A Dense Reference Network for Mass-Market Centimeter-Accurate Positioning

The quality of atmospheric corrections provided by a dense reference network for centimeter-accurate carrierphase differential GNSS (CDGNSS) positioning is investigated. A dense reference network (less than 20 km inter-station distance) offers significant benefits for mass-market users, enabling lowcost (including single-frequency) CDGNSS positioning with rapid integer ambiguity resolution. Precise positioning on a massmarket platform would significantly influence the world economy, ushering in a host of consumer-focused applications such as globally-registered augmented and virtual reality and improved all-weather safety and efficiency for intelligent transportation systems, applications which have so far been hampered by the several-meter-level errors in standard GNSS positioning. This contribution examines CDGNSS integer ambiguity resolution performance in terms of network correction uncertainty, and network correction uncertainty, in turn, in terms of network density. It considers the total error in network corrections: a sum of ionospheric, tropospheric, and reference station multipath components. The paper’s primary goal is to identify the network density beyond which mass-market users would see no further significant improvement in ambiguity resolution performance. It finishes by describing development and deployment of a low-cost dense reference network in Austin, Texas.Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanic

Characterizing the Cutaneous Microbiome of the Peaks of Otter Salamander (Plethodon hubrichti) in the Context of Infectious Disease

Undergraduate Basi

Complexity among the finitely generated subgroups of Thompson's group

Funding: Acknowledgements. The authors would also like to thank the referee for their very careful and thorough reading of the paper. This publication is in part a product of a visit of the first and third author to the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach, Germany in December 2016 as part of their Research In Pairs program. The third author was partially supported by NSF grants DMS–1600635 and DMS-1854367.We demonstrate the existence of a family of finitely generated subgroups of Richard Thompson’s group F which is strictly well-ordered by the embeddability relation of type ε0 + 1. All except the maximum element of this family (which is F itself) are elementary amenable groups. In fact we also obtain, for each α < ε0, a finitely generated elementary amenable subgroup of F whose EA-class is α + 2. These groups all have simple, explicit descriptions and can be viewed as a natural continuation of the progression which starts with Z + Z, Z wr Z, and the Brin-Navas group B. We also give an example of a pair of finitely generated elementary amenable subgroups of F with the property that neither is embeddable into the other.PostprintPeer reviewe

Progress around the Boone-Higman Conjecture

A conjecture of Boone and Higman from the 1970's asserts that a finitely generated group $G$ has solvable word problem if and only if $G$ can be embedded into a finitely presented simple group. We comment on the history of this conjecture and survey recent results that establish the conjecture for many large classes of interesting groups.Comment: 21 page

Premolar root and canal variation in South African Plio-Pleistocene specimens attributed to Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus

South African hominin fossils attributed to Australopithecus africanus derive from the cave sites of Makapansgat, Sterkfontein, and Taung, from deposits dated between about 2 and 3 million years ago (Ma), while Paranthropus robustus is known from Drimolen, Kromdraai, and Swartkrans, from deposits dated between about 1 and 2 Ma. Although variation in the premolar root complex has informed taxonomic and phylogenetic hypotheses for these fossil hominin species, traditionally there has been a focus on external root form, number, and position. In this study, we use microtomography to undertake the first comprehensive study of maxillary and mandibular premolar root and canal variation in Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus (n = 166 teeth) within and between the species. We also test for correlations between premolar size and root morphology as predicted under the ‘size/number continuum’ (SNC) model, which correlates increasing root number with tooth size. Our results demonstrate previously undocumented variation in these two fossil hominin species and highlight taxonomic differences in the presence and frequency of particular root types, qualitative root traits, and tooth size (measured as cervix cross-sectional area). Patterns of tooth size and canal/root number are broadly consistent with the SNC model, however statistically significant support is limited. The implications for hominin taxonomy in light of the increased variation in root morphology documented in this study are discussed