The construction and evaluation of an achievement test of musical knowledge for grades VII-XII.

Thesis (M.M.E.)--Boston Universit

Low-Latency Short-Packet Transmissions: Fixed Length or HARQ?

We study short-packet communications, subject to latency and reliability constraints, under the premises of limited frequency diversity and no time diversity. The question addressed is whether, and when, hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) outperforms fixed-blocklength schemes with no feedback (FBL-NF) in such a setting. We derive an achievability bound for HARQ, under the assumption of a limited number of transmissions. The bound relies on pilot-assisted transmission to estimate the fading channel and scaled nearest-neighbor decoding at the receiver. We compare our achievability bound for HARQ to stateof-the-art achievability bounds for FBL-NF communications and show that for a given latency, reliability, number of information bits, and number of diversity branches, HARQ may significantly outperform FBL-NF. For example, for an average latency of 1 ms, a target error probability of 10^-3, 30 information bits, and 3 diversity branches, the gain in energy per bit is about 4 dB.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted to GLOBECOM 201

The effect of Tricresyl-Phosphate (TCP) as an additive on wear of Iron (Fe)

The effect of tricresyl phosphate (TCP) as an antiwear additive in lubricant trimethyol propane triheptanoate (TMPTH) was investigated. The objective was to examine step loading wear by use of surface analysis, wetting, and chemical bonding changes in the lubricant. The investigation consisted of steploading wear studies by a pin or disk tribometer, the effects on wear related to wetting by contact angle and surface tension measurements of various liquid systems, the chemical bonding changes between lubricant and TCP chromatographic analysis, and by determining the reaction between the TCP and metal surfaces through wear scar analysis by Auger emission spectroscopy (AES). The steploading curve for the base fluid alone shows rapid increase of wear rate with load. The steploading curve for the base fluid in presence of 4.25 percent by volume TCP under dry air purge has shown a great reduction of wear rate with all loads studied. It has also been found that the addition of 4.25 percent by volume TCP plus 0.33 percent by volume water to the base lubricant under N2 purge also greatly reduces the wear rate with all loads studied. AES surface analysis reveals a phosphate type wear resistant film, which greatly increases load-bearing capacity, formed on the iron disk. Preliminary chromatographic studies suggest that this film forms either because of ester oxidation or TCP degradation. Wetting studies show direct correlation between the spreading coefficient and the wear rate

Examining the Protective Effects of Self-Positivity on Information Avoidance

Although information could provide insight, comfort, or opportunity, people are motivated to avoid information that challenges preexisting belief or cause unpleasant emotion. Previous research shows that affirming one’s self-worth can reduce information avoidance. The present study measures whether selfenhancement, or exaggerating qualities to maintain a positive sense of self, can also reduce information avoidance. Self-enhancement is associated with positive mental health and reducing physiological stress symptoms if the exaggeration is within the same domain as threatening information. Participants in the selfenhancement category were asked to give examples of how they are better at maintaining social relationships than the average college student. They were then asked if they would like to see results of a personality test that could potentially show them they are not socially successful. The difference in information avoidance did not vary between those in the self-enhancement condition, those in the selfaffirmation condition, and those control condition. Self-enhancement as a method of information avoidance could be more effective if the domain was more threatening like health information or career outlook

Probing equilibrium glass flow up to exapoise viscosities

Glasses are out-of-equilibrium systems aging under the crystallization threat. During ordinary glass formation, the atomic diffusion slows down rendering its experimental investigation impractically long, to the extent that a timescale divergence is taken for granted by many. We circumvent here these limitations, taking advantage of a wide family of glasses rapidly obtained by physical vapor deposition directly into the solid state, endowed with different "ages" rivaling those reached by standard cooling and waiting for millennia. Isothermally probing the mechanical response of each of these glasses, we infer a correspondence with viscosity along the equilibrium line, up to exapoise values. We find a dependence of the elastic modulus on the glass age, which, traced back to temperature steepness index of the viscosity, tears down one of the cornerstones of several glass transition theories: the dynamical divergence. Critically, our results suggest that the conventional wisdom picture of a glass ceasing to flow at finite temperature could be wrong.Comment: 4 figures and 1 supplementary figur

Decompositions of Triangle-Dense Graphs

High triangle density -- the graph property stating that a constant fraction of two-hop paths belong to a triangle -- is a common signature of social networks. This paper studies triangle-dense graphs from a structural perspective. We prove constructively that significant portions of a triangle-dense graph are contained in a disjoint union of dense, radius 2 subgraphs. This result quantifies the extent to which triangle-dense graphs resemble unions of cliques. We also show that our algorithm recovers planted clusterings in approximation-stable k-median instances.Comment: 20 pages. Version 1->2: Minor edits. 2->3: Strengthened {\S}3.5, removed appendi

Accessing Excited State Molecular Vibrations by Femtosecond Stimulated Raman Spectroscopy

Excited state vibrations are crucial for determining the photophysical and photochemical properties of molecular compounds. Stimulated Raman scattering can coherently stimulate and probe molecular vibrations with optical pulses, but it is generally restricted to ground state properties. Working under resonance conditions enables cross-section enhancement and selective excitation to a targeted electronic level but is hampered by an increased signal complexity due to the presence of overlapping spectral contributions. Here, we show how detailed information about ground and excited state vibrations can be disentangled by exploiting the relative time delay between Raman and probe pulses to control the excited state population, combined with a diagrammatic formalism to dissect the pathways concurring with the signal generation. The proposed method is then exploited to elucidate the vibrational properties of the ground and excited electronic states in the paradigmatic case of cresyl violet. We anticipate that the presented approach holds the potential for selective mapping of the reaction coordinates pertaining to transient electronic stages implied in photoactive compounds