam" NOT diagnosis[tw]). We then tested all remaining filters against each of these 4 new datasets and again identified terms with the lowest error rate. This allowed us to grow the recursive partitioning tree. We repeated this until the two 2x2 tables created by the split were no longer significantly different from each other (P > .05). Because this approach can lead to overfitting, we also required each new branch to have a recall of at least 99%.
To develop the testing database, we used the largest collection of systematic reviews on clinical examination in the literature: The Rational Clinical Examination series in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) . One author (NS) used a priori inclusion and exclusion criteria similar to those used to establish the training database to develop the testing database. We included systematic reviews that reviewed at least 10 original studies, reported sensitivity and specificity of signs or symptoms, and were published beginning in 1996 through 2006 (Figure 2). Reviews that did not pertain to clinical examination, reviews of questionnaires, reviews of multivariable diagnostic rules that included laboratory or imaging variables, and reviews of prognostic or screening tests were excluded. A total of 15 systematic reviews met all inclusion criteria.
Articles included in these 15 reviews were regarded as relevant articles (gold standard) that the filters should be able to recall. To identify nonrelevant articles we recreated the subject-specific search (eg, temporal arteritis or giant cell arteritis) using the search strategy reported in the methods section of each of the systematic reviews; articles that were retrieved by the electronic subject-specific search but that were not included in the review were regarded as nonrelevant. This allowed us to calculate the number of relevant and nonrelevant articles for each review. A total of 224 original clinical examination articles were included in these 15 systematic reviews. We excluded 7 articles that were not in Medline. One study was excluded because it was not found by the subject-specific search. In all, 28 older studies without abstracts were excluded because filters would have difficulty retrieving these studies and because contemporary studies of the clinical examination are likely to have abstracts. The resulting testing database included 188 articles that were relevant and 430,932 articles that were nonrelevant.
Figure 2. Flow sheet describing development of the testing database.
For the 3 filters with the highest recall in the training database, we calculated the recall, precision, F-measure, and the number needed to read in the testing database. The calculations were based on the cells and formulas in Table 1.
The performance of 12 previously developed filters validated for retrieving articles on diagnosis [10,17-21] and 1 filter developed specifically for the clinical examination by editors of the Rational Clinical Examination series  was evaluated in the testing database. The filters tested are listed in Multimedia Appendix 2 and are named using the name of the first author of the publication describing the filter followed by the year of publication. If more than one filter was described in the publication, we tagged on the name used by the author to describe the various filters. For example, the label "Haynes-2004-Sensitive" refers to the filter described by Haynes et al in their 2004 publication with the highest sensitivity (ie, the filter with the highest recall). Finally, we tested whether a combination of the best filters would improve performance.
Authors of systematic reviews often examine reference lists hoping to increase recall. We examined how this strategy would complement the use of filters in the area of clinical examination. Specifically, we examined whether checking the reference lists of included articles would allow use of a filter with a lower recall. Thus, we identified articles that were missed by the 2 filters with the highest recall and checked to see if these articles were included in the reference lists of the articles not missed by these filters.
Filters with the best performance in the training database are shown in Table 2. The term diagnosis[subheading] identified 95% of the clinical examination studies. The MeSH term physical examination identified only 25% of studies and was therefore not included in the table. In general, multiple-term search filters using only terms pertaining to diagnosis outperformed the filters using only clinical examination terms. Also, 3 filters had a recall of 100% (CE-high recall, Dx-high recall, RP) and two of these (Dx-high recall, RP) appeared particularly promising because of their higher precision.
The recursive partitioning tree is shown in Figure 3. When converted to Boolean language, the RP filter, in PubMed syntax, is as follows: (Diagnosis[tw] AND (specific*[tw] OR clinical*[tw] OR exam*[tw])) OR "sensitivity and specificity"[MeSH].
Figure 3. Best multiple-term filter for retrieval of articles on clinical examination (CE) developed using recursive partitioning.
The recall, precision, F-measure, and the number needed to read for the filters developed in this study as well as the 13 previously developed filters and combination of filters are presented in Table 3. The Haynes-2004-Sensitive filter had the highest recall (98%). When considering only filters with a recall of 80%, the RP filter had the highest precision (0.26%). The Haynes-2004-Sensitive filter and the CE-high recall filter when combined using the Boolean term OR had a recall of 100% and a precision of 0.06%. Other filter combinations did not offer much of an improvement in recall compared with their individual use.
Overall, 4 of 188 relevant articles were missed by the Haynes-2004-Sensitive search strategy, and, of these, 2 were retrieved by reviewing the reference lists of the articles not missed by this strategy (increasing recall from 98% to 99%). Of the 19 articles missed by the recursive partitioning strategy, 8 were retrieved by reviewing the reference lists of the articles not missed by this strategy (increasing recall from 89% to 94%).
We quantified the recall and precision of filters that may be used to find articles on clinical examination in MEDLINE. While the use of recursive partitioning may increase the precision of searching, all of the strategies we tested had a very low precision of less than 2%.
For health care providers looking for information regarding the diagnostic accuracy of clinical examination findings, the RP filter appears to be the most reasonable choice. For example, let us assume that a clinician is reviewing the ability of the third heart sound to detect heart failure. To determine the posttest probability of congestive heart failure among patients with a third heart sound, the search using the RP filter in PubMed would be (gallop OR S3 OR third heart sound) AND heart failure[MeSH] AND ((Diagnosis[tw] AND (specific*[tw] OR clinical*[tw] OR exam*[tw])) OR "sensitivity and specificity"[MeSH]). As of March 2011 this search yielded 68 articles, several of which directly related to the clinician's question. Although not studied, the physician could restrict the search to systematic reviews by adding the term "systematic[sb]". This strategy yielded 1 relevant systematic review. While the NNRs for the filters examined reported in this study are very high (Table 3), the NNR will be considerably lower in clinical practice. The NNR, like the positive predictive value of a diagnostic test, is dependent on the prevalence of articles about physical examination. Although the proportion of physical examination studies in MEDLINE is relatively low (eg, < 0.1% in the Hedges database), when the clinician enters search terms for a disease and for the physical examination findings, the prevalence of physical examination articles increases. As a result, the number needed to read will be substantially lower (see example above). Accordingly, it is critical that the clinician uses a well-built clinical question using the most descriptive and specific terms possible .
For the researcher who wants to undertake a systematic review, the Haynes-2004-Sensitive filter , with its 98% recall, appears to be the most reasonable choice. Nevertheless, some articles may be missed if one relies on this filter alone. Two strategies are suggested for increasing recall. One is to examine the reference list of the articles meeting criteria for inclusion. This increases the sensitivity to 99%. The other strategy is to combine the Haynes-1994-and the CE High recall filter using OR. Although this strategy had a 100% recall, its precision was very low (0.06%). Even though relying on filters alone may lead to some studies being missed , we feel that use of filters is appropriate, especially when it is exceedingly difficult to conduct a review without one. The filters presented here are intended to be used as part of a larger search strategy, which includes a review of reference lists, and communication with experts in the field.
All of the filters we tested had a very low precision in identifying clinical examination studies. Our findings are consistent with findings published by Haynes and colleagues , indicating poor precision of filters developed for retrieving articles on diagnosis as compared to those developed for retrieving articles on treatment (Table 4). These observations suggest that the National Library of Medicine should create a publication type for studies that quantify sensitivity and specificity for diagnosis. Other alternative or complementary solutions may involve manually identifying and tagging studies that quantify the clinical examination (as is currently used by the Cochrane Collaboration to create a database of sound randomized controlled treatment trials, CENTRAL), collaborative filtering, or content-based filtering .
There are several limitations to our study. The Hedges database  contains the 161 journals whose articles were felt to have the highest scientific merit and clinical relevance. While we believe these are the journals that will most help clinicians, the results may vary when all of Medline is searched. In addition, journals published in foreign languages were not included in the Hedges database. Because some of our filters used text words, these filters may fall in performance when searching for articles that have not been translated to English or for articles without an abstract. Another limitation was in our identification of candidate search terms. Consistent with prior studies of filter development, expert searchers independently reviewed our lists of candidate terms and suggested additional terms. However, we did not quantitatively review the most frequent search terms and text words in the gold standard studies to identify candidate terms. However, when we retrospectively examined the MeSH terms that were used to index the gold standard studies in the training database, the terms not tested by us had substantially lower recall and precision than the terms we selected. Nevertheless, we believe that future studies should incorporate this method of identifying terms. Another limitation was in identification of the gold standard articles in the training database. Only one investigator initially reviewed the articles for eligibility. Future studies should utilize two investigators who independently assess each article. Finally, because of the low prevalence of clinical examination studies, the number of gold standard studies in both the training and testing databases were relatively small. Further testing of these filters in larger databases is necessary.
A surprising result is that only 25% and 20% of the clinical examination studies in the training database were coded with the MeSH terms "physical examination" and "signs and symptoms", respectively. This current inconsistency in the assignment of these MeSH terms limits the ability of search filters on this topic.
We present a new method for the development of multi-term filters. The use of recursive partitioning in the development of filters is novel and seems particularly well suited when there are many candidate terms. When the number of candidate terms is small, one could test all the possible combinations of terms against the dataset. This becomes prohibitive when the number of candidate terms is large. In contrast, using recursive partitioning, a search filter is constructed in a stepwise fashion. This method also allows for the development of filters that use both AND and OR terms and allows for the development of filters with the best combination of recall and precision.
Recursive partitioning offers an alternative method of developing filters: it not only allows for the development of filters with the best combination of recall and precision, but also for the development of filters that use both AND and OR Boolean connectors. Despite the advantages of recursive partitioning, the filters we developed for the retrieval of clinical examination studies had relatively low precision. We believe the National Library of Medicine should create a publication type for articles that quantify the sensitivity and specificity of the clinical examination. This new tag could improve retrieval of studies of clinical diagnosis.
We acknowledge Chen-Pin Wang, PhD, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, who helped us develop statistical strategies to address overfitting in the recursive partitioning model.
List of filters evaluated in the testing corpus.
Hersh WR. Information Retrieval: A Health Care Perspective. New York: Springer; 1995.
©Nader Shaikh, Robert G. Badgett, Mina Pi, Nancy L. Wilczynski, K. Ann McKibbon, Andrea M. Ketchum, R. Brian Haynes. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 19.10.2011.


