Effectiveness of simultaneous independent realizations at low carrier-to-noise ratio to improve heterodyne Doppler lidar performance. I. Theory and numerical simulations

It is shown that the performance of heterodyne Doppler lidar (HDL) can be improved by (i) at least one good realization for every single shot or (ii) several simultaneous good realizations for accumulation. Until now, several simultaneous independent realizations at high carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) have been considered. At low CNR, noise may have a detrimental effect on the accumulation techniques. We determine the chances of getting "heavy" speckles in HDL signals from many receiver-detector units on a single-shot basis and several good realizations on a single-shot basis, which is required for an effective accumulation. The use of multiple receiver-detector units at low CNR is worthwhile in contexts such as space lidar, where optimized treatment is at a premium. We conclude on the effectiveness of many receiver-detector units in parallel in order to achieve simultaneous independent realizations at low CNR to improve the performance of HDL on a statistical basis.     

Platelet phospholipids are differentially protected against oxidative degradation by plasmalogens

The oxidative degradation of phospholipids in the presence and absence of plasmalogens (plasmenyl phosphatidylethanolamine: PPE) was followed by chemical analysis. Human platelet phospholipids, either intact or after removal of PPE by acid treatment, were oxidized with 28 mM 2,2′-azobis(2-amidinopropane di-HCl in Triton X-100 micelles (detergent/phospholipid 5∶1, mol/mol). PPE (12% of all phospholipids, mol/mol) disappeared about three times more rapidly than glycerophospholipids, whereas sphingomyelin remained unaltered and the lysophosphatidylethanolamine (lysoPE) generated became progressively more unsaturated. After 60 min oxidation, the FA compositions of PS, PC, and PI were similar in extracts with or without plasmalogens. In contrast, diacyl phosphatidylethanolamine (DPE) became more saturated in the absence of PPE. The rate of phospholipid destruction was always unique to each class, but for all phospholipids slowed down in the presence of PPE. This protective effect increased in the order DPE<PS<PC<PI and did not seem to be simply related to the class unsaturation. α-Tocopherol had no influence on the time courses of the quantities and compositions of the phospholipids, even at a molar ratio of α-tocopherol to phospholipids four times higher than in platelet membranes. Thus, PPE protected phospholipids efficiently but differentially against peroxidative attack, whereas the contribution of α-tocopherol appeared to be negligible even at a concentration four times greater than in platelet membranes.     

Letter position information and printed word perception: The relative-position priming constraint.

Six experiments apply the masked priming paradigm to investigate how letter position information is computed during printed word perception. Primes formed by a subset of the target's letters facilitated target recognition as long as the relative position of letters was respected across prime and target (e.g., "arict" vs. "acirt" as primes for the target "apricot"). Priming effects were not influenced by whether or not absolute, length-dependent position was respected (e.g., "a-ric-t" vs. "arict"/"ar-i-ct"). Position of overlap of relative-position primes (e.g., apric-apricot; ricot-apricot; arict-apricot) was found to have little influence on the size of priming effects, particularly in conditions (i.e., 33 ms prime durations) where there was no evidence for phonological priming. The results constrain possible schemes for letter position coding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Functional Programming Framework for Latency Insensitive Protocol Validation

Latency insensitive protocols (LIPs) have been proposed as a viable means to connect synchronous IP blocks via long interconnects in a system-on-chip. The reason why one needs to implement LIPs on long interconnects stems from the fact that with increasing clock frequencies, the signal delay on some interconnects exceeds the clock period. Correctness of a system composed of synchronous blocks communicating via LIPs is established by showing latency equivalence between a completely synchronous composition of the blocks, and the LIP based composition. A design flow based on a synchronous composition specification, and stepwise refinement to LIP composition can be easily conceived, and a proof obligation to show latency equivalence between the synchronous specification and the refinement needs to be discharged. In this work, we propose a functional programming based framework for modeling and simulating LIP, and implement the semantics of various refinement steps in the programming model, so we can validate the LIP model against the original system within this functional programming framework. Such validation becomes easier due to the inherent denotational model of functional languages. We specifically use Standard ML to model the original system implementation as well as its latency insensitive version and compare the two by creating a model that contains both, giving them the same inputs and checking their outputs to be latency equivalent.     

