PEARL HARBOR AND THE INADEQUACY OF CRYPTANALYSIS

American codebreakers achieved remarkable success in solving Japanese codes, but could not prevent the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor because the Japanese never transmitted anything about the attack on the airwaves.     

Comparative interference by haemolysis in automated assays for bilirubin at multiple analyte concentrations

The negative interference caused by haemolysis in manual bilirubin assays contrasts with the positive interference reported for some automated methods utilizing the same basic chemistry. A comparison was therefore made of the haemolysis interference associated with several automated bilirubin methodologies: multilayer film (Kodak Ektachem- total bilirubin (TBil), direct bilirubin (DBil), conjugated bilirubin (Bc), unconjugated bilirubin (Bu),; tableted reagents (Baxter Paramax- TBil, DBil); continuous flow (Technicon SMAC — TBil). Thirty serum pools were analysed (five concentrations of bilirubin, 2-229 μmol/l; six concentrations of haemoglobin, 0.00002-0.052 mmol/1). All methods, except one (Bc), exhibited both positive and negative interference, depending upon the relative haemoglobin and bilirubin concentrations. This interference, at any given haemoglobin concentration, was neither constant nor proportional with increasing bilirubin concentration. These complex patterns of interference suggest that the best characterization of interference is obtained when (1) both percentage-difference and absolute-difference ‘interferographs’ are plotted; and (2) the interference is determined at multiple analyte concentrations.     

Reconstructing electrical conductivity profiles from variable-frequency eddy current measurements

A method for reconstructing radially varying conductivity profiles in cylindrical conductors is described. Solenoidal driving and sensing coils surround the cylindrical sample and an AC magnetic field applied by the driving solenoid induces axisymmetric eddy currents in the sample. It is shown how a radially varying conductivity profile can be recovered from measurements of the complex impedance recorded as a function of frequency, where impedance here is defined as the ratio of the induced electromotive force (EMF) in the sensing coil to the current in the driving coil. An iterative nonlinear least-squares algorithm is employed to reconstruct the profiles. Demonstrations of the reconstruction method are presented based on both simulated and experimentally recorded impedance data.     

Propylene Epoxidation: High-Throughput Screening of Supported Metal Catalysts Combinatorially Prepared by Rapid Sol–Gel Method

The gas phase oxidation of propylene using molecular oxygen was studied on a variety of supported metal catalysts. The most promising PO activity was obtained for Cu supported on high surface area SiO₂ and the multimetallic systems exhibit synergistic effects that increased the desired PO yield by several folds for Ag promoted with Cu on SiO₂ after screening a large number of catalysts by a high throughput testing technique.     

Energy Aware Signal Processing for Software Defined Radio Baseband Implementation

The fast pacing diversity and evolution of wireless communications require a wide variety of baseband implementations within a short time-to-market. Besides, the exponentially increased design complexity and design cost of deep sub-micron silicon highly desire the designs to be reused as much as possible. This yields an increasing demand for reconfigurable/ programmable baseband solutions. Implementing all baseband functionalities on programmable architectures, as foreseen in the tier-2 SDR, will become necessary in the future. However, the energy efficiency of SDR baseband platforms is a major concern. This brings a challenging gap that is continuously broadened by the exploding baseband complexity. We advocate a system level approach to bridge the gap. Specifically, we fully leverage the advantages (programmability) of SDR platforms to compensate its disadvantages (energy efficiency). Highly flexible and dynamic baseband signal processing algorithms are designed and implemented to exploit the abundant dynamics in the environment and the user requirement. Instead of always performing the best effort, the baseband can dynamically and autonomously adjust its work load to optimize the average energy consumption. In this paper, we will introduce such baseband signal processing techniques optimized for SDR implementations. The methodology and design steps will be presented together with 3 representative case studies in HSDPA, WiMAX and 3GPP LTE.     

A comparison analysis of prefiltering methods in space-time trellis-based reduced-state turbo-detection

In this paper, we investigate two different prefiltering strategies, i.e., multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channel shortening and MIMO whitened matched filtering, to decode iteratively a space time bit interleaved coded modulation transmitted over MIMO block fading intersymbol interference channels using a trellis-based post-detector. Indeed, resorting to such front-ends allows significant complexity gain when compared to the optimal maximum a posteriori-based turbo-receiver. While those two approaches have been exhaustively visited in the past, their fair comparison in terms of trade-off between complexity and performance has – to our knowledge – never been tackled before. This paper aims at giving some valuable insights about the respective benefits of these two prefiltering methods with respect to the channel characteristics and overall receiver complexity.     

Décodage par le treillis de codes polynomiaux: un écueil à éviter

We give a simple proof of a well known property of the maximum likelihood decoding of polynomial block codes: the systematic version of the code results in fewer decoding errors than the non systematic version. As a practical result, it is interesting to decode the systematic version of the code on the treillis of the non systematic version, because the non systematic version of the code exhibits a more regular trellis, and both version generate the same codewords.     

Optical phaselock receiver with multigigahertz signal bandwidth

Describes a balanced pinFET receiver which employs two signal amplification paths for homodyne detection of multigigabit-per-second, pilot-carrier PSK optical signals. Using narrow-line 1.51 mu m semiconductor lasers, the authors have employed this receiver to phaselock a local oscillator to a 295 pW pilot carrier with 8 degrees RMS phase error.<>