text:
Honda showed the work of a new airbag
August 25, 2019	0	By autotimesnews
Honda demonstrated the operation of a three-chamber airbag of a new type. According to the calculations of the Japanese company, a progressive airbag will improve the protection of the front passenger with a frontal and side impact. Testing was successful: three-chamber airbags will appear on Honda production cars in 2020.
The key difference between the new pillow and the usual airbag with one inflatable compartment is the combination of four components: three sections of the airbag and the "sail panel" between the two extreme compartments. The creators compare the principle of the new airbag with a baseball mitten: a three-chamber pillow neatly catches and slows the passenger's head, helping to minimize craniocerebral injuries and fractures of the cervical vertebrae.
The most effective technology may be in the event of a side impact or a frontal impact with displacement: three sections reduce the likelihood of injuries resulting from a chaotic rotation of the head or its sliding off the airbag.
Jim Keller, president of Honda's US R&D branch, said the new development was the result of Honda's ongoing efforts to improve safety. Keller called the three-chamber pillow "revolutionary technology" and expressed confidence that the new product could save many lives.
Who will win the tug of war, Mercedes-AMG G 63, Bentley Bentayga or Porsche Cayenne?
The new Chevrolet Corvette has different exterior mirrors

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


1. The box of 70 pieces rubber stamps including 26 letters in upper case and low case, number 0-9 and 8 symbols- versatile enough to make your very own words!
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Seal Size 1.2*0.9*4 / 0.5*0.35*1.6"
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It's just been revealed that in an effort to cut back on the number of iPhones bought for the express purposes of reselling them or unlocking them from their AT&T Mobility shackles, Apple is limiting sales of iPhone to two per customer and not accepting cash for them at Apple's retail stores.The old policy was five iPhones per person, but apparently, that proved too tempting for hackers.
It's just been revealed that in an effort to cut back on the number of iPhones bought for the express purposes of reselling them or unlocking them from their AT&T Mobility shackles, Apple is limiting sales of iPhone to two per customer and not accepting cash for them at Apple's retail stores.
The old policy was five iPhones per person, but apparently, that proved too tempting for hackers.
"Customer response to the iPhone has been off the charts, and limiting iPhone sales to two per customer helps us ensure that there are enough iPhones for people who are shopping for themselves or buying a gift," said Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris said. "We're requiring a credit or debit card for payment to discourage unauthorized resellers."
In a conference call earlier this week, Apple COO Tim Cook said Apple believes that of the 1.4 million iPhones bought since the debut on June 29, around 250,000 were purchased with the express purpose of unlocking them.
Do you think the new two-iPhones-per-customer policy is fair?


text:
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Gold Ridge withdraws workers
GOLD Ridge Mining Limited (GRML) confirmed last night it has withdrawn personnel from its Gold Ridge mine following a serious escalation in security and associated safety concerns. GRML Director, Bob Vassie, said: "Safety is the Company's highest priority. We have taken the decision to withdraw our employees from site because we cannot assure their continued…
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"We are going to make sure that every vote is counted."
UPDATED: 6:34 a.m. EDT, Nov. 7 — After a suspenseful Election Night, Stacey Abrams said she wouldn't concede the race to be Georgia's next governor to Brian Kemp, who was accused of orchestrating widespread voter suppression against Black people before and during Election Day. Abrams hinted at a possible runoff election next month because of Kemp's razor-thin lead that continued to dwindle Wednesday morning, according to the Atlanta Journal-Consitution.
This race is NOT over. @StaceyAbrams is now closer than ever.
And 9% of voters are still outstanding in heavily Democratic areas.
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp stooped to a new low, even for him, in his ongoing efforts to keep Black people from voting for Stacey Abrams, the Black woman running against him for governor. Voting machines, which fall under the responsibility of the secretary of state, were delivered to majority Black precincts without any cords to provide them with electrical power for voters to cast their ballots.
Kemp's "dirty tricks" caused delays of up to four hours at polling places where hundreds of voters at a time were left waiting.
Kemp, who has President Donald Trump's endorsement, oversees the election system. He's also been on the receiving end of multiple federal lawsuits over his attempts to suppress Black votes.
They range for rejecting certain absentee ballots, blocking approximately 53,000 voter registration forms and purging some 700,000 voters from the state's voting rolls—all targeting African-American voters.
Here are just a few of the reports that flooded social media about suppression in Georgia.
Many of the reported problems apparently stemmed from old, decrepit voting machines that are concentrated in poor communities.
"The counties and cities with the fewest resources are voting on the oldest equipment that tend to have the most problems," Edgardo Cortés, an election security advisor at the Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program, confirmed to NewsOne during an interview on Monday.
Kemp and Abrams were locked in a neck-and-neck race. Abrams has the chance to become the nation's first African-American woman governor—in a red state that has not elected a Democratic governor in two decades.


