Lost at Sea: Introduction to Numerical Methods through Navigation

Excerpt: The ship, El Perdido, was damaged during a storm which knocked out its main and backup power generators. Before the backup generator failed, Captain Miguel Gomez sent a distress call and the crew have been able to keep El Perdido a oat, but the ship is adrift in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Thankfully, a US Coast Guard rescue operation is underway after receiving the distress call. The Coast Guard has El Perdido\u27s last known position and has mapped out the surface water velocities in this area as slope fields for longitude (x) and latitude (y), which they have updated using historical data and estimated predictions. Since the search grid is small enough, this curved region on the surface of the earth is relatively at

Assessing stomatal response to live bacterial cells using whole leaf imaging.

Stomata are natural openings in the plant epidermis responsible for gas exchange between plant interior and environment. They are formed by a pair of guard cells, which are able to close the stomatal pore in response to a number of external factors including light intensity, carbon dioxide concentration, and relative humidity (RH). The stomatal pore is also the main route for pathogen entry into leaves, a crucial step for disease development. Recent studies have unveiled that closure of the pore is effective in minimizing bacterial disease development in Arabidopsis plants; an integral part of plant innate immunity. Previously, we have used epidermal peels to assess stomatal response to live bacteria (Melotto et al. 2006); however maintaining favorable environmental conditions for both plant epidermal peels and bacterial cells has been challenging. Leaf epidermis can be kept alive and healthy with MES buffer (10 mM KCl, 25 mM MES-KOH, pH 6.15) for electrophysiological experiments of guard cells. However, this buffer is not appropriate for obtaining bacterial suspension. On the other hand, bacterial cells can be kept alive in water which is not proper to maintain epidermal peels for long period of times. When an epidermal peel floats on water, the cells in the peel that are exposed to air dry within 4 hours limiting the timing to conduct the experiment. An ideal method for assessing the effect of a particular stimulus on guard cells should present minimal interference to stomatal physiology and to the natural environment of the plant as much as possible. We, therefore, developed a new method to assess stomatal response to live bacteria in which leaf wounding and manipulation is greatly minimized aiming to provide an easily reproducible and reliable stomatal assay. The protocol is based on staining of intact leaf with propidium iodide (PI), incubation of staining leaf with bacterial suspension, and observation of leaves under laser scanning confocal microscope. Finally, this method allows for the observation of the same live leaf sample over extended periods of time using conditions that closely mimic the natural conditions under which plants are attacked by pathogens

An Efficient Spectral Leakage Filtering for IEEE 802.11af in TV White Space

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been widely adopted for modern wireless standards and become a key enabling technology for cognitive radios. However, one of its main drawbacks is significant spectral leakage due to the accumulation of multiple sinc-shaped subcarriers. In this paper, we present a novel pulse shaping scheme for efficient spectral leakage suppression in OFDM based physical layer of IEEE 802.11af standard. With conventional pulse shaping filters such as a raised-cosine filter, vestigial symmetry can be used to reduce spectral leakage very effectively. However, these pulse shaping filters require long guard interval, i.e., cyclic prefix in an OFDM system, to avoid inter-symbol interference (ISI), resulting in a loss of spectral efficiency. The proposed pulse shaping method based on asymmetric pulse shaping achieves better spectral leakage suppression and decreases ISI caused by filtering as compared to conventional pulse shaping filters

Analisis High Availability Pada Sistem Berbasis Teknologi Oracle Data Guard (Studi Kasus SIA-SAT UKSW)

. High Availability on Oracle Data Guard-based System (Case Study: SIA-SAT UKSW). SIA-SAT is a subject administration system for UKSW collegian. Database SIA-SAT is backuped by autobackup system, and backup file sent directly to backup server at another building. Until these days, database SIA-SAT system still does not have a secondary database (backup) which can replace main database when failure is happening on main database.Oracle Data Guard System is a technology researched by Oracle to increase availability level on Oracle Database server. Every transaction is saved on main server and duplicated for standby database server. The advantages point of technology is standby database which indirectly becomes a backup server, and standby database can be used for replacing main database.The result of this research is the technology of Oracle Data Guard can increase availability level for a system Oracle Database. This condition can happen because standby database always duplicates data and is ready to replace primary database

CHARDA: Causal Hybrid Automata Recovery via Dynamic Analysis

We propose and evaluate a new technique for learning hybrid automata automatically by observing the runtime behavior of a dynamical system. Working from a sequence of continuous state values and predicates about the environment, CHARDA recovers the distinct dynamic modes, learns a model for each mode from a given set of templates, and postulates causal guard conditions which trigger transitions between modes. Our main contribution is the use of information-theoretic measures (1)~as a cost function for data segmentation and model selection to penalize over-fitting and (2)~to determine the likely causes of each transition. CHARDA is easily extended with different classes of model templates, fitting methods, or predicates. In our experiments on a complex videogame character, CHARDA successfully discovers a reasonable over-approximation of the character's true behaviors. Our results also compare favorably against recent work in automatically learning probabilistic timed automata in an aircraft domain: CHARDA exactly learns the modes of these simpler automata.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for IJCAI 201

Evidence for risk of bias in cluster randomised trials: review of recent trials published in three general medical journals

Objective To examine the prevalence of a risk of bias associated with the design and conduct of cluster randomised controlled trials among a sample of recently published studies. Design Retrospective review of cluster randomised trials published in the BMJ, Lancet, and New England Journal of Medicine from January 1997 to October 2002. Main outcome measures Prevalence of secure randomisation of clusters, identification of participants before randomisation (to avoid foreknowledge of allocation), differential recruitment between treatment arms, differential application of inclusion and exclusion criteria, and differential attrition. Results Of the 36 trials identified, 24 were published in the BMJ, I I in the Lancet, and a single trial in the New England journal of Medicine. At the cluster level, 15 (42%) trials provided evidence for secure allocation and 25 (69%) used stratified allocation. Few trials showed evidence of imbalance at the cluster level. However, some evidence of susceptibility to risk of bias at the individual level existed in 14 (39%) studies. Conclusions Some recently published cluster randomised trials may not have taken adequate precautions to guard against threats to the internal validity of their design

Supremica – An integrated environment for verification, synthesis and simulation of discrete event systems

An integrated environment, Supremica, for verification, synthesis and simulation of discrete event systems is presented. The basic model in Supremica is finite automata where the transitions have an associated event together with a guard condition and an action function that updates automata variables. Supremica uses two main approaches to handle large state-spaces. The first approach exploits modularity in order to divide the original problem into many smaller problems that together solve the original problem. The second approach uses an efficient data structure, a binary decision diagram, to symbolically represent the reachable states. Models in Supremica may be simulated in the environment. It is also possible to generate code that implements the behavior of the model using both the IEC 61131 and the IEC 61499 standard