Prof Chris Lintott

Abstract:

Background Validated methods of objective assessments of surgical skills are resource intensive. We sought to test a web-based grading tool using crowdsourcing called Crowd-Sourced Assessment of Technical Skill. Materials and methods Institutional Review Board approval was granted to test the accuracy of Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk and Facebook crowdworkers compared with experienced surgical faculty grading a recorded dry-laboratory robotic surgical suturing performance using three performance domains from a validated assessment tool. Assessor free-text comments describing their rating rationale were used to explore a relationship between the language used by the crowd and grading accuracy. Results Of a total possible global performance score of 3-15, 10 experienced surgeons graded the suturing video at a mean score of 12.11 (95% confidence interval [CI], 11.11-13.11). Mechanical Turk and Facebook graders rated the video at mean scores of 12.21 (95% CI, 11.98-12.43) and 12.06 (95% CI, 11.57-12.55), respectively. It took 24 h to obtain responses from 501 Mechanical Turk subjects, whereas it took 24 d for 10 faculty surgeons to complete the 3-min survey. Facebook subjects (110) responded within 25 d. Language analysis indicated that crowdworkers who used negation words (i.e., "but," "although," and so forth) scored the performance more equivalently to experienced surgeons than crowdworkers who did not (P < 0.00001). Conclusions For a robotic suturing performance, we have shown that surgery-naive crowdworkers can rapidly assess skill equivalent to experienced faculty surgeons using Crowd-Sourced Assessment of Technical Skill. It remains to be seen whether crowds can discriminate different levels of skill and can accurately assess human surgery performances. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Abstract:

We use SDSS+\textit{GALEX}+Galaxy Zoo data to study the quenching of star formation in low-redshift galaxies. We show that the green valley between the blue cloud of star-forming galaxies and the red sequence of quiescent galaxies in the colour-mass diagram is not a single transitional state through which most blue galaxies evolve into red galaxies. Rather, an analysis that takes morphology into account makes clear that only a small population of blue early-type galaxies move rapidly across the green valley after the morphologies are transformed from disk to spheroid and star formation is quenched rapidly. In contrast, the majority of blue star-forming galaxies have significant disks, and they retain their late-type morphologies as their star formation rates decline very slowly. We summarize a range of observations that lead to these conclusions, including UV-optical colours and halo masses, which both show a striking dependence on morphological type. We interpret these results in terms of the evolution of cosmic gas supply and gas reservoirs. We conclude that late-type galaxies are consistent with a scenario where the cosmic supply of gas is shut off, perhaps at a critical halo mass, followed by a slow exhaustion of the remaining gas over several Gyr, driven by secular and/or environmental processes. In contrast, early-type galaxies require a scenario where the gas supply and gas reservoir are destroyed virtually instantaneously, with rapid quenching accompanied by a morphological transformation from disk to spheroid. This gas reservoir destruction could be the consequence of a major merger, which in most cases transforms galaxies from disk to elliptical morphology, and mergers could play a role in inducing black hole accretion and possibly AGN feedback.

Abstract:

The effective extinction law (attenuation behavior) in galaxies in the emitted ultraviolet (UV) regime is well known only for actively star-forming objects and combines effects of the grain properties, fine structure in the dust distribution, and relative distributions of stars and dust. We use Galaxy Evolution Explorer, XMM Optical Monitor, and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data to explore the UV attenuation in the outer parts of spiral disks which are backlit by other UV-bright galaxies, starting with the candidate list of pairs provided by Galaxy Zoo participants. New optical images help to constrain the geometry and structure of the target galaxies. Our analysis incorporates galaxy symmetry, using non-overlapping regions of each galaxy to derive error estimates on the attenuation measurements. The entire sample has an attenuation law across the optical and UV that is close to the Calzetti et al. form; the UV slope for the overall sample is substantially shallower than found by Wild et al., which is a reasonable match to the more distant galaxies in our sample but not to the weighted combination including NGC 2207. The nearby, bright spiral NGC 2207 alone gives an accuracy almost equal to the rest of our sample, and its outer arms have a very low level of foreground starlight. Thus, this widespread, fairly "gray" law can be produced from the distribution of dust alone, without a necessary contribution from differential escape of stars from dense clouds. Our results indicate that the extrapolation needed to compare attenuation between backlit galaxies at moderate redshifts from HST data, and local systems from Sloan Digital Sky Survey and similar data, is mild enough to allow the use of galaxy overlaps to trace the cosmic history of dust in galaxies. For NGC 2207, HST data in the near-UV F336W band show that the covering factor of clouds with small optical attenuation becomes a dominant factor farther into the UV, which opens the possibility that widespread diffuse dust dominates over dust in star-forming regions deep into the UV. Comparison with published radiative-transfer models indicates that the role of dust clumping dominates over differences in grain populations at this coarse spatial resolution. © 2014. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.