Ancient oceans and Martian paleohydrology

The global model of ocean formation on Mars is discussed. The studies of impact crater densities on certain Martian landforms show that late in Martian history there could have been coincident formation of: (1) glacial features in the Southern Hemisphere; (2) ponded water and related ice features in the northern plains; (3) fluvial runoff on Martian uplands; and (4) active ice-related mass-movement. This model of transient ocean formation ties these diverse observations together in a long-term cyclic scheme of global planetary operation

High temperature magnetic ordering in La2RuO5

Magnetic susceptibility, heat capacity and electrical resistivity measurements have been carried out on a new ruthenate, La2RuO5 (monoclinic, space group P21/c) which reveal that this compound is a magnetic semiconductor with a high magnetic ordering temperature of 170K. The entropy associated with the magnetic transition is 8.3 J/mole-K -close to that expected for the low spin (S=1) state of Ru4+ ions. The low temperatures specific heat coefficient g is found to be nearly zero consistent with the semiconducting nature of the compound. The magnetic ordering temperature of La2RuO5 is comparable to the highest known Curie temperature of another ruthenate, namely, metallic SrRuO3, and in both these compounds the nominal charge state of Ru is 4+.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, To be published in Solid State Communication

On board Processor and Processing Strategies for Next Generation Reconfigurable Satellite Payloads

Today, the increasing demand in higher data rates necessitates new methods as well as higher flexibility for satellite telecommunication payloads in order to address a variety of applications and customers. This paper presents one of these processing strategies that is applicable to today’s processing satellite payloads aiming to meet those demands. For this purpose, a two-tier filter bank is designed as part of a digital onboard processor, which first divides the spectrum at the output of the ADC into a number of sub-bands extracting all the stacked channels in the digital domain. Following the analysis section of the first tier of operations, the extracted channels go under a secondary channelisation process to obtain much finer granularity of 31.25 kHz or 50 kHz depending on the communication standard used for data transmission. The implementation of the channeliser was delivered on a bit-true simulation model and the input and the output of the channelisers were compared and evaluated both in the time and frequency domains

James van Allen and his namesake NASA mission

Abstract In many ways, James A. Van Allen defined and “invented” modern space research. His example showed the way for government-university partners to pursue basic research that also served important national and international goals. He was a tireless advocate for space exploration and for the role of space science in the spectrum of national priorities

Paracetamol induced fixed drug eruption: a case report

Fixed drug eruption (FDE) is a type of drug-induced skin reaction pattern that characteristically recurs at the same skin or mucosal site. Paracetamol is one of the common drugs prescribed as analgesic–antipyretic agent in all age group of patients. FDE is a well-reported, but uncommon side-effect of paracetamol, usually the classic, pigmenting type most commonly found in children and adolescents. We present a case of 52 years old male patient who developed FDE over the glans penis following paracetamol use

High Temperature Ferromagnetism with Giant Magnetic Moment in Transparent Co-doped SnO2-d

Occurrence of room temperature ferromagnetism is demonstrated in pulsed laser deposited thin films of Sn1-xCoxO2-d (x<0.3). Interestingly, films of Sn0.95Co0.05O2-d grown on R-plane sapphire not only exhibit ferromagnetism with a Curie temperature close to 650 K, but also a giant magnetic moment of about 7 Bohr-Magneton/Co, not yet reported in any diluted magnetic semiconductor system. The films are semiconducting and optically highly transparent.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Human recognition based on gait poses

This paper introduces a new approach for gait analysis based on the Gait Energy Image (GEI). The main idea is to segment the gait cycle into some biomechanical poses, and to compute a particular GEI for eachpose. Pose-based GEIs can better represent body parts and dynamics descriptors with respect to the usually blurred depiction provided by a general GEI. Gait classification is carried out by fusing separatedpose-based decisions. Experiments on human identification prove the benefits of this new approach when compared to the original GEI method.Partially supported by projects CSD2007-00018 and CICYT TIN2009-14205-C04-04 from the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and Science, P1-1B2009-04 from Fundació Bancaixa and PREDOC/2008/04 grant from Universitat Jaume I. Portions of the research in this paper use the CASIA Gait Database collected by Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science

Discovering Valuable Items from Massive Data

Suppose there is a large collection of items, each with an associated cost and an inherent utility that is revealed only once we commit to selecting it. Given a budget on the cumulative cost of the selected items, how can we pick a subset of maximal value? This task generalizes several important problems such as multi-arm bandits, active search and the knapsack problem. We present an algorithm, GP-Select, which utilizes prior knowledge about similarity be- tween items, expressed as a kernel function. GP-Select uses Gaussian process prediction to balance exploration (estimating the unknown value of items) and exploitation (selecting items of high value). We extend GP-Select to be able to discover sets that simultaneously have high utility and are diverse. Our preference for diversity can be specified as an arbitrary monotone submodular function that quantifies the diminishing returns obtained when selecting similar items. Furthermore, we exploit the structure of the model updates to achieve an order of magnitude (up to 40X) speedup in our experiments without resorting to approximations. We provide strong guarantees on the performance of GP-Select and apply it to three real-world case studies of industrial relevance: (1) Refreshing a repository of prices in a Global Distribution System for the travel industry, (2) Identifying diverse, binding-affine peptides in a vaccine de- sign task and (3) Maximizing clicks in a web-scale recommender system by recommending items to users