text:
Killer Dreams
著者: Iris Johansen
ナレーター: Jennifer Van Dyck
カテゴリー: ミステリー・スリラー・サスペンス, スリラー・サスペンス
批評家のレビュー
"The danger increases tenfold as the hunters become the hunted in this suspenseful tale of nightmarish evil." (Booklist)
New York Times best-selling author Iris Johansen returns with a new suspense thriller guaranteed to keep readers turning pages all night long, an adrenaline-laced shocker that pits a mother and son against a killer who's the stuff of nightmares.
If you close your eyes, he'll get you. Sophie Dunston knows all too well how dreams can kill. As one of the nation's top sleep therapists, she specializes in the life-threatening night terrors that her 10-year-old son, Michael, suffers from. But she is also an expert in another kind of terror, the kind that can turn a dream life into a living nightmare in the blink of an eye.
Someone is watching. He's a shadowy figure from out of her darkest fears, and he hasn't forgotten her. In one shocking moment of violence, he'd shattered Sophie's world forever and left her with only one thing to live for: her son. But the nightmare isn't over for Sophie Dunston. It's just begun. He's been waiting. Sophie was supposed to die the first time around, but fate intervened. This time he'll make sure that not even a miracle will save her.
It wasn't a miracle that saved Jock Gavin, but it was pretty close. A semi-retired hit man, commando, and jack-of-all-deadly-trades, he knows what Sophie is up against, and that she'll need help. But the man he's chosen for the job is as unpredictable as he is dangerous. Matt Royd is a wild card, hard, cool, merciless, and putting him into play changes the game completely. But to whose advantage?
Sophie will soon find out. She will have to trust Royd because she has no choices left. Because the boogeyman haunting her dreams is all too real and he's on the hunt again. Because the nightmare he's got planned for Sophie won't end when she wakes up screaming. It won't end. Ever.
©2006 Johansen Publishing LLLP (P)2006 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
同じ著者・ナレーターの作品
Blind Alley
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Killer Dreamsに寄せられたリスナーの声
最も参考になった 最近のレビュー
すべて表示 5つ星のみ表示 4つ星のみ表示 3つ星のみ表示 2つ星のみ表示 1つ星のみ表示
KimerySue
HOLY COW BATMAN!
If you liked the old Batman shows you'll LOVE this book. EVERYTHING is SOOOOO over dramatized that it's hard to get into. It was so hard to listen to that I just didn't get what the story line was anymore. I had to quit.
Disapointed
I usually enjoy this author but I was really tired of hearing "shut-up". I gave up about 2/3 of the way in.
Iris Johansen is one of my favorite authors, and as I've come to expect this novel as always out shines the last with lots of intrique and twists in the plot. Anyone who enjoys her work will not be disappointed and if you have never read one of her novels this would be a great one to read first.
Gail Goodwin
Not Johansen usual writing!!
Could not wait until the end, I have read all her books and there is something missing in this one, more like one of the romance novels
Very good book
I listened to this several times. Loved it. Good story and plenty of twists and turns
GI Joe with Kung-Fu Grip
I accidentally chose this book...
I thought this was going to be an interesting book with intrigue and action. Zero of either! There was so much build up but nothing ever happened! The so called sexual tension was sophomoric and tedious. Damn would someone just kill someone or something!? I think the author should leave the special forces styled assassin BS to someone else and stick to describing naked hunks unabashedly lounging about the undersexed landscape while the heroine continually tells him to "shut up".
This book made me look forward to my next root canal.
I will say that I was digging the narrator's Scottish accent.
Loved it!!
Great book....not surprised. Iris Johansen is always great. Loved the characters....couldn't wait to find out what happened next.
Book and Movie Lover
Typical Johansen - Easy Listening, Fast Pace
Sophie Dunst, a dream expert and her son Michael are being targeted by killers, all after they both witness Sophie's father gun down Sophie's mother and then kill himself in a crazed mental state that was completely unlike his usual state (a "killer dream" maybe?) When it becomes clear that someone wants Sophie and Michael dead, they go into hiding with the help of Royd, a handsome protector. Diabolical plot, erotic charmer, beautiful leading lady, what more do you need? Pretty good summer listen.
JC Radican
Killer Dreams - WOW
Wow!! This was a GREAT book!! I would never expect less from Iris Johansen though!! It kept me going to where I didn't want to stop, cuz I wanted to know what was going to happen next! As always, thanks Iris Johansen for your wonderful imagination!! Happy reading!
Mrs. REP
Dire!
This is not a good example of the romantic suspence genre! The main characters are cardboard cutouts and have lots of unlikely contradictory conversations. The story is partially set in Scotland where the characters are all called MacDuff or MacTavish or suchlike and the author appears to be unaware that Scotland Yard isn't actually in Scotland.
Also the narrator has to be in the running for the worst Scottish accent ever!


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text:
Tag: storytelling
Storytelling in a disconnected age, and why it matters for policymakers
Soledad O'Brien's attention to the intersection of public policy and storytelling is crucial in bringing awareness to public policy issues to those outside our policy wonk bubble. We are so excited to have her as our distinguished speaker for The Holt Lecture this year and learn more about her approach to storytelling.
If you would like tickets for this year's Holt Lecture, click here. It's free! Hope to see you there!
MoreStorytelling in a disconnected age, and why it matters for policymakers
Kim Simon
by Casey Fischl
Kim Simon is the Managing Director of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, which manages one of the largest digital collections of its kind in the world. Kim has been with the Institute since its start in 1994 and has played a key role in the development and implementation of public engagement programs that connect USC Shoah Foundation to many audiences.
MoreKim Simon
Originally published on the USC Price website, February 11, 2015 Television icon LeVar Burton discussed how he'd like to see storytelling better integrated into education during a Jan. 28 Holt…
MoreLeVar Burton seeks to integrate storytelling into education


text:
\section{Introduction}

The current galaxy formation scenario based on the $\Lambda$ cold dark matter
($\Lambda$CDM) cosmology model \citep{Begelman1980,Volonteri2003} suggests that
massive galaxies form from hierarchical merging and accretion of smaller
galaxies. If the merging galaxies have massive black holes (MBHs) in their
centers, the merging processes should also include coalescence of MBHs, since
MBHs are commonly observed at the centers of most galaxies today
\citep{Greene2009}. Thus, to understand the process of MBHs coalescence is
significant for cosmological structure formation, galaxy formation and MBH
formation.

In the case of gas-poor galaxies merging, the two MBHs have three distinct
evolution phases \citep{Begelman1980}. First, the dynamical friction exerted by
the stars forces the two MBHs to sink toward the galactic center. This phase
continues until the binary reaches the \textit{hard binary separation}
\citep{Merritt2001,Yu2002}. Second, a hard MBH binary (MBHB) orbit will continue
to shrink due to \textit{slingshot} ejection of surrounding stars. Third, when
the MBHB reaches a separation at which the loss of orbital energy caused by
gravitational waves (GWs) emission becomes significant, the MBHB shrinks until
the final coalescence.

There is a challenging problem, often called ``Final Parsec Problem'', during
this three phase model in the merger of gas-poor galaxies. In
\textit{quasi-steady spherical} stellar environment, the \textit{slingshot}
efficiency decreases rapidly when the separation of the MBHB becomes much
smaller than the average separation of neighboring stars of the MBHB
\citep{Quinlan1997, Milosavlijevic2003, Berczik2005}. The hardening rate of the
MBHB for large particle numbers, such as in real galactic nuclei, is too low and
the timescale of coalescence of the MBHB will be larger than the Hubble
time. Recent efforts suggest that if the stellar system has some degree of
axisymmetry or triaxiality, this problem may be solved
\citep{Yu2002, Merritt2004, Berczik2006, Preto2011,FPB2012, KPBB2012, khan2013}.
 The simulations by \cite{khan2013} show that even a mildly flattened stellar system with an axis ratio
of $0.9$ will result in an eight times faster hardening rate of the MBHB,
and that the MBHB evolution is independent of particle number when the
axis ratio is $0.75$. These results agree with the earlier work of
 \cite{Berczik2006}. Also, \cite{Gualandris2012} argue
that in post-merger galaxies the loss-cone is full, hardening does not
depend on $N$. Therefore, these studies show a solution of the ``Final Parsec Problem''
because the MBHB merges in a relatively short time.
The final solution of this problem requires more work on the details of the
\textit{slingshot} phase.

Detection of GWs is the most important expected observations in the near future
to give direct proof of general relativity. GWs will also provide a new window
to understand the Universe independent of electromagnetic observations. The
coalescence of MBHs is expected to be the strongest GW source to be measured
with future space satellite detectors, such as the Laser Interferometer Space
Antennae (LISA/e-LISA/ALIA, see e.g. \citealp{Gong2011}). This encourages
researchers to concentrate on the final orbital parameters and the merging rate
of MBHs to predict the GW signals to be measured.

It is very important to understand the eccentricity growth of the MBHB during
phase $2$ since it strongly influences the coalescence time \citep{Peters1964}
and the angular momentum evolution. \cite{Q1996} used three-body scattering
experiments to study the properties of slingshot effects. He found the
eccentricity growth is small unless the MBHB already forms with a large
eccentricity. \cite{Preto2011,khan2011} carried out a large number of $N$-body
simulations of \textit{equal-mass} MBHBs in axisymmetric and triaxial stellar
environment after a galaxy merger. They found the initial eccentricities when
MBHs become bound are very high with about $e = 0.95$ on average. This is also
consistent with previous work \citep{Aarseth2003, BPB2008, Berentzen2009,
Preto2009, LLB2012}. On the other hand, \cite{khan2013} find low eccentricities for some of their elliptical
 galaxy models. The reason for this may be that they model a non-rotating stellar system.
However, none of the these studies examined the detailed
scattering processes near the MBHB; it is desirable to study the eccentricity
evolution in detail in the full $N$-body simulation as a counterpart, and to
check the validity of \cite{Q1996} three-body Monte Carlo work.

A galaxy merger can result in a rotating stellar
  system. Therefore, simulations of MBHBs in rotating star clusters are
 interesting \citep{Berczik2006,Preto2011,khan2011,KPBB2012}.
Several restricted studies of MBHB evolution in rotating star
clusters were carried out by \cite{Sesana2011} and \cite{GDS2012}.
They study very high mass ratios of the MBHB ($1/64$) and a
 small stellar system surrounding it (less than the mass of the MBHB).
 Under these restrictions, \cite{Sesana2011} find that the
eccentricity evolution of MBHB in a rotating stellar cusp can be
significantly influenced by the fraction of corotating stars.
However, larger $N$-body simulations may give different results,
because many interactions occur with stars from unbound regious.
Thus to understand the effect of stellar rotation further, it is necessary to carry
out a deeper analysis of large $N$-body systems with different mass ratios
of MBHB.

It is interesting that triple black holes during galaxy mergers can also exist,
if one of the progenitor MBHBs does not coalesce before the next galaxy with
another third MBH falls in. In such cases, very extreme eccentricities of the
inner MBHB have been found ($e\sim 0.99-0.999$, \citealp{Amaro2010})

\cite{Yu2003} studied the dynamical processes of hyper-velocity stars ejected by
the MBHB in the Galactic center and predicted the rate of
ejections. \cite{Lu2010} use analytical arguments and numerical simulations to
study the distribution of hyper-velocity stars ejected by a MBH in the Galactic
center. They found most of these are ejected anti-parallel to the injecting
direction of their progenitors.

In this paper, Section~\ref{sec-method} provides the $N$-body simulations and
the method to select ejected stars from the simulation results. In
Section~\ref{sec:ui} we list the initial conditions. In Section~\ref{sec:result}
we discuss the eccentricity growth of MBHBs, angular momentum properties of MBHBs
and ejected stars. Finally, Section~\ref{sec:dis} contains our results and
conclusions.

\section{Methods} \label{sec-method}

In this work, we use the direct $N$-body code called \PGPU ~\citep{BNZ2011}
to do all the simulations. The full set of runs and the parameters are
described in more detail in our forthcoming publication ~\citep{BSBN2013}.

The code is a direct $N$-body simulation package, with a high order
Hermite integration scheme and individual block time steps (the code supports
time integration of particle orbits with 4$^{\rm th}$, 6$^{\rm th}$ and even
8$^{\rm th}$ order schemes). A direct $N$-body code evaluates in principle
all pairwise forces between the gravitating particles, and its computational
complexity scales asymptotically with $N^2$; however, it is {\em not} to be
confused with a simple brute force shared time step code, due to the block time
steps. We refer more interested readers to a general discussion about $N$-body codes
and their implementation in \cite{spurzem2011a,spurzem2011b}.

The \PGPU code is fully parallelized using the MPI library, and for each MPI process
GPU accelerator hardware is used to compute gravitational forces between
particles. It is based on an earlier {\bf \tt C}
version\footnote{\tt ftp://mao.kiev.ua/pub/users/berczik/phi-GRAPE/} for
{\tt GRAPE6a} clusters ~\citep{FMK2005}. The new code is written from scratch in
{\bf \tt C++} and based on earlier CPU serial $N$-body code (YEBISU;
\citealp{NM2008} ).  The MPI parallelization was done in the same ``j'' particle
parallelization mode as in the earlier \PGRAPE code \citep{HGM2007}.

The present version of the \PGPU\footnote{\tt ftp://mao.kiev.ua/pub/berczik/phi-GPU/}
code uses native GPU support and direct access
to the GPU's with only the NVIDIA native CUDA library. Multi GPU support is
achieved through MPI parallelization. More details and also the \PGPU public
version are presented in \cite{BNZ2011, SBZ2012, Berczik2013}.

The present code is well tested and already used to obtain important
results in our earlier large scale few million body simulation
~\citep{KBB2012}.

Our analysis is based on the ejected stars from the \textit{slingshot} effect of
MBHBs. The method used to select ejected stars depends on the individual total
energy change from the beginning to the end of the simulations ($\Delta E_t$)
because ejected stars usually gain a lot of energy during the interaction and
this energy gain should be much larger than energy fluctuations caused by
perturbations from other stars. The next step is to check the two dimensional
histogram of initial energy of each star $E_0$ vs. $\log(-\Delta E_t/E_0)$ for
each model, and to determine a critial value $\delta_e$ to select ejected star
candidates, which satisfy $\log(-\Delta E_t/E_0)> \delta_e$, where $\delta_e$ is
obtained by the number density gap shown in Figure~\ref{fig:dEEs}. For rotating
and non-rotating models, these energy features are different, but we still can
select a $\delta_e$, which works well. This procedure also functions as an
operational definition of the term ejected star, which here just means it leaves
after a strong encounter with the MBHB with significantly higher energy than before.
For the purpose of our paper it is not important whether the ejected star has
enough energy to become unbound from the MBHB, from the central stellar cluster
or even from the entire galaxy.

The next step is to check the energy evolution of each ejected star candidate
and the MBHB. The final samples of stars are chosen from each candidate energy
change $\Delta E_i > M_{s,i}$ during its ejection time $t_e$, where $M_{s,i}$ is
the mass of a star in $N$-body units and $i$ indicates the index of ejected
stars.  In our simulation, $M_{s,i}$ is the same order of magnitude of the
individual star's energy in $N$-body units. Thus it can be used to select the
events with obvious energy jump.

With the ejected stars samples, we calculate the angular momentum $L_i$ of each
ES and $L_b$ of the MBHB at $t_e$. We compare the angular momentum before and
after ejection of each star.

We carry out all data reduction and analysis using the open source software {\textit{ROOT}}.

\section{Units and Initial Conditions} \label{sec:ui}

We scale the numerical units of our initial models applying the standard $N$-
body normalization \citep{AHW1974} by setting both the gravitational constant
$G$ and the total mass of the stellar system to unity. The total energy of the
system is scaled to $E = - {1/4}$. Our simulations are purely gravitational and
thus scale-free, but for convenience we define one example of the scaling in
physical units below. The initial conditions of our $N$-body simulations
presented here are based on the ones used in \cite{Berczik2006} and
\cite{BPBMS2009}. The initial stellar galactic nucleus follows a distribution
function for a rotating King model \cite[see, e.g.,][and references
  therein]{ES1999}. It provides rigid rotation inside the half-mass radius, and
quickly decreasing differential rotation outwards. After the MBHs settle into
the galactic center the density and velocity dispersion adjust to the MBH's
gravity inside its influence radius.  The concentration and rotation parameters
are set to $W_0 = 6$ and to $\omega_0=1.8$, respectively, in all rotating
models. We also simulate the non-rotating King models ($\omega_0=0$) for
comparison. The total angular momentum vector of the stellar nucleus are aligned
with the $z$-axis of our coordinate frame. We place the two MBHBs in the $z=0$
mid-plane with initial coordinate components $x_{1,2}=0$ and $y_{1,2}=\pm 0.3$,
where the subscripts denote the two black hole particles.

The full set of models (with different field particle numbers and set of MBH's
initial velocities) and the MBH's orbital evolution are presented elsewhere
\citep{BSBN2013}. Here we analyze only the subset of our runs (which include
seven models) with a fixed stellar particle number $N = 10^6$. The total
integration time for these models was $150$ $N$-body time units. The differences
are the MBH masses, which we are given in Table~\ref{tab:mod}.  The
non-rotating models are indicated by the suffix \textit{-nonrot} hereafter. Our
work will focus on the rotating models. Thus non-rotating models will only be
shown in some parts. The initial $x$-velocity of the MBH's in these simulations
has been chosen to be $v_{x;1,2}=\pm V_{\mathrm{circ}}$, where
$V_{\mathrm{circ}}$ is the circular velocity within the stellar background
model. With our choice of initial values, the circular velocity in $N$-body
units is $V_{\mathrm{circ}}=0.7$ at the initial distance of the MBH's from the
center.

