Untethered Desense Testing of Radio-Frequency Devices

An electronic device, e.g., laptop, etc., in radio-frequency communication with another electronic device can lose receiver sensitivity when certain components turn on. This is because electrical switching activity in the components can result in electromagnetic interference. Traditional methods of measuring receiver desensitization tether the device to a computer that carries out test sequences and logs measurements. However, the presence of the tethering cable itself causes additional electromagnetic interference. This disclosure describes techniques that enable untethered measurement of receiver desensitization. Per the techniques, an RF tester measures the packet error rate (PER) based on over-the-air acknowledgements received from the device under test. Receiver sensitivity, with and without active components, is measured by reducing transmit power until the PER just crosses a threshold. The device is characterized for receive-desensitization accurately and in a nearly real-use situation

Explicit upper bounds for the number of primes simultaneously representable by any set of irreducible polynomials

Using an explicit version of Selberg's upper sieve, we obtain explicit upper bounds for the number of $n\leq x$ such that a non-empty set of irreducible polynomials $F_i(n)$ with integer coefficients are simultaneously prime; this set can contain as many polynomials as desired. To demonstrate, we present computations for some irreducible polynomials and obtain an explicit upper bound for the number of Sophie Germain primes up to $x$, which have practical applications in cryptography.Comment: 18 pages, one table, comments welcome

Differences in hearing acuity among “normal-hearing” young adults modulate the neural basis for speech comprehension

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate how subtle differences in hearing acuity affect the neural systems supporting speech processing in young adults. Auditory sentence comprehension requires perceiving a complex acoustic signal and performing linguistic operations to extract the correct meaning. We used functional MRI to monitor human brain activity while adults aged 18–41 years listened to spoken sentences. The sentences varied in their level of syntactic processing demands, containing either a subject-relative or object-relative center-embedded clause. All participants self-reported normal hearing, confirmed by audiometric testing, with some variation within a clinically normal range. We found that participants showed activity related to sentence processing in a left-lateralized frontotemporal network. Although accuracy was generally high, participants still made some errors, which were associated with increased activity in bilateral cingulo-opercular and frontoparietal attention networks. A whole-brain regression analysis revealed that activity in a right anterior middle frontal gyrus (aMFG) component of the frontoparietal attention network was related to individual differences in hearing acuity, such that listeners with poorer hearing showed greater recruitment of this region when successfully understanding a sentence. The activity in right aMFGs for listeners with poor hearing did not differ as a function of sentence type, suggesting a general mechanism that is independent of linguistic processing demands. Our results suggest that even modest variations in hearing ability impact the systems supporting auditory speech comprehension, and that auditory sentence comprehension entails the coordination of a left perisylvian network that is sensitive to linguistic variation with an executive attention network that responds to acoustic challenge.</jats:p

Explicit Interval Estimates for Prime Numbers

Using a smoothing function and recent knowledge on the zeros of the Riemann zeta-function, we compute pairs of $(\Delta, x_0)$ such that for all $x \geq x_0$ there exists at least one prime in the interval $(x(1 - \Delta^{-1}), x]$.Comment: 15 pages, 3 tables, 1 figur