Comparison between Vernier-cascade and MZI as transducer for biosensing with on-chip spectral filter

The Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and the Vernier-cascade are highly responsive photonic sensors with large design freedom. They are therefore very suitable for interrogation through a broadband source and an on-chip spectral filter, a sensing scheme that is well equipped for point-of-care applications. In this work, the MZI is shown to outperform the Vernier-cascade through a better minimum detectable wavelength shift as well as a higher power efficiency, indicating its superiority in this sensing scheme. Fabricated MZIs yield bulk detection limits down to 8.8 x 10(-7) refractive index units (RIU) in a point-of-care compatible measuring setup, indicating the potential of the proposed sensing scheme

Education as an export industry: the case of New Zealand

This paper discusses New Zealand's role in the global market for tertiary education. The internationalization and liberalization of education markets is progressing rapidly in today's globalizing world, as reflected by the incorporation of education as a service into the GATS framework. Through the example of New Zealand as a case study for internationalization of education services, the study depicts the way government is involved in this process. Commodification of sectors traditionally subject to domestic public policy is often associated with a less interventionist state, but our example of education shows that this is not necessarily the case, at least in the medium-term: New Zealand's government rather appears to be an active facilitator of the liberalization process in education. We review its recent move towards treating education as an international export good and present data on the growth of this industry. The paper concentrates on the particular ways by which New Zealand's government is trying to facilitate this process of liberalizing the education sector. --

Inspired by the past : a practical guide for cellist and other string players to the execution of Baroque music on modern instruments with special reference to the Six Suites for Solo Cello by J. S. Bach

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical reference (leaves 84-86).This dissertation will explore cello technique through the ages with a view to providing a performer with a meaningful and accurate guide to the various techniques necessary to give stylistic and historically honest performances of Baroque music on a modem instrument

Intra-, inter-, and extra-container path loss for shipping container monitoring systems

This letter presents empirical path loss models for an environment of stacked shipping containers. Specifically, a system for wireless monitoring of containers is considered for which three different types of wireless links are identified, namely intra-, inter-, and extra-container links. Furthermore, the inter-container link is investigated for the two most common types of container stacking: row and block stacking. Intra-and inter-container path loss are investigated at IEEE 802.15.4 frequencies of 433, 868, and 2400 MHz. Extra-container path loss is examined at GSM/UMTS frequencies of 900, 1850, and 2100 MHz. Distance-dependent path loss models are proposed for the inter-and extra-container links ( high-correlation coefficients between 0.76 and 0.86). The resulting path loss models can be used in link budget calculations for container monitoring systems

Perceptual-based textures for scene labeling: a bottom-up and a top-down approach

Due to the semantic gap, the automatic interpretation of digital images is a very challenging task. Both the segmentation and classification are intricate because of the high variation of the data. Therefore, the application of appropriate features is of utter importance. This paper presents biologically inspired texture features for material classification and interpreting outdoor scenery images. Experiments show that the presented texture features obtain the best classification results for material recognition compared to other well-known texture features, with an average classification rate of 93.0%. For scene analysis, both a bottom-up and top-down strategy are employed to bridge the semantic gap. At first, images are segmented into regions based on the perceptual texture and next, a semantic label is calculated for these regions. Since this emerging interpretation is still error prone, domain knowledge is ingested to achieve a more accurate description of the depicted scene. By applying both strategies, 91.9% of the pixels from outdoor scenery images obtained a correct label