Our models are scale-free and can be applied to a range of real astrophysical
systems. Here we give an example, for the case of the MBH mass 0.01 in $N$-body units i
(see Table~\ref{tab:mod}); if the black hole mass
is e.g. $10^7 M_\odot$, and the black hole separation $y_{1,2}=\pm 0.3$ is,
e.g., $\pm 300$ pc, then one $N$-body time unit is about $15$ Myr and one
$N$-body velocity unit is about $65.6 $ km/s.

\begin{table*}[htbp]
  \begin{center}
    \caption{Full set of our model runs for both rotating and non-rotating King models
    (we use $W_0 =6$ and $\omega_0=1.8$ for the rotating and $\omega_0 = 0$ for the
 non-rotating models).
 $m_1$, $m_2$ and $\mu = m_1 m_2 / M$, with $M = m_1 + m_2$ denote the masses of
the primary and secondary MBH and their reduced mass; all masses here are in units
of $10^{-2}$, where the total cluster mass is unity. \medskip }
    \begin{tabular}{l|ccccccc}
      \tableline
      Model & 0110 & 0210 & 0510 & 1010 & 2020 & 4020 & 4040 \\
      \tableline
      $m_2/m_1$ & 0.10/1 & 0.20/1 & 0.50/1 & 1.00/1 & 2.00/2 & 4.00/2 & 4.00/4 \\
      $\mu$ & 0.0909 & 0.1667 & 0.3333 & 0.5000 & 0.6667 & 1.3333 & 2.0000 \\
      \tableline
      \end{tabular}
  \label{tab:mod}
  \end{center}
\end{table*}

\section{Results} \label{sec:result}

\subsection{Coordinate System and Angles} \label{sec:csa}

In our simulations, we have initially defined rectangular, Cartesian coordinates with
$x$, $y$ and $z$ axes (Section~\ref{sec:ui}). Here, we define three angles:
$\alpha$, $\delta$ and $\theta$. When we use the spherical coordinate system
instead, the radius $r$ denotes the distance to the origin and two angles $\alpha$ and $\delta$
define the direction of a vector.
The transformation from $(x,y,z)$ to $(r, \alpha, \delta)$ can be described as:
\begin{equation}
  \begin{split}
  x &= r \cos \delta \cos \alpha \\
  y &= r \cos \delta \sin \alpha \\
  z &= r \sin \delta \\
  \end{split}
\end{equation}
We will later use these spherical coordinates to define the angular momentum vectors
of a star $L_s$ and of the MBHB $L_b$.
$\theta$ is the angle between $L_b$ and $L_s$ defined through:
\begin{equation}
  \theta = \arccos \frac{\overrightarrow{L_b} \cdot \overrightarrow{L_s}}{|\overrightarrow{L_b}| |\overrightarrow{L_s}|}
\end{equation}
 Hereafter we use suffix ``b'' to denote MBHBs and ``s'' to denote ejected
 stars.

For each angle of individual ejected stars or MBHBs, we also have two values:
the one before ejection time $t_i$ (hereafter denoted with suffix ``BE'') and the
one after ejection time $t_o$ (hereafter denoted with suffix ``AE''). Due to our
simulation output time resolution, the interval time between $t_i$ and $t_o$ is
one $N$-body time unit.

\subsection{Ejected Stars Sample Selection}

Using the method discussed in Section~\ref{sec-method}, we successfully find
most ejected stars for the massive MBHB models. The numbers of ejected stars and
$\delta_e$ (defined in Section~\ref{sec-method}) for all rotating models are listed in
Table~\ref{tab:table-eject}.

\begin{table*}[htbp]
  \begin{center}
    \caption{The number of ejected stars detected in each rotating model. \medskip}
    \begin{tabular}{l|ccccccc}
      \tableline
      Model           & 0110 & 0210  & 0510   & 1010   & 2020    & 4020   & 4040 \\
      \tableline
      $\delta_e$    & 0.25  & 0.25   & 0.24    & 0.20    & 0.24     & 0.19   & 0.08 \\
      $N_{ESs}$       & 863   & 3457  & 10203 & 16656 & 40288  & 57596  & 83367 \\
      $N_{ESs}/N_{tot}(\%)$   & $0.086$ & $0.34$ & $1.02$ & $1.67$ & $4.03$ & $5.76$ & $8.34$ \\
      \tableline
    \end{tabular}
  \label{tab:table-eject}
  \end{center}
\end{table*}

To ensure our samples are convincing, we calculate the integrated energy change
of all ejected stars during their ejections ($\Delta E_{s}(t)$) and compare it to the MBHBs'
binding energy loss ($\Delta E_{b}(t)$) during each time unit
(Figure~\ref{fig:dEvsT}). If the residual energy change $\Delta E_{r}(t) =
\Delta E_{b}(t) - \Delta E_{s}(t)$ is zero, the ejected star sample
is complete, its deviation from zero gives information about how many
ejected stars we may have missed, since there is no other significant mechanism in our
simulations due to which the MBHB can lose energy.
Figure~\ref{fig:dEvsT} shows that $\Delta E_{r}(t)$ in both the
rotating model $2020$ and the non-rotating model $2020$\textit{-nonrot} are
almost zero after the binary formation ($t>40$). This result holds for all
models with large black hole masses. This indicates our method to select
ejected stars is reliable. The only exceptions are the two models $0110$ and
$0210$ with low masses of MBHBs (one is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:dEvsT}).

There are two possibilities that may cause incomplete samples for low mass MBHBs. One
is that low mass MBHBs probably generate more ejected stars with low $\Delta
E_i$, which cannot be distinguished from energy fluctuations caused by other mechanisms, so we
cannot select this part of the ejected stars. Another reason is that the low mass MBHB's
become gravitational bound at a later time
than the massive ones -- slingshot effects dominate the
energy loss of MBHBs only after the binary formation.

\subsection{Eccentricity Growth Rate of MBHBs}

The specific angular momentum $J$ of a MBHB can be described by
\begin{equation}\label{eq:l}
  J = \frac{L}{\mu} = \sqrt{ GMa (1-e^2)}
\end{equation}
 where $L$ is the standard angular momentum, $\mu$ is reduced mass, $a$ is
semi-major axis, $M = m_1 + m_2$ is the total mass of the binary components, $e$ is
the eccentricity and $G$ is gravitational constant. The hardening process of a MBHB provides energy to the
ejected stars, and thus increases its binding energy and reduces its semi-major axis $a$;
As a result of Eq.~\ref{eq:l} the angular momentum of the MBHB will also be reduced,
even if $e$ remains constant (which is generally not the case; see below).
Any eccentricity growth will lead to additional decrease of $L$.
In phase $2$, the ejected stars
dominate the energy and angular momentum evolution of MBHB. Thus to understand
the properties of ejected stars it will help to know how they carry away the
energy and the angular momentum from the MBHB.

\cite{Q1996} defined an eccentricity growth rate $K$ as
\begin{equation}
  \label{eq:ke}
  K = \frac{\Delta e }{\Delta \ln (1/a)}
\end{equation}
and then derived $K_1$, a numerical expression of $K$ with the assumption that all stars have an identical velocity
$v$. Note that, for the special case of constant specific angular momentum
($\Delta J = 0$), we have
\begin{equation}
  \label{eq:ke1}
  K = \frac{\Delta e }{\Delta \ln (1/a)} = - \frac{1-e^2}{2e} \ .
\end{equation}
Quinlan also carried out Monte-Carlo models (three-body scattering experiments of
single stars with the MBHB), the results of which we can compare with our data.
In our work, we
also calculate $K$ by using Equation~\ref{eq:ke} directly from the MBHBs measured
changes $\Delta e$ and $\Delta \ln (1/a)$. To compute the differences we use
the eccentricity $e$ and semi-major axis $a$ of the MBHB averaged over time spans
of one $N$-body time unit (for good statistic).

Figure~\ref{fig:ke} shows the comparison between our result with \cite{Q1996}'s.
The values are not monotonous in time, rather there is a stochastic variation of
$K$ (which creates positive and negative $\Delta e$ in individual encounters)
due to the three-body encounters. The average growth rate of $e$ (see circles
with crosses in Figure~\ref{fig:ke}) is positive and agrees fairly well with
previous semi-analytic work. The dash-dotted line shows the predicted growth rate
when $J$ of MBHB is conserved. If $J$ of MBHB decreases as the MBHB become harding,
the $K$ should be located above this line. Our results indicate that during the hardening
of the MBHB, the MBHBs with lower $e$ always lose $J$ and the MBHBs with
higher $e$ in most cases also lose $J$.

