12,278 research outputs found
Ice ages and geomagnetic reversals
There have been speculations on the relationship between climatic cooling and polarity reversals of the earth's magnetic field during the Pleistocene. Two of the common criticisms on this relationship have been the reality of these short duration geomagnetic events and the accuracy of their dates. Champion et al. (1988) have reviewed recent progress in this area. They identified a total of 10 short-duration polarity events in the last 1 Ma and 6 of these events have been found in volcanic rocks, which also have K-Ar dates. Supposing that the speculated relationship between climatic cooling and geomagnetic reversals actually exist, two mechanisms that assume climatic cooling causes short period magnetic reversals will be investigated. These two methods are core-mantle boundary topography and transfer of the rotational energy to the core
Efficient Algorithms for Scheduling Moldable Tasks
We study the problem of scheduling independent moldable tasks on
processors that arises in large-scale parallel computations. When tasks are
monotonic, the best known result is a -approximation
algorithm for makespan minimization with a complexity linear in and
polynomial in and where is
arbitrarily small. We propose a new perspective of the existing speedup models:
the speedup of a task is linear when the number of assigned
processors is small (up to a threshold ) while it presents
monotonicity when ranges in ; the bound
indicates an unacceptable overhead when parallelizing on too many processors.
For a given integer , let . In this paper, we propose a -approximation algorithm for makespan minimization with a
complexity where
(). As
a by-product, we also propose a -approximation algorithm for
throughput maximization with a common deadline with a complexity
An ALMA Dynamical Mass Estimate of the Proposed Planetary-mass Companion FW Tau C
Dynamical mass estimates down to the planet-mass regime can help to
understand planet formation. We present Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter
Array (ALMA) 1.3 mm observations of FW Tau C, a proposed ~10
planet-mass companion at ~330 au from the host binary FW Tau AB. We spatially
and spectrally resolve the accretion disk of FW Tau C in CO (2-1). By
modeling the Keplerian rotation of gas, we derive a dynamical mass of ~0.1
. Therefore, FW Tau C is unlikely a planet, but rather a low-mass star
with a highly inclined disk. This also suggests that FW Tau is a triple system
consisting of three ~0.1 stars.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ
Asymptotically Good Additive Cyclic Codes Exist
Long quasi-cyclic codes of any fixed index have been shown to be
asymptotically good, depending on Artin primitive root conjecture in (A.
Alahmadi, C. G\"uneri, H. Shoaib, P. Sol\'e, 2017). We use this recent result
to construct good long additive cyclic codes on any extension of fixed degree
of the base field. Similarly self-dual double circulant codes, and self-dual
four circulant codes, have been shown to be good, also depending on Artin
primitive root conjecture in (A. Alahmadi, F. \"Ozdemir, P. Sol\'e, 2017) and (
M. Shi, H. Zhu, P. Sol\'e, 2017) respectively. Building on these recent
results, we can show that long cyclic codes are good over \F_q, for many
classes of 's. This is a partial solution to a fifty year old open problem
GRBs and fundamental physics
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are short and intense flashes at the cosmological
distances, which are the most luminous explosions in the Universe. The high
luminosities of GRBs make them detectable out to the edge of the visible
universe. So, they are unique tools to probe the properties of high-redshift
universe: including the cosmic expansion and dark energy, star formation rate,
the reionization epoch and the metal evolution of the Universe. First, they can
be used to constrain the history of cosmic acceleration and the evolution of
dark energy in a redshift range hardly achievable by other cosmological probes.
Second, long GRBs are believed to be formed by collapse of massive stars. So
they can be used to derive the high-redshift star formation rate, which can not
be probed by current observations. Moreover, the use of GRBs as cosmological
tools could unveil the reionization history and metal evolution of the
Universe, the intergalactic medium (IGM) properties and the nature of first
stars in the early universe. But beyond that, the GRB high-energy photons can
be applied to constrain Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) and to test
Einstein's Equivalence Principle (EEP). In this paper, we review the progress
on the GRB cosmology and fundamental physics probed by GRBs.Comment: 38 pages, 18 figures, Review based on ISSI workshop "Gamma-Ray
Bursts: a Tool to Explore the Young Universe" (2015, Beijing, China),
accepted for publication in Space Science Review
Modeling of micro-electro-mechanical integrated test structures
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 38).by SunMan Patrick Wu.M.Eng
Collapsed speech segment detection and suppression for WaveNet vocoder
In this paper, we propose a technique to alleviate the quality degradation
caused by collapsed speech segments sometimes generated by the WaveNet vocoder.
The effectiveness of the WaveNet vocoder for generating natural speech from
acoustic features has been proved in recent works. However, it sometimes
generates very noisy speech with collapsed speech segments when only a limited
amount of training data is available or significant acoustic mismatches exist
between the training and testing data. Such a limitation on the corpus and
limited ability of the model can easily occur in some speech generation
applications, such as voice conversion and speech enhancement. To address this
problem, we propose a technique to automatically detect collapsed speech
segments. Moreover, to refine the detected segments, we also propose a waveform
generation technique for WaveNet using a linear predictive coding constraint.
Verification and subjective tests are conducted to investigate the
effectiveness of the proposed techniques. The verification results indicate
that the detection technique can detect most collapsed segments. The subjective
evaluations of voice conversion demonstrate that the generation technique
significantly improves the speech quality while maintaining the same speaker
similarity.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures. Proc. Interspeech, 201
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