Numerical simulation of the MHD equations by a kinetic-type method

We introduce a flux-splitting formula for the approximation of the ideal MHD equations in conservative form. The Faraday equation is considered as the average of an abstract kinetic equation, giving a flux-splitting formula. For the other part of the equations, we generalize formally the classical half-Maxwellian flux-splitting of the Euler equations. Numerical results on MHD shock tube problems are displayed.     

Réflexion libre à travers ľATM paragraphs on ATM

Fifteen years after its first tentative steps in the laboratory, ATM seems to have reached the thankless age of confrontation with the reality of operational networks while others would say the age of potential to fulfil and promises to keep. The following article does not pretend to be an in-depth technical analysis of a particular aspect or development of ATM but rather the thoughts of a witness to a number of past, present and future issues. The objective is much more to stimulate thought on ATM than to provide definitive answers to often difficult questions.     

Arachidonic acid autoxidation in an aqueous media effect of α-tocopherol,cysteine and nucleic acids

The autoxidation of arachidonic acid dispersed in aqueous media was evaluated simultaneously with and without different agents, e.g., α-tocopherol at different concentrations, cysteine, DNA and RNA. The autoxidation rate of arachidonic acid was evaluated by quantitative gas liquid chromatography (GLC) determination of the unoxidized acid and by spectrophotometric measurement of conjugated dienes. α-Tocopherol exhibited a prooxidant activity at concentrations of 1.25 × 10⁻⁴ M and 1.25 × 10⁻⁵ M and a weak antioxidant activity at a concentration of 1.25 × 10⁻⁶ M. Cysteine showed antioxidant activity and greatly reduced the prooxidant activity of α-tocopherol. DNA and RNA had no effect in either case. α-Tocopherol oxidation was followed by high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC). The prooxidant effect was accompanied by a rapid oxidation of α-tocopherol, except in the presence of cysteine, which prevented the oxidation of α-tocopherol.     

ATM: A contribution to the debate on broadband ISDN

The definition of broadband ISDN recently became a major topic of research and predevelopments. Fast packet technologies are widely recognized as the basis for BISDN. Even if international consensus has appeared far more quickly than could have been expected a few years ago, a lot of issues remain open. This paper is a contribution to discussions on some important topics relating to the definition of asynchronous transfer mode.     

Application du concept d'echelles multiples a l'ecoulement dans une turbomachine axiale

An asymptotic theory to the flow in an axial compressor is presented with the aim of devising a coupling process between the so-called meridian through flow and the flow around cascades. The small parameter ? is the inverse of the (supposed ? 1) number of blades per row and/or number of stages. As a matter of fact, the cascade flow is treated as a small perturbation of the through flow and has to be computed, locally, as the two dimensional unsteady flow around an array of couples of cascades alternately fixed and in motion. The array is constructed by developing on a plane the section of the compressor by a circular cylinder, and continuing by periodicity, the couple of cascades, so obtained, at each location. The coupling between through flow and cascade flow is part of the analysis. It occurs by the way that the equations of through flow are obtained through an averaging process, completed on a domain of periodicity of the array of cascades, while the through flow appears, locally, as an unperturbed flow for the linearized problem defining the cascade flow. The tridimensional nature of the complete flow is built in by the coupling itself, as is visualized by the occurence of source terms in each of the two sets of equations describing through flow and cascade flow. This paper is aimed at giving a preliminary answer to the question of how to devise an, as rational as possible, way of inscribing the familiar scheme of cascade flow within the computation of a mean through flow. The main output is that the concept of cascade flow should be revisited and reassessed as one of unsteady flow around an array of cascades.