Variations in propagation delay times for line ten (TV) based time transfers

Variation in the propagation delay for a 30 km TV (Line Ten) radio link was evaluated for a series of 30 independent measurements. Time marks from TV Channel 5 WTTG in Washington, D.C. were simultaneously measured at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and at the United States Naval Observatory against each stations' local cesium standard clocks. Differences in the stations' cesium clocks were determined by portable cesium clock transfers. Thirty independent timing determinations were made. The root mean square deviation in the propagation delay calculated from the timing determinations was 11 ns. The variations seen in the propagation delays are believed to be caused by environmental factors and by errors in the portable clock timing measurements. In correlating the propagation delay variations with local weather conditions, only a moderate dependence on air temperature and absolute humidity was found

Statistical Modelling of Information Sharing: Community, Membership and Content

File-sharing systems, like many online and traditional information sharing communities (e.g. newsgroups, BBS, forums, interest clubs), are dynamical systems in nature. As peers get in and out of the system, the information content made available by the prevailing membership varies continually in amount as well as composition, which in turn affects all peers' join/leave decisions. As a result, the dynamics of membership and information content are strongly coupled, suggesting interesting issues about growth, sustenance and stability. In this paper, we propose to study such communities with a simple statistical model of an information sharing club. Carrying their private payloads of information goods as potential supply to the club, peers join or leave on the basis of whether the information they demand is currently available. Information goods are chunked and typed, as in a file sharing system where peers contribute different files, or a forum where messages are grouped by topics or threads. Peers' demand and supply are then characterized by statistical distributions over the type domain. This model reveals interesting critical behaviour with multiple equilibria. A sharp growth threshold is derived: the club may grow towards a sustainable equilibrium only if the value of an order parameter is above the threshold, or shrink to emptiness otherwise. The order parameter is composite and comprises the peer population size, the level of their contributed supply, the club's efficiency in information search, the spread of supply and demand over the type domain, as well as the goodness of match between them.Comment: accepted in International Symposium on Computer Performance, Modeling, Measurements and Evaluation, Juan-les-Pins, France, October-200

Solutions of the Ginsparg-Wilson Relation

We analyze general solutions of the Ginsparg-Wilson relation for lattice Dirac operators and formulate a necessary condition for such operators to have non-zero index in the topologically nontrivial background gauge fields.Comment: 6 pages, latex, no figures, set T to 1 in eqs. (10)--(13

A Linux PC cluster for lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry

A computational system for lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry is described. The platform is a home-made Linux PC cluster, built with off-the-shelf components. At present this system constitutes of 64 nodes, with each node consisting of one Pentium 4 processor (1.6/2.0/2.5 GHz), one Gbyte of PC800/PC1066 RDRAM, one 40/80/120 Gbyte hard disk, and a network card. The computationally intensive parts of our program are written in SSE2 codes. The speed of this system is estimated to be 70 Gflops, and its price/performance is better than $1.0/Mflops for 64-bit (double precision) computations in quenched QCD. We discuss how to optimize its hardware and software for computing quark propagators via the overlap Dirac operator.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX, 2 eps figures, v2:a note and references added, the version published in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Chiral fermions on the lattice and index relations

Comparing recent lattice results on chiral fermions and old continuum results for the index puzzling questions arise. To clarify this issue we start with a critical reconsideration of the results on finite lattices. We then work out various aspects of the continuum limit. After determining bounds and norm convergences we obtain the limit of the anomaly term. Collecting our results the index relation of the quantized theory gets established. We then compare in detail with the Atiyah-Singer theorem. Finally we analyze conventional continuum approaches.Comment: 34 pages; a more detaild introduction and a subsection with remarks on literature adde

Quenched chiral logarithms in lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry

We examine quenched chiral logarithms in lattice QCD with overlap Dirac quark. For 100 gauge configurations generated with the Wilson gauge action at $\beta = 5.8$ on the $8^3 \times 24$ lattice, we compute quenched quark propagators for 12 bare quark masses. The pion decay constant is extracted from the pion propagator, and from which the lattice spacing is determined to be 0.147 fm. The presence of quenched chiral logarithm in the pion mass is confirmed, and its coefficient is determined to be $\delta = 0.203 \pm 0.014$, in agreement with the theoretical estimate in quenched chiral perturbation theory. Further, we obtain the topological susceptibility of these 100 gauge configurations by measuring the index of the overlap Dirac operator. Using a formula due to exact chiral symmetry, we obtain the $\eta'$ mass in quenched chiral perturbation theory, $m_{\eta'} = (901 \pm 64)$ Mev, and an estimate of $\delta = 0.197 \pm 0.027$, which is in good agreement with that determined from the pion mass.Comment: 24 pages, 6 EPS figures; v2: some clarifications added, to appear in Physical Review

Ceramic automotive Stirling engine study

A conceptual design study for a Ceramic Automotive Stirling Engine (CASE) is performed. Year 1990 structural ceramic technology is assumed. Structural and performance analyses of the conceptual design are performed as well as a manufacturing and cost analysis. The general conclusions from this study are that such an engine would be 10-26% more efficient over its performance map than the current metal Automotive Stirling Reference Engine (ASRE). Cost of such a ceramic engine is likely to be somewhat higher than that of the ASRE but engine cost is very sensitive to the ultimate cost of the high purity, ceramic powder raw materials required to fabricate high performance parts. When the design study is projected to the year 2000 technology, substantinal net efficiency improvements, on the order of 25 to 46% over the ASRE, are computed

Influence of retardation effects on 2D magnetoplasmon spectrum

Within dissipationless limit the magnetic field dependence of magnetoplasmon spectrum for unbounded 2DEG system found to intersect the cyclotron resonance line, and, then approaches the frequency given by light dispersion relation. Recent experiments done for macroscopic disc-shape 2DEG systems confirm theory expectations.Comment: 2 pages,2 figure

RGBD Semantic Segmentation Using Spatio-Temporal Data-Driven Pooling

Beyond the success in classification, neural networks have recently shown strong results on pixel-wise prediction tasks like image semantic segmentation on RGBD data. However, the commonly used deconvolutional layers for upsampling intermediate representations to the full-resolution output still show different failure modes, like imprecise segmentation boundaries and label mistakes in particular on large, weakly textured objects (e.g. fridge, whiteboard, door). We attribute these errors in part to the rigid way, current network aggregate information, that can be either too local (missing context) or too global (inaccurate boundaries). Therefore we propose a data-driven pooling layer that integrates with fully convolutional architectures and utilizes boundary detection from RGBD image segmentation approaches. We extend our approach to leverage region-level correspondences across images with an additional temporal pooling stage. We evaluate our approach on the NYU-Depth-V2 dataset comprised of indoor RGBD video sequences and compare it to various state-of-the-art baselines. Besides a general improvement over the state-of-the-art, our approach shows particularly good results in terms of accuracy of the predicted boundaries and in segmenting previously problematic classes