\subsection{Angular Momentum exchange between stars and MBHBs} \label{sec:am}

\subsubsection{Angular momentum evolution}

Figure~\ref{fig:bh_xyz} shows how the three components of the
MBHBs' angular momentum decrease over time. The $L_z$ of
MBHBs in models $0110$, $0210$ and $2020$ have the same or smaller magnitude of
$L_x$ and $L_y$. Thus their MBHBs have an orbital plane that is tilted with respect to the
$x-y$ plane, which is the symmetry plane of the rotating stellar cluster.
The inclination angle between these two planes is far from zero,
hereafter we call these models I-Models. In contrast, the MBHBs in all the other
models have an orbital plane almost parallel to the $x-y$ plane (hereafter we
call these P-Models).

The angular momentum of individual ejected stars $L_{r,AE}$ as compared to that
before ejection $L_{r,BE}$ in all models shows an increasing trend.
Figure~\ref{fig:L_io} provides evidence for this trend. If one of the ejected stars
gains $L_r$ during its ejection, it is located in the top-left region of the
density map, and vice versa. We see that there is both gain and loss of $L_r$ of
ejected stars. But the total $L_r$ gain of the ejected stars is larger than the loss
since the density peaks are located in the top-left region for all models. This
indicates that the ejected stars will carry away net angular momentum from the MBHB.
As an additional effect, they also carry away and redistribute some of the angular
momentum of the stellar system.

Two more effects are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:L_io}. One is that,
independent of the mass of the MBHBs, the stellar angular momentum after
the encounter $L_{r,AE}$ is approximately constant (it is actually a distribution
where the highest level contour lines are nearly flat, parallel to the horizontal axis,
which is the angular momentum before the encounter $L_{r,BE}$). This means
that stars of any incoming angular momentum get a typical angular momentum
after the encounter which is independent of its initial value and is only determined
by the properties of the MBHB. The value of such post-encounter angular momentum becomes smaller
for larger MBHB mass. In case of the non-rotating stellar system the effect is
not visible in the plot, the angular momentum after the encounter scatters
in a more symmetric distribution around the line of equality with the initial
angular momentum.

\subsubsection{Distribution of angular momentum direction}

The direction of incoming and ejecting orbits of ejected stars viewed in
rectangular coordinate system is influenced by rotational planes of both the whole stellar system
and the MBHB. The distribution of $\alpha_s$ and $\delta_s$ (see
Section~\ref{sec:csa}) is similar before and after ejection
(Figure~\ref{fig:ad}).

For I-Models, the MBHBs have a stable $\alpha_b$ and $\delta_b$ (e.g., $\alpha_b
\approx 3.8$ and $\cos (\delta_b) \approx 0.15$ in model $2020$)
(Figure~\ref{fig:ad}), i.e. the direction of the angular momentum of
the MBHB binary (or its orbital plane) does not change much during all the
stellar encounters.
The $\alpha_s$ and $\delta_s$ distribution concentrates near the same
angles or ($\pm \pi$) as the MBHB, both before and after ejection.
This indicates that the MBHB interacts preferentially with stars
having the same orbital plane. The rotational direction of the stars
may be the same or opposite rotational direction as MBHBs' (co- or
counterrotating) and
$\cos (\delta_s)$ also has a concentration towards $0$. Thus ejected
stars are oriented with their orbital plane to the one of the MBHB,
which is
perpendicular to the stellar system rotational symmetry
plane (the $x-y$ plane).

For P-Models, the MBHBs orbital plane is close to the $x-y$ plane,
aligned with the stellar system's rotational symmetry plane and $\alpha_b$ cannot be
defined well. Therefore there is an extended distribution of $\alpha_b$ and we expect
to see no special trend of $\alpha_s$ related to $\alpha_b$ (like model $4020$
in Figure~\ref{fig:ad}). The $\cos (\delta_s)$ distribution also has strong concentration
close to $0$ and less concentration on $\cos (\delta_b)$. The orbits
of the ejected stars, which prefer
$\cos (\delta_s) \approx 0$, are now not correlated
with the MBHB's orbital plane, but rather with the stellar system's rotational
symmetry plane. Therefore we see in this case an effect of the rotation of
the stellar system, which dominate the orbit direction of ejected
stars in P-Models and overrides the MBHBs rotational effect we see in the I-Models.

In Figure~\ref{fig:ad_io}
we use the angles $\alpha_s$ and $\delta_s$ to illustrate the
relation between the stellar orbit before (BE) and after (AE) the encounters.
Particularly interesting are the
concentrations near the lines $\alpha_{s,AE}-\alpha_{s,BE}=\pm \pi$, which
indicates that initially counter-rotating stars (with respect to the MBHB orbital
plane) become co-rotating after the encounter and ejection. But
the $\alpha_{s, BE}$ and $\alpha_{s, AE}$ in both I-Models and P-Models show also
concentrations near the line without change, which means that many ejected stars
preserve their rotational direction during the encounter, independent of that of the MBHB.
We can also
see that $\alpha_{s}$ concentrates near $\alpha_{b}$ with small change before and
after ejection in Model $2020$. The $\delta_{s}$ have a wider change than the
$\alpha_s$ and concentrate near $\delta_{s} = \pi/2 $ with a small change.

The information about the relation between incoming and ejected stellar
orbital plane, related to the one of the MBHB, can be more easily analyzed
by looking at a single angle $\theta$, which is the inclination angle
between ejected stars and MBHB (Figure~\ref{fig:theta_io}).
For I-Models, the distribution of
$\cos \theta$ is flat (model $1001$, $1002$) with a little increase around $\cos \theta = \pm 1$
(model $2020$). This indicates that ejected stars show a preference of co- and
counter-rotation with respect to the MBHBs' rotation, which is consistent with the results
discussed above.

For P-Models, $\cos (\theta_{BE})$ and $\cos (\theta_{AE})$ show clear
concentrations near $\pm 1$ and $0$ (slight bias for $\cos (\theta_{AE})$ in model
$4040$) . It means that the ejected stars tend to have a incident and ejecting
orbits parallel or perpendicular to the MBHB's rotational orbit in the
P-Models, which is consistent with Figure~\ref{fig:ad}.

There is also a slight trend that ejected stars prefer to co-rotate with MBHBs
since the fraction of positive $\cos (\theta)$ is larger than the negative fraction.

The distribution $\cos (\theta)$ in models $4040$ and $4020$ also shows a
significant difference between before and after ejection
(Figure~\ref{fig:theta_io})
. In these two cases, MBHBs tend to switch orbits of
incident stars counter-rotating with MBHBs to co-rotating ones.

For non-rotating models, both $\cos (\theta_{BE})$ and $\cos (\theta_{AE})$ show
no trend of concentration near the $-1$ and $0$, but a strong concentration on
$1$. This indicates that for non-rotating models, ejected stars prefer to have
incident and ejecting orbits co-rotating with MBH's rotational orbit and also
confirms that the concentration near $0$ is the effect of stellar system
rotation. There is also the trend of switching orbits of incident stars
counter-rotating with MBHBs to co-rotating orbits for rotating models.

\section{Conclusions}\label{sec:dis}

High accuracy direct $N$-body models of spherical and axisymmetric (rotating)
star clusters in galactic nuclei have been presented here, which consist of
one million stars and two massive black holes (MBH), which are initially
unbound. We study the evolution of a massive black hole binary (MBHB) forming during the
evolution and its detailed interactions (superelastic scatterings) with single stars.
The two MBHs have three evolutionary phases: the dynamical friction phase, the three-body
encounter phase and a final gravitational wave (GW) radiation phase. The MBHs will sink toward the galactic
center, form a binary whose orbit shrinks through superelastic three-body encounters
until they final coalesce under strong emission of gravitational waves.

Some authors have reported a ``Final Parsec Problem'' for this three phase MBHB
merging scienario purely based on stellar dynamical processes. The timescale of MBHB merging
would be too long compared to the evolutionary time scale of galactic nuclei and galaxy
mergers, which are the origin of MBHB. The MBHB would stall at a separation of about
a parsec with an empty loss cone, no further hardening (orbit shrinking) occurs and
relativistic energy losses are yet too small \citep{Begelman1980}.

Currently it seems that the ``Final Parsec Problem'' only occurs under unphysical idealized
conditions, such as a strictly spherical stellar system. Under more general conditions,
such as some degree of rotation or triaxiality (bars or tidal fields) or the presence
of gas there is no problem to bring an MBHB in few Gyrs to complete relativistic
coalescence \citep{Berczik2005, Berczik2006, Preto2011, khan2011, KPBB2012, KBB2012, khan2013}.

In this work we have studied the details of the interactions between single stars and
the MBHB with an unprecedented detail and statistical quality due to the large particle
number in our simulations (obtained with the $\varphi$GPU code on large GPU accelerated
supercomputers in China and Germany). The detailed evolution of energy and angular
momentum of the MBHB during a large number of {\sl slingshot} interactions with stars
is analyzed. Also the effect of a large scale rotation of the stellar cluster surrounding
the MBHB binary is taken into account.

The nuclear stellar cluster surrounding the MBHB is simulated with
direct high-accuracy $N$-body simulation (Hermite scheme, \PGPU ~\citep{BNZ2011} code) with up to
$10^6$ equal mass stars. A parameter study is presented with different mass ratios
of the black holes to each other and to the single stars (see Table~\ref{tab:mod}).
We build an efficient method to select the ejected stars from the simulations in
order to understand the detailed properties of ejected stars and how they change
the eccentricity of the MBHBs when \textit{slingshot} effects dominate the
hardening of the MBHBs. About $0.08\%$ to $8\%$ of stars are ejected by MBHBs in
our $150$ $N$-body time unit simulations (see
Table~\ref{tab:table-eject}, if we use the scale factor as discussed in the last
part of Section~\ref{sec:ui}, $150$ is about $2.25Gyr$).

Our results (see Figure~\ref{fig:bh_xyz}) exhibit two different classes of systems
based on the MBHB's rotational axis direction at the time it becomes gravitationally
bound, which we denote as $I$-model (the inclination angle
between MBHBs' orbits and stellar system rotational symmetry plane is large) and $P$-model
(MBHBs orbital plane is nearly parallel to the stellar system's rotational symmetry plane).
$I$-model and $P$-model lead to
different characteristics of the angular momentum distribution of ejected stars
(Figure~\ref{fig:ad},\ref{fig:ad_io},\ref{fig:theta_io}). The histogram reflects
both the rotation of the surrounding star cluster as well as the one of the MBHB
- there is a maximum both at angular momenta perpendicular to the orbit of MBHB,
and another one aligned with the stellar system (see I-models in
Figure~\ref{fig:theta_io}). If the stellar system is spherically symmetric we
only see the maximum at ejected stellar orbits co-rotating with the MHBH (see
last two histograms in Figure~\ref{fig:theta_io}).

Besides, the larger mass MBHBs have a stronger rotational correlation with
ejected stars. If the black hole and the stellar system's rotational symmetry plane are
similar, the effect is even stronger. For the $P$-model, the stellar system's rotational symmetry
plane dominates the concentration features of ejected stars (see
Figure~\ref{fig:ad},\ref{fig:theta_io}).

Finally, we find that massive MBHB (models $4040$ and $4020$ in
Figure~\ref{fig:theta_io}) in both rotating and non-rotating galactic nuclei
deplete co-rotating stars, because relatively more ejected stars are co-rotating
with the MBHB. This agrees with
models of
\cite{Zier2001,Zier2002,Iwasawa2011,Meiron2013}.
\cite{Iwasawa2011} carried out simulations with small mass ratios
(1/100) and they only considered bound stars and a non-rotating stellar
system. They argue that non-axisymmetric perturbations by the secondary
 black hole create an effect, which is also seen in our simulations with
rotating models containing a massive MBHB and non-rotating models
(see Figure~\ref{fig:theta_io}):
initially counter-rotating stars become co-rotating after being
scattered. Our results show this effect for much more general conditions
(up to equal mass ratio of the MBHB and including mostly unbound scattered
 stars).
The average eccentricity changes of our MBHBs agree fairly well with early Monte
Carlo prediction \citep{Q1996} (see Figure~\ref{fig:ke}), but the scatter for
individual events is quite large. This means that our interactions, detected in
the numerical simulations, cover a different, and we think more realistic range
of encounters than used in the early investigation of \cite{Q1996}.  This could
be due to different distributions of relative velocities, impact parameters or the
movement of the MBHB. This effect is more pronounced for the few cases where we
have low eccentricity, while for the large $e$ our results follow the same trend
as \cite{Q1996}.  Our data show that the eccentricity grows in a stochastic
way, where positive and negative $K$ occur all the time, but there is an average
trend towards higher eccentricity. The relativistic Post-Newtonian evolution
of the MBHB and its gravitational wave emission in the final phase before
coalescence depends on such detailed orbital evolution, which is a reason why
we need simulations like ours and others for a correct assessment of
gravitational radiation from MBHB in the universe (cf. e.g. \cite{Preto2011,khan2011,khan2013}).
We obtain an average higher eccentricities as comparied to
\cite{khan2013}. The reason for this is probably that we have
rotating models while their galaxy models are non-rotating.

\section*{ACKNOWLEDGMENTS}

We thank the anonymous referee for constructive comments that helped to improve the paper.

We acknowledge support by Chinese Academy of Sciences through the Silk
Road Project at NAOC, through the Chinese Academy of Sciences Visiting
Professorship for Senior International Scientists, Grant Number $2009S1-5$
(RS), and through the "Qianren" special foreign experts program of China.

LW acknowledges support and hospitality through research visits at the
Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPA) in Garching, at the University
of Heidelberg (SFB881), and through the European Gravitational Wave
Observatory (EGO), VESF grant EGO-DIR-50-2010 to attend a school in
Rome, Italy.

The special GPU accelerated supercomputer {\tt laohu} at the Center of Information
and Computing at National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, funded by Ministry of Finance of People's Republic of China under the
grant $ZDYZ2008-2$, has been used for some of the largest simulations.
We also used smaller GPU clusters  {\tt titan}, {\tt hydra} and {\tt kepler},
funded under the grants I/80041-043 and I/84678/84680 of the Volkswagen
Foundation and grants 823.219-439/30 and /36 of the Ministry of
Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-W\"urttemberg, Germany.

Some code development was also done on the Milky Way supercomputer, funded by
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through Collaborative Research Center
(SFB 881) "The Milky Way System" (subproject Z2), hosted and co-funded by the
J\"ulich Supercomputing Center (JSC).

PB acknowledges the special support by the NASU under the Main Astronomical
Observatory GRID/GPU computing cluster project.

MBNK was supported by the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation through the PPGF fellowship, by the Peking University One Hundred Talent Fund (985), and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants 11010237, 11050110414, 11173004). This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation or National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The funds from John Templeton Foundation were awarded in a grant to The University of Chicago which also managed the program in conjunction with National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

