Reply to [arXiv:1105.5147] "Are GRB 090423 and Similar Bursts due to Superconducting Cosmic Strings?"

The GRB outflow driven by superconducting cosmic strings is likely to be an arc rather than a usually-considered spherical cap. In such a case, the afterglows of the cosmic string GRBs could be basically consistent with the observation of the high-redshift GRBs.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

An Android-Based Mechanism for Energy Efficient Localization Depending on Indoor/Outdoor Context

Today, there is widespread use of mobile applications that take advantage of a user\u27s location. Popular usages of location information include geotagging on social media websites, driver assistance and navigation, and querying nearby locations of interest. However, the average user may not realize the high energy costs of using location services (namely the GPS) or may not make smart decisions regarding when to enable or disable location services-for example, when indoors. As a result, a mechanism that can make these decisions on the user\u27s behalf can significantly improve a smartphone\u27s battery life. In this paper, we present an energy consumption analysis of the localization methods available on modern Android smