Modified fast frequency acquisition via adaptive least squares algorithm

A method and the associated apparatus for estimating the amplitude, frequency, and phase of a signal of interest are presented. The method comprises the following steps: (1) inputting the signal of interest; (2) generating a reference signal with adjustable amplitude, frequency and phase at an output thereof; (3) mixing the signal of interest with the reference signal and a signal 90 deg out of phase with the reference signal to provide a pair of quadrature sample signals comprising respectively a difference between the signal of interest and the reference signal and a difference between the signal of interest and the signal 90 deg out of phase with the reference signal; (4) using the pair of quadrature sample signals to compute estimates of the amplitude, frequency, and phase of an error signal comprising the difference between the signal of interest and the reference signal employing a least squares estimation; (5) adjusting the amplitude, frequency, and phase of the reference signal from the numerically controlled oscillator in a manner which drives the error signal towards zero; and (6) outputting the estimates of the amplitude, frequency, and phase of the error signal in combination with the reference signal to produce a best estimate of the amplitude, frequency, and phase of the signal of interest. The preferred method includes the step of providing the error signal as a real time confidence measure as to the accuracy of the estimates wherein the closer the error signal is to zero, the higher the probability that the estimates are accurate. A matrix in the estimation algorithm provides an estimate of the variance of the estimation error

8th Britain-Nepal Academic Council Annual Lecture

Dr Rajendra Pradhan is currently Dean of Nepâ School of Social Sciences and Humanities and was a founding member and the Chair of Social Science Baha (January 2002 - June 2010). He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. He has conducted research on several topics, including religion among Hindu Newars of Kathmandu, care of the elderly in a Dutch village, food habits of Tarai inhabitants, water rights in Nepal, legal history of land, forest and water in Nepal, traditional dispute settlement processes, and more recently court cases. He has served as research consultant to various organisations, including the International Water Management Institute, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. He has conducted several research workshops and training sessions for Nepali and international participants, including on topics such as legal pluralism, ethnography, and water rights. His publications include several edited and co-edited books such as Water Rights, Conflict and Policy (1997), Water, Land and Law: Changing Rights to Land and Water in Nepal (2000), Law, History and Culture of Water in Nepal (2003), Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law in Social, Economic and Political Development (2003) and articles in books and journals on a wide range of topics. He is currently co-editing a book entitled Unpacking Water Rights: A Comparative Reader to be published in 2011 by Sage and is working on a manuscript on Supreme Court cases pertaining to women’s rights and gender justice.In the nineteen nineties, encouraged by the restoration of multiparty parliamentary democracy, a new more liberal constitution, better organized and funded social movements, and the increasing influence of international organizations and laws, legal activists filed numerous public interest litigations pertaining to women’s rights and gender justice in the Supreme Court of Nepal. These cases concerned a wide range of issues, including ancestral property, marriage, divorce, marital rape, sexual harassment, and citizenship. The decisions of the Supreme Court were on the whole favourable to women’s rights and contributed to the changes in the laws, especially discriminatory provisions in the Muluki Ain (National Code), making them more supportive of gender equality and justice. In today’s lecture, I will offer one reading or interpretation of these laws and court cases using a legal anthropological perspective to make two points. First, I will demonstrate the usefulness of using the concept of legal pluralism to understand the historical as well as contemporary legal fields in Nepal and make a case for state legal pluralism. I will then discuss the ‘paradigm of argument’ (Comaroff and Roberts 1977) used by the petitioners, the respondents (Government) and the judges in the Supreme Court, paying attention to the different laws they cite to justify their arguments, including the Constitution, international law, customary law and Hindu norms and ‘Nepali culture’ to demonstrate legal pluralism in the Supreme Court. Second, I will argue that these court cases are not only about women’s rights and gender justice but more importantly they are cultural contestations concerning gender relations, family, marriage, property, individuals, citizenship, and so on and more generally about different visions of Nepali society. In conclusion, I will reflect on the relations between law and culture and law and social change in a legal pluralistic, multicultural, predominantly rural society.Digital Himalaya Project & the Britain-Nepal Academic Counci

Efficient detection and signal parameter estimation with application to high dynamic GPS receiver

In a system for deriving position, velocity, and acceleration information from a received signal emitted from an object to be tracked wherein the signal comprises a carrier signal phase modulated by unknown binary data and experiencing very high Doppler and Doppler rate, this invention provides combined estimation/detection apparatus for simultaneously detecting data bits and obtaining estimates of signal parameters such as carrier phase and frequency related to receiver dynamics in a sequential manner. There is a first stage for obtaining estimates of the signal parameters related to phase and frequency in the vicinity of possible data transitions on the basis of measurements obtained within a current data bit. A second stage uses the estimates from the first stage to decide whether or not a data transition has actually occurred. There is a third stage for removing data modulation from the received signal when a data transition has occurred and a fourth stage for using the received signal with data modulation removed therefrom to update global parameters which are dependent only upon receiver dynamics and independent of data modulation. Finally, there is a fifth stage for using the global parameters to determine the position, velocity, and acceleration of the object

Analysis of N-Glycosylation Sites in HIV glycoprotein 160

HIV infection is a condition caused by the human immunodeficiency virus. The condition gradually destroys the immune system, which makes it harder for the body to fight infections. HIV presents a complex knot for scientists to unravel. An envelope protein of the human HIV that is encoded by the env gene contains numerous glycosylation sites. It serves as a precursor for both the GP120 and the GP41. Here statistical investigation was done to study the sequential aspects of amino acids around the N-glycosylated protein from HIV virus. Sequences containing N-glycosylated asparagine were selected from the uniprot database of N-glycosylated proteins. The frequency of occurrence of amino acid residues around the glycosylated asparagine showed that there are increased numbers of isoleucine and threonine residues around the N-glycosylation sites in comparison with the nonglycosylated asparagine residues. Preferential occurrence
of amino acid residues around the glycosylation site shows that T has the maximum preference around the N-glycosylation site. T at 3 and/or -3 positions strongly favors glycosylation irrespective of other glycosylation sites. The data presented in the present work clearly indicate that there is a pronounced positional preference for the hydrophobic and neutral amino acids at various positions around the N-glycosylation site. In the future it will be of much interest to investigate further the possible structural and conformational implications of some
of these suggested positional preferences of the various amino acids around the site of glycosylation. This is a potentially important study, and such analyses will surely contribute an important part of our knowledge base in the future on HIV research. These results will be of interest to molecular biologists and protein engineers to identify N-glycosylation sites important in molecular recognition processes in HIV virus

Optimum filters and smoothers design for carrier phase and frequency tracking

The report presents the application of fixed lag smoothing algorithms to the problem of estimation of the phase and frequency of a sinusoidal carrier received in the presence of process noise and additive observation noise. A suboptimal structure consists of a phase-locked loop (PLL) followed by post-loop correction to the phase and frequency estimates. When the PLL is operating under high signal-to-noise ratio, the phase detector is approximately linear, and the smoother equations then correspond to the optimal linear equations for an equivalent linear signal model. The performance of such a smoother can be predicted by linear filtering theory. However, if the PLL is operating near the threshold region of the signal-to-noise ratio, the phase detector cannot be assumed to be linear. Then the actual performance of the smoother can significantly differ from that predicted by linear theory. In this report we present both the theoretical and simulated performance of such smoothers derived on the basis of various models for the phase and frequency processes