A preliminary study of shallow-water sonar issues : signal motion loss and reverberation noise

This preliminary investigation addresses key program elements for sonar sensing in a shallow-water environment to establish bounds on possible solutions and to reduce program uncertainty. The modeling and experimental program focuses on two issues - the potential degradation of sonar data due to signal masking by shallow-water reverberation and signal loss caused by extreme platform motions. The research program combines theoretical analysis, experimental validation in a shallow-water environment, and development of a computer model to explore parametric sensitivity. Results from an initial dock-side test show good agreement with the theoretical predictions. From the shallow-water experiments and acoustic modeling we conclude that: (1) Signal motion loss can influence the reverberation level significantly but is not the dominant factor in target detection for sonars in the frequency range of interest (>200 kHz); a high-quality (velocity-aided) inertial navigation and attitude system will be sufficient to correct for geometric distortions caused by platform motion. (2) Although surface reverberation and multipath noise can be a factor, partcularly in shadow-mode imaging, reverberation levels are rapidly attenuated at the frequencies of interest and beam patterns can be manipulated to reject most interferences; echo-mode imaging is still dominated by the contrast between target strength and bottom reverberation.Funding was provided by the Mitre Corporation and the Office of Naval Research under Contract N00014-92-C-602

Moisture Effects On Load-Duration Behavior of Lumber. Part II. Effect of Cyclic Relative Humidity

The effect of cyclic moisture conditions on the load-duration behavior of structural lumber is presented. Select Structural and No. 2. Douglas-fir nominal 2 by 4 specimens were tested in bending in two cyclic relative humidity (RH) environments: 35% to 95% RH on 24- and 96-hour cycles. A constant temperature of 73 F was maintained in both tests. Constant bending loads based on the 15th percentile of the static strength distributions for each grade at 73 F and 50% RH were used to load the beams. The load-duration behavior in the two cyclic RH environments is compared to previously reported results observed from three constant RH environments (35%, 50%, and 95% RH at 73 F). Analysis of test results indicated a trend toward shorter times-to-failure in cyclic RH conditions as compared to constant RH conditions. The effect, however, was no more evident in the No. 2 specimens than in the Select Structural specimens. To predict the load-duration behavior, an existing damage accumulation model was modified to account for the effect of changing moisture contents on the long-term strength of structural lumber. The developed model was found to predict the observed behavior quite well

Thermal Effects On Load-Duration Behavior Of Lumber. Part I. Effect Of Constant Temperature

The effect of constant thermal loadings on the load-duration relationships for structural lumber in bending is presented. Select Structural and No. 2 grade Douglas-fir nominal 2 by 4 (38.1 mm by 88.9 mm) beams were tested in bending under constant load. Constant temperature environments of 73 F, 100 F, and 130 F (22.8 C, 37.8 C, and 54.4 C) were used in the investigation. A constant 50% relative humidity (RH) was maintained for each temperature. The applied bending loads were based on the 15th percentile of the assumed static strength distributions for each grade at 73 F and 50% RH. An exponential damage accumulation model modified to account for temperature effects is used to define the load-duration response. The results indicate shorter times-to-failure with corresponding higher probabilities of failure for equal levels of mechanical stress as the temperature is increased

Thermal Effects on Load-Duration Behavior of Lumber. Part II: Effect of Cyclic Temperature

The effect of a cyclic thermal loading on the load-duration behavior of structural lumber in bending is presented. Select Structural and No. 2 grade Douglas-fir nominal 2 by 4 beams were tested under a constant bending load to determine time-to-failure. Two cyclic temperature environments were used in the investigation: 73 F to 100 F and 73 F to 130 F on a 24-hour cycle with a constant 50% relative humidity. An exponential damage accumulation model with a temperature factor was used to predict the observed times-to-failure. The damage model originally was fitted and calibrated using load-duration data from equivalent lumber samples subjected to constant temperature environments. The model predicted quite well the observed times-to-failure in the cyclic temperature environments. This is quantified using a standard errors analysis between the model predictions and the observed cyclic temperature data. These errors are comparable to those observed with the constant temperature data which were used to determine the model constants

Lift and Pitching-moment Interference Between a Pointed Cylindrical Body and Triangular Wings of Various Aspect Ratios at Mach Numbers of 1.50 and 2.02

