Uniqueness theorems for meromorphic mappings sharing hyperplanes in general position

The purpose of this article is to study the uniqueness problem for meromorphic mappings from $\mathbb{C}^{n}$ into the complex projective space $\mathbb{P}^{N}(\mathbb{C}).$ By making using of the method of dealing with multiple values due to L. Yang and the technique of Dethloff-Quang-Tan respectively, we obtain two general uniqueness theorems which improve and extend some known results of meromorphic mappings sharing hyperplanes in general position.Comment: 10 page

Topological Zero-Thickness Cosmic Strings

In this paper, based on the gauge potential decomposition and the $\phi-$mapping theories, we study the topological structures and properties of the cosmic strings that arise in the Abelian-Higgs gauge theory in the zero-thickness limit. After a detailed discussion, we conclude that the topological tensor current introduced in our model is a better and more basic starting point than the generally used Nambu-Goto effective action for studying cosmic strings.Comment: 10 pages, no figure

Personalized local heating neutralizing individual, spatial and temporal thermo-physiological variances in extreme cold environments

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility, robustness and optimization of introducing personal comfort systems (PCS), apparatuses that promises in energy saving and comfort improvement, into a broader range of environments. We report a series of laboratory experiments systematically examining the effect of personalized heating in neutralizing individual, spatial and temporal variations of thermal demands. The experiments were conducted in an artificial climate chamber at -15 degC in order to simulate extreme cold environments. We developed a heating garment with 20 pieces of 20 * 20 cm2 heating cloth (grouped into 9 regions) comprehensively covering human body. Surface temperatures of the garment can be controlled independently, quickly (within 20 seconds), precisely (within 1 degC) and easily (through a tablet) up to 45 degC. Participants were instructed to adjust surface temperatures of each segment to their preferences, with their physiological, psychological and adjustment data collected. We found that active heating could significantly and stably improve thermal satisfaction. The overall TSV and TCV were improved 1.50 and 1.53 during the self-adjustment phase. Preferred heating surface temperatures for different segments varied widely. Further, even for the same segment, individual differences among participants were considerable. Such variances were observed through local heating powers, while unnoticeable among thermal perception votes. In other words, all these various differences could be neutralized given the flexibility in personalized adjustments. Our research reaffirms the paradigm of "adaptive thermal comfort" and will promote innovations on human-centric design for more efficient PCSs

Improved Decoding of Staircase Codes: The Soft-aided Bit-marking (SABM) Algorithm

Staircase codes (SCCs) are typically decoded using iterative bounded-distance decoding (BDD) and hard decisions. In this paper, a novel decoding algorithm is proposed, which partially uses soft information from the channel. The proposed algorithm is based on marking certain number of highly reliable and highly unreliable bits. These marked bits are used to improve the miscorrection-detection capability of the SCC decoder and the error-correcting capability of BDD. For SCCs with $2$-error-correcting Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem component codes, our algorithm improves upon standard SCC decoding by up to $0.30$~dB at a bit-error rate (BER) of $10^{-7}$. The proposed algorithm is shown to achieve almost half of the gain achievable by an idealized decoder with this structure. A complexity analysis based on the number of additional calls to the component BDD decoder shows that the relative complexity increase is only around $4\%$ at a BER of $10^{-4}$. This additional complexity is shown to decrease as the channel quality improves. Our algorithm is also extended (with minor modifications) to product codes. The simulation results show that in this case, the algorithm offers gains of up to $0.44$~dB at a BER of $10^{-8}$.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figure