On demonstrating unconscious perception: Comment on Draine and Greenwald (1998).

S. C. Draine and A. G. Greenwald (see record 1999-10824-004) have described a methodology based on regression analysis for demonstrating unconscious perception. They have suggested that their methodology represents a major improvement over existing methodologies. An analysis of their methodology reveals that it is closely related to the classic dissociation paradigm. As such, interpretation of their results is compromised by the same issues concerning the measurement of awareness that have plagued all previous attempts to use the dissociation paradigm to demonstrate unconscious perception in the complete absence of conscious perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cryogenic scanning tunneling spectroscopy studies of inhomogeneous superconductors

We applied scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy, combined with magnetic susceptibility measurements and Mossbauer spectroscopy, in studies of three superconducting materials. Two belong to a new class of high T_c magnetic-superconductor systems, R_1.4Ce_0.6RuSr₂Cu₂O_10-δ (R=Eu and Gd), which are magnetically ordered at T_N≪T_c. The third is a granular normal-superconductor system, where the superconducting phase is YNi₂B₂C. In this paper we focus on the tunneling measurements, which exhibit large spatial variations of the local electronic properties for all three materials. Albeit, these local measurements also reveal pronounced differences between the third and the first two systems, which will be discussed in view of their macroscopic properties.     

Synthesis and characterization of broad-band polarization-mode dispersion equalizers

A synthesis algorithm for the design of a finite impulse response polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) equalizer is described and used for characterization of the filter. Defined in terms of the residual maximum differential group delay, the performance of the equalizer is characterized as a function of the equalizer order and period. The synthesis algorithm uses spectral factorization to analytically find estimated equalizer control variables. The control variables are then used as initial guess for an optimization procedure that minimize the maximum differential group delay in the frequency range of interest.     

3-D curve matching using splines

A machine vision algorithm to find the longest common subcurve of two 3-D curves is presented. The curves are represented by splines fitted through sequences of sample points extracted from dense range data. The approximated 3-D curves are transformed into 1-D numerical strings of rotation and translation invariant shape signatures, based on a multiresolution representation of the curvature and torsion values of the space curves. The shape signature strings are matched using an efficient hashing technique that finds longest matching substrings. The results of the string matching stage are later verified by a robust, least-squares, 3-D curve matching technique, which also recovers the Euclidean transformation between the curves being matched. This algorithm is of average complexity O(n) where n is the number of the sample points on the two curves. The algorithm has applications in assembly and object recognition tasks. Results of assembly experiments are included.     

A spectral-based method for reconstructing spatial distributions of soil surface temperature during simulated fire events

Heterogeneous heat was applied to a homogenous soil surface to simulate a natural fire event. Subsequently cooled soil samples were evaluated spectrally and a spectral-spatial cube was generated corresponding to the burned area. Heat-induced spectral changes associated with thermal effects on soil minerals were observed across the entire spectrum, including: soil color changes (iron-oxide transformation); shifting absorption bands (iron-oxide transformation and illite/calcite ratio); changes in spectral shape (illite/montmorillonite ratio); disappearing absorption features (unknown); and changes in the overall brightness (soot). A model was developed using Partial Least Squares (PLS) to predict maximum soil surface temperatures, measured using thermocouples, from soil spectral reflectance. Thus, this proof-of-concept study demonstrates that soil spectroscopy reveals important information about soil temperature history and as such, represents a promising tool for viewing fire events retrospectively.     

Improved blood glucose control for critically ill subjects

For patients in intensive care units (ICUs), control of blood glucose level is an important factor in reducing serious complications and mortality. Standard protocols for glucose control in ICUs have been based on infrequent glucose measurements, look-up tables to determine the appropriate insulin infusion rates, and bedside administration of the insulin infusion by ICU staff. In this paper a new automatic control strategy is proposed based on frequent glucose measurements and a self-tuning control technique. During a short initial time period when manual glucose control is performed using a standard protocol, a simple dynamic model of the glucose-insulin system is identified in real time using recursive least squares. Then an adaptive PID controller is tuned, based on the model parameters, and the controller is turned on. A simulation study based on detailed physiological models of the glucose-insulin dynamics demonstrates that the proposed control strategy performs better than standard protocols for insulin infusion.     

Integrating and customizing heterogeneous e-commerce applications

A broad spectrum of electronic commerce applications is currently available on the Web, providing services in almost any area one can think of. As the number and variety of such applications grow, more business opportunities emerge for providing new services based on the integration and customization of existing applications. (Web shopping malls and support for comparative shopping are just a couple of examples.) Unfortunately, the diversity of applications in each specific domain and the disparity of interfaces, application flows, actor roles in the business transaction, and data formats, renders the integration and manipulation of applications a rather difficult task. In this paper we present the Application Manifold system, aimed at simplifying the intricate task of integration and customization of e-commerce applications. The scope of the work in this paper is limited to web-enabled e-commerce applications. We do not support the integration/customization of proprietary/legacy applications. The wrapping of such applications as web services is complementary to our work. Based on the emerging Web data standard, XML, and application modeling standard, UML, the system offers a novel declarative specification language for describing the integration/customization task, supporting a modular approach where new applications can be added and integrated at will with minimal effort. Then, acting as an application generator, the system generates a full integrated/customized e-commerce application, with the declarativity of the specification allowing for the optimization and verification of the generated application. The integration here deals with the full profile of the given e-commerce applications: the various services offered by the applications, the activities and roles of the different actors participating in the application (e.g., customers, vendors), the application flow, as well as with the data involved in the process. This is in contrast to previous works on Web data integration that focused primarily on querying the data available in the applications, mostly ignoring the additional aspects mentioned above. Received: 30 October 2000 / Accepted 14 March 2001 Published online: 2 August 2001     

Experimental realization of an imaging system with an extended depth of field

We describe the experimental realization of an all-optical imaging system with an extended depth of field (DOF). The core of the system is a phase mask consisting of 16 Fresnel lenses (FLs) that are spatially multiplexed and mutually exclusive. Because each FL, in tandem with the primary lens, is designed to produce a sharp image for a specific object plane location, jointly the FLs achieve a wide DOF. However, the resultant image exhibits reduced resolution. The acquired image, onto which we did not apply any postprocessing, clearly is sharper than that acquired with a clear-aperture imaging system with the same pupil size.