The lift and pitching-moment characteristics of a body alone, six triangular wings of various aspect ratios, and the combinations were measured at Mach numbers of 1.50 and 2.02 at a Reynolds number of 5.5 million (based on the body length) for angles of attack up to 5.5 degrees. The total lift and pitching-moment interference were determined and compared with theory. The agreement was found to be good

Using Growing Self-Organising Maps to Improve the Binning Process in Environmental Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequencing

Metagenomic projects using whole-genome shotgun (WGS) sequencing produces many unassembled DNA sequences and small contigs. The step of clustering these sequences, based on biological and molecular features, is called binning. A reported strategy for binning that combines oligonucleotide frequency and self-organising maps (SOM) shows high potential. We improve this strategy by identifying suitable training features, implementing a better clustering algorithm, and defining quantitative measures for assessing results. We investigated the suitability of each of di-, tri-, tetra-, and pentanucleotide frequencies. The results show that dinucleotide frequency is not a sufficiently strong signature for binning 10 kb long DNA sequences, compared to the other three. Furthermore, we observed that increased order of oligonucleotide frequency may deteriorate the assignment result in some cases, which indicates the possible existence of optimal species-specific oligonucleotide frequency. We replaced SOM with growing self-organising map (GSOM) where comparable results are obtained while gaining 7%–15% speed improvement

Binning sequences using very sparse labels within a metagenome

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In metagenomic studies, a process called binning is necessary to assign contigs that belong to multiple species to their respective phylogenetic groups. Most of the current methods of binning, such as BLAST, <it>k</it>-mer and PhyloPythia, involve assigning sequence fragments by comparing sequence similarity or sequence composition with already-sequenced genomes that are still far from comprehensive. We propose a semi-supervised seeding method for binning that does not depend on knowledge of completed genomes. Instead, it extracts the flanking sequences of highly conserved 16S rRNA from the metagenome and uses them as seeds (labels) to assign other reads based on their compositional similarity.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The proposed seeding method is implemented on an unsupervised Growing Self-Organising Map (GSOM), and called Seeded GSOM (S-GSOM). We compared it with four well-known semi-supervised learning methods in a preliminary test, separating random-length prokaryotic sequence fragments sampled from the NCBI genome database. We identified the flanking sequences of the highly conserved 16S rRNA as suitable seeds that could be used to group the sequence fragments according to their species. S-GSOM showed superior performance compared to the semi-supervised methods tested. Additionally, S-GSOM may also be used to visually identify some species that do not have seeds.</p> <p>The proposed method was then applied to simulated metagenomic datasets using two different confidence threshold settings and compared with PhyloPythia, <it>k</it>-mer and BLAST. At the reference taxonomic level Order, S-GSOM outperformed all <it>k</it>-mer and BLAST results and showed comparable results with PhyloPythia for each of the corresponding confidence settings, where S-GSOM performed better than PhyloPythia in the ≥ 10 reads datasets and comparable in the ≥ 8 kb benchmark tests.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In the task of binning using semi-supervised learning methods, results indicate S-GSOM to be the best of the methods tested. Most importantly, the proposed method does not require knowledge from known genomes and uses only very few labels (one per species is sufficient in most cases), which are extracted from the metagenome itself. These advantages make it a very attractive binning method. S-GSOM outperformed the binning methods that depend on already-sequenced genomes, and compares well to the current most advanced binning method, PhyloPythia.</p

Power asymmetry in CMB polarization maps from PLANCK : a local variance analysis

A persistent signal of power asymmetry on opposite hemispheres of CMB sky was seen in full-sky temperature measurements made so far. This asymmetry was seen in microwave sky from WMAP as well as PLANCK satellites, and calls for attention the larger question of \emph{statistical isotropy}, one of the foundational principles of modern cosmology. In this work we present an analysis of polarized CMB maps from PLANCK 2015 full mission data. We apply the local variance estimator on low resolution $E-$mode maps from PLANCK 2015 polarization \texttt{Commander} solution. We find a significant hemispherical power asymmetry in polarization data on large angular scales, at the level of $\sim 2.6-3.9\%$ depending on the galactic mask, and the circular disc radius used for computing local variance maps. However the direction is found to be pointing broadly towards CMB kinetic dipole direction. Precise measurements of CMB polarization in future will shed light on this apparent discrepancy in the anisotropy axis seen in temperature and polarized CMB sky, and likely influence of systematics on our findings.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 3 table