54,158 research outputs found
Secure thermal infrared communications using engineered blackbody radiation
The thermal (emitted) infrared frequency bands, from 20–40 THz and 60–100 THz, are best known for applications in thermography. This underused and unregulated part of the spectral range offers opportunities for the development of secure communications. The ‘THz Torch' concept was recently presented by the authors. This technology fundamentally exploits engineered blackbody radiation, by partitioning thermally-generated spectral noise power into pre-defined frequency channels; the energy in each channel is then independently pulsed modulated and multiplexing schemes are introduced to create a robust form of short-range secure communications in the far/mid infrared. To date, octave bandwidth (25–50 THz) single-channel links have been demonstrated with 380 bps speeds. Multi-channel ‘THz Torch' frequency division multiplexing (FDM) and frequency-hopping spread-spectrum (FHSS) schemes have been proposed, but only a slow 40 bps FDM scheme has been demonstrated experimentally. Here, we report a much faster 1,280 bps FDM implementation. In addition, an experimental proof-of-concept FHSS scheme is demonstrated for the first time, having a 320 bps data rate. With both 4-channel multiplexing schemes, measured bit error rates (BERs) of < 10(−6) are achieved over a distance of 2.5 cm. Our approach represents a new paradigm in the way niche secure communications can be established over short links
Spin Polarisability of the Nucleon in the Heavy Baryon Effective Field Theory
We have constructed a heavy baryon effective field theory with photon as an
external field in accordance with the symmetry requirements similar to the
heavy quark effective field theory. By treating the heavy baryon and
anti-baryon equally on the same footing in the effective field theory, we have
calculated the spin polarisabilities of the nucleon at
third order and at fourth-order of the spin-dependent Compton scattering. At
leading order (LO), our results agree with the corresponding results of the
heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory, at the next-to-leading order(NLO) the
results show a large correction to the ones in the heavy baryon chiral
perturbation theory due to baryon-antibaryon coupling terms. The low energy
theorem is satisfied both at LO and at NLO. The contributions arising from the
heavy baryon-antibaryon vertex were found to be significant and the results of
the polarisabilities obtained from our theory is much closer to the
experimental data.Comment: 21pages, title changed, minimal correction
Evaluation of outcomes reported in randomized controlled trials for herbal remedies for adults with chronic hepatitis C
Background: Herbal remedies have been widely utilized in treating chronic hepatitis C (CHC) worldwide. Selecting appropriate outcomes to reflect both beneficial and harmful effects is a crucial step in designing randomized controlled trials (RCTs). This study evaluated the outcomes reported in RCTs on herbal remedies for CHC with comparison to the core outcomes recommended by the Cochrane Hepato-Biliary Group
(CHBG), to check the consistency of the outcomes and to provide recommendation for future researches.
Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted in Western and Chinese databases to identify RCTs on herbal remedies for adults with CHC. For each trial, all the outcomes reported in the results section were collected. Comparison between trial outcomes and CHBG core outcomes were evaluated and summarized with descriptive statistics.
Results: A total of 116 RCTs involving 9154 participants were included; 27 outcomes were identified. Commonly reported outcomes included alanine aminotransferase (64
trials, 55.2%), adverse events (58 trials, 50.0%), and end-of-treatment virological response (50 trials, 43.1%). All trials indicated that the herbal remedies under investigation had a positive effect and was markedly more effective than the control.
Nearly half of the trials reported that the combination of herbal medicine and antiviral drugs could ameliorate adverse events. Very few trials reported primary core outcomes relating survival and quality of life. The most frequently reported core outcomes are non-serious adverse events (54 trials, 46.6%), viral response (27 trials, 23.3%), and biochemical response (24 trials, 20.7%).
Conclusion: The variation and inconsistency in trial outcomes impedes research synthesis efforts, and indicate the need for comparable outcomes through the development of core outcome sets in CHC. The low concordance of outcome reporting
could be improved by following CHBG core outcomes recommendation
On Dust Extinction of Gamma-ray Burst Host Galaxies
Although it is well recognized that gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows are
obscured and reddened by dust in their host galaxies, the wavelength-dependence
and quantity of dust extinction are still poorly known. Current studies on this
mostly rely on fitting the afterglow spectral energy distributions (SEDs) with
template extinction models. The inferred extinction (both quantity and
wavelength-dependence) and dust-to-gas ratios are often in disagreement with
that obtained from dust depletion and X-ray spectroscopy studies. We argue that
this discrepancy could result from the prior assumption of a template
extinction law. We propose an analytical formula to approximate the GRB host
extinction law. With the template extinction laws self-contained, and the
capability of revealing extinction laws differing from the conventional ones,
it is shown that this is a powerful approach in modeling the afterglow SEDs to
derive GRB host extinction.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures; The Astrophysical Journal, in press (2008 Oct 1
issue
Semantic Object Parsing with Graph LSTM
By taking the semantic object parsing task as an exemplar application
scenario, we propose the Graph Long Short-Term Memory (Graph LSTM) network,
which is the generalization of LSTM from sequential data or multi-dimensional
data to general graph-structured data. Particularly, instead of evenly and
fixedly dividing an image to pixels or patches in existing multi-dimensional
LSTM structures (e.g., Row, Grid and Diagonal LSTMs), we take each
arbitrary-shaped superpixel as a semantically consistent node, and adaptively
construct an undirected graph for each image, where the spatial relations of
the superpixels are naturally used as edges. Constructed on such an adaptive
graph topology, the Graph LSTM is more naturally aligned with the visual
patterns in the image (e.g., object boundaries or appearance similarities) and
provides a more economical information propagation route. Furthermore, for each
optimization step over Graph LSTM, we propose to use a confidence-driven scheme
to update the hidden and memory states of nodes progressively till all nodes
are updated. In addition, for each node, the forgets gates are adaptively
learned to capture different degrees of semantic correlation with neighboring
nodes. Comprehensive evaluations on four diverse semantic object parsing
datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Graph LSTM over
other state-of-the-art solutions.Comment: 18 page
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