\bibliographystyle{apj}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


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Home / My Account / Dry Needling Research
Hardly traceable pitfalls in medical review articles
Complement Ther Med. 2022 Apr 7:102828. doi: 10.1016/j.ctim.2022.102828. Online ahead of print.
The main purpose of review articles is to increase insight into the best possible practice for increasing the health condition of future subjects. This requires the collection of as many relevant data as possible from earlier case studies, but such data should be mutually independent. If the data from the reviewed single- or multi-case studies are not entirely mutually independent, the conclusions of the review study may easily – though not necessarily – become biased. This is shown on the basis of a 2020 systematic review about the effects of deep dry needling on spasticity and related physical disabilities. We analyzed this study by checking undisclosed possible overlaps regarding the subjects dealt with in the various case studies that were reviewed. This analysis raised also some questions about the accuracy of the number of subjects that had been treated, which is an aspects of which errors can commonly not be disclosed by the readers. The objective of our Letter is to show that insufficient attention by authors, editor and reviewers for an unambiguous presentation of the data regarding the subjects dealt with can make it impossible for readers to draw correct conclusions regarding the optimization of possible treatments.
PMID:35398482 | DOI:10.1016/j.ctim.2022.102828
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text:
Protecting Dreamers defines us as Oregonians: Guest opinion
Young people certified under the DACA program, called Dreamers, and several hundred supporters rallied at Terry Schrunk Plaza last fall.(Stephanie Yao Long/2017)
By Guest Columnist
By Peter Courtney and Michael H. Schill
As presidents of the Oregon State Senate and the University of Oregon, each of us has a unique perspective on how protecting undocumented children, known as Dreamers, benefits Oregon. These protections create opportunity. They create hope. They create promise for a generation of young people.
It is also the right thing to do.
These children did not get to choose the country or the state in which they live. Their parents made that choice. They went to elementary school, middle school and high school here. They worked hard. Many participated in school activities.
This is the only country, the only state and the only home they have ever known. Today there is a major political effort to deport them to the country of their parents -- a country they don't know. Pure and simple, they are Americans in thought, word and deed.
Oregon is a leader in reaching out to these children. In 2013, the Oregon Legislative Assembly boldly embraced Dreamers by granting them the ability to attend college, pay in-state tuition rates and receive need-based financial aid. Tuition equity levels the playing field for the nearly 11,000 Oregon young people registered as part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The unjust end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would crush their dreams of earning an education and sharing their talents in the place where they grew up, the place they consider home.
Morality dictates that these young people be allowed to remain in the United States to learn, work and make a life for themselves. Oregon is their home. To uproot them would be wrong.
Tuition equity and DACA have given them access to opportunity and the same American dream their classmates enjoy. It has allowed them to contribute to our economy in the light of day, rather than being relegated to the shadows.
That is why we urge Congress to continue the program and provide these young people a road to citizenship. It is also why we and others support Senate Bill 1563. Provisions of federal law require that prior to providing a benefit to undocumented students, including institutional financial aid, a state statute must be in place that affirms this authority. SB 1563 ensures compliance with federal law and eliminates the requirement that undocumented students must apply for the DACA program to be eligible for scholarships or in-state tuition rates.
Without this legislation, these students would lack basic protections that safeguard their right to continue their education after high school.
Lawmakers and university presidents are not so different. The reason most of us do the work we do is to provide a chance for young people to realize their full potential. Their opportunities should not be hindered by race, culture, background, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or birthplace. We must make clear that the State of Oregon, University of Oregon and all our state universities support every student, no matter his or her immigration status.
Citizens of Oregon are valued and welcomed because of their diversity, not in spite of it. Our many differences enrich our state. They enhance the learning environments at our universities and community colleges. They help our economy flourish.
Congress should act quickly to fulfill our moral duty to protect Dreamers. In the meantime, Oregon will do its part to ensure that all our young people have the opportunity to pursue the bright future they deserve.
To punish young people brought here by their undocumented parents would be wrong. It would be cruel. It would be un-American. They are every bit a part of our American family.
-- Peter Courtney is president of the Oregon State Senate. Michael H. Schill is president of the University of Oregon and a professor of law.


Just like with every other game, everyone is not a winner in video poker. These video poker tips, however, will help you figure out what it takes to win, and hopefully improve your chances quite a bit.
It helps a lot if you already know how the pay table works, understand it well, in fact, and are familiar with how to play the game. After you figure out the pay table, decide how much you're going to bet and how many bets you can make. A common video poker tips is that you need to play no less than 100 rounds to make video poker worthwhile. Whatever you choose to do, make your decisions before you get into the game.
The odds of even getting a winning combination are greatest with fewer numbers of cards. A wild card in the deck makes them even better. However, you can get nowhere unless you actually know the winning combinations and are prepared to make your plays accordingly. For instance, although aces are usually important in card games, video poker is a game where face cards are important. If you have good face cards, don't worry about dropping the ace. If you know what combinations you're driving for, you can play more in a more informed manner and greatly increase the likelihood of a win.
You better have a really good reason for sweating while you're playing online video poker. There's nobody there to play against, except the computer, so just keep your cool and keep your head. The more time you take to consider your options and make sure you're doing the right thing, the better your chances of winning.
It's only when you do things right that your win, and winning is quite profitable if you use consistent strategies and thus can reproduce past results. The best of all video poker tips is to just have fun and enjoy the game.
Video poker uses a Random Number Generator (RNG) to come up with its results, so you have as good of a chance to win as the computer. Good luck beating your machine, and have fun.


Patients who have undergone IVF (in vitro fertilization) treatment may have an additional embryo (or embryos) which can be cryopreserved (frozen) and used for another attempt. This may be after the delivery of a child when the patient may wish to come back and use their frozen embryos to grow their family, or it could be after an unsuccessful stimulated in vitro fertilization (IVF). Transferring frozen embryos is a much simpler process and is less costly than undergoing an additional collection cycle. Frozen embryos maintain their cellular integrity and can give the woman more flexibility with the timing of her pregnancy.


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The District Court in Gdańsk allowed the action of Amon from the Polenergia Group to determine the ineffectiveness of breaking long-term agreements
SPCG Law Firm represents Amon sp. o.o. (a subsidiary of Polenergia S.A.) in proceedings for determination of ineffectiveness of termination by Polska Energia – Pierwsza Kompania Handlowa sp. z o.o. ("PKH", a subsidiary of Tauron Polska Energia S.A.) of the long-term agreements concluded on December 23, 2009 with Amon Sp. z o.o. for the sale of energy generated in renewable energy sources (wind farm in the city of Łukaszów) and sale of property rights arising from certificates of origin confirming the generation of energy in renewable energy sources ("Agreements").
In a partial and preliminary ruling issued on July 25, 2019, the District Court in Gdańsk allowed the claim of Amon Sp. z o.o. The court established that PKH's statements on the termination of long-term Agreements concluded between PKH and Amon are ineffective and have no legal effect in the form of termination of both Agreements. As a result, both Agreements, after the period of notice, i.e. after April 30, 2015, remain in force as to all provisions and bind their parties. At the same time, the District Court in Gdańsk found compensation claims claimed by Amon Sp. z o.o. towards PKH due to PKH's non-performance of the Property Rights Agreement. The verdict is not final.
It is worth noting that this is the first substantive ruling issued in proceedings regarding the termination by PKH in 2015 of long-term agreements for the sale of property rights and energy generated in renewable energy sources.
The legal team of the SPCG dealing with the case is led by Krystian Radłowski, Partner, who represents Amon sp. z o.o. The core team includes also Bartłomiej Jarco, Senior Associate and Zofia Matyja, Associate supported by Ewelina Rumak, Associate, Tomasz Praschil, Associate, and Bartosz Amroziewicz, Junior Associate.


NOAA weather now says "Undefined"
chumbysphere forum → Widgets → NOAA weather now says "Undefined"
Topic: NOAA weather now says "Undefined"
The NOAA weather widget now says "undefined" at the top.
It previews with that same display on chumby.com.
Re: NOAA weather now says "Undefined"
You have to understand that this is out of our hands - the government servers that supply this data to us were affected by the partial government shutdown, and were causing serious problems on our systems.
Because our servers also provide data from other widgets and the various music services, we had no choice but to block the malfunctioning government servers until they resolve their issues.
I have no particular insight into what's going on in the agency since the government reopened. We do know that *many* government data services deteriorated to various degrees of severity over the month of the shutdown, and my experience in the general computer industry and working with various government agencies, and what it publicly known about the degree of damage, that it's probably going to take at least a few weeks to fix everything. Frankly, the real possibility of another shutdown in a few weeks probably isn't a very helpful incentive to the people affected.
I will be experimenting this weekend with unblocking the feed to see what condition it's in.
Hi Duane, thanks for the update. I was complaining more about the wife and the government shutdown. I can't control either one of those. The unbricked Dash has made me smile for the whole time you have given it a new life. Keep up the good work and please accept my apologies if it seemed like I was complaining about the work you and the team do.
We've unblocked and are keeping an eye on it.
I'm guessing that was unsuccessful; it now seems to freeze at "Loading..."
Yeah, the servers are not locking up, and are now responding, but with an error message that there's no data available.
Took a closer look - they moved a bunch of services around so the URLs we were using no longer functioned properly, responding with error messages.
The NOAA widget has been updated for the new locations of the feeds - the CP will eventually recognize the change automatically after a couple of hours, or you can reboot your device to force it to check.
Looking better... but still not totally right.
It's showing current conditions, but the forecast is confused (eg all the days may be SUN with undefined values).
I've seen that happen several times in the past - that behavior seems to depend upon the weather station.
For my zipcode (92131), I'm getting all the data. What zipcode are you using?
it likely just means that your local station is only supplying current conditions at the moment.
If it had been working before, it just may mean that they're not yet fully restored to normal operation.
Hmm, this is odd... on my two C1s it now works properly, but on the chumdash I get "undefined" all over the place... so I power cycled the chumdash... and now it works!
Could be. We had to do some redirecting on the back end a while back because the weather.gov data pulls were killing the server... whether that was due to some fallout from the partial shutdown, or coincidence, I'm not sure.