Effect of weight of otter boards on the horizontal opening of trawl nets

The paper gives briefly the experiments carried out to determine the optimum weight of otter board that should be used for a trawl gear for better efficiency

Soliton switching using cascaded nonlinear-optical loop mirrors

We demonstrate multiple-peaked switching in a nonlinear-optical loop mirror and present an experimental investigation of device cascading in the soliton regime based on a sequence of two independent nonlinear-optical loop mirrors. Cascading leads to an enhanced switching response with sharper switching edges, flattened peaks, and increased interpeak extinction ratios. We observe that pulses emerging from the cascade retain the sech2 temporal profile of a soliton with minimal degradation in the spectral characteristics

Primal-dual coding to probe light transport

We present primal-dual coding, a photography technique that enables direct fine-grain control over which light paths contribute to a photo. We achieve this by projecting a sequence of patterns onto the scene while the sensor is exposed to light. At the same time, a second sequence of patterns, derived from the first and applied in lockstep, modulates the light received at individual sensor pixels. We show that photography in this regime is equivalent to a matrix probing operation in which the elements of the scene's transport matrix are individually re-scaled and then mapped to the photo. This makes it possible to directly acquire photos in which specific light transport paths have been blocked, attenuated or enhanced. We show captured photos for several scenes with challenging light transport effects, including specular inter-reflections, caustics, diffuse inter-reflections and volumetric scattering. A key feature of primal-dual coding is that it operates almost exclusively in the optical domain: our results consist of directly-acquired, unprocessed RAW photos or differences between them.Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Research Fellowship)United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA Young Faculty Award)Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory (Consortium Members

Time-Varying Textures

Essentially all computer graphics rendering assumes that the reflectance and texture of surfaces is a static phenomenon. Yet, there is an abundance of materials in nature whose appearance varies dramatically with time, such as cracking paint, growing grass, or ripening banana skins. In this paper, we take a significant step towards addressing this problem, investigating a new class of time-varying textures. We make three contributions. First, we describe the carefully controlled acquisition of datasets of a variety of natural processes including the growth of grass, the accumulation of snow, and the oxidation of copper. Second, we show how to adapt quilting-based methods to time-varying texture synthesis, addressing the important challenges of maintaining temporal coherence, efficient synthesis on large time-varying datasets, and reducing visual artifacts specific to time-varying textures. Finally, we show how simple procedural techniques can be used to control the evolution of the results, such as allowing for a faster growth of grass in well lit (as opposed to shadowed) areas

cDNA-detector: detection and removal of cDNA contamination in DNA sequencing libraries

BACKGROUND: Exogenous cDNA introduced into an experimental system, either intentionally or accidentally, can appear as added read coverage over that gene in next-generation sequencing libraries derived from this system. If not properly recognized and managed, this cross-contamination with exogenous signal can lead to incorrect interpretation of research results. Yet, this problem is not routinely addressed in current sequence processing pipelines. RESULTS: We present cDNA-detector, a computational tool to identify and remove exogenous cDNA contamination in DNA sequencing experiments. We demonstrate that cDNA-detector can identify cDNAs quickly and accurately from alignment files. A source inference step attempts to separate endogenous cDNAs (retrocopied genes) from potential cloned, exogenous cDNAs. cDNA-detector provides a mechanism to decontaminate the alignment from detected cDNAs. Simulation studies show that cDNA-detector is highly sensitive and specific, outperforming existing tools. We apply cDNA-detector to several highly-cited public databases (TCGA, ENCODE, NCBI SRA) and show that contaminant genes appear in sequencing experiments where they lead to incorrect coverage peak calls. CONCLUSIONS: cDNA-detector is a user-friendly and accurate tool to detect and remove cDNA detection in NGS libraries. This two-step design reduces the risk of true variant removal since it allows for manual review of candidates. We find that contamination with intentionally and accidentally introduced cDNAs is an underappreciated problem even in widely-used consortium datasets, where it can lead to spurious results. Our findings highlight the importance of sensitive detection and removal of contaminant cDNA from NGS libraries before downstream analysis

Molluscan resources of Kali river estuarine system in Karnataka

The present work has shown that there is an organized clam fishery for Meretrix meretrix, Paphia malabarica and Villorita cyprinoides in Kali River. The three species of clams show differential distribution. Paphia malabarica is confined to lower reaches of river from the river mouth to Nandangadda where salinity is 33.44%o suggesting that this species has distinct preference for areas where salinity is high. Meretrix meretrix occurs over a distance of 6.25 km from Nandangadda where the salinity is 30.82%o to Kinnar where the salinity is 8.76%o. Villorita cyprinoids is distributed only in low salinity areas in the upper parts of the river from Botjug to Mallapur where salinity is uniformly low fluctuating between 5.7%o and 0.24%o indicating that this species thrives well in low salinity conditions. During the survey conducted in November- December, 1978 observations were made on the environmental conditions, species composition of the molluscan resources, their distribution pattern, exploitation and marketing and the findings are presented in this paper

Experimental study of the settlement and collection Of pearl oyster spat from Tuticorin area

For the first time settlement and growth of pearl oyst«rs have be-en observed on granite stones forming the embankments of the New Tuticorin Port. Large numbers of pearl oyster spat have also been collected by employing diflfeirent types of spat collectors and the rate of growth of the oysters in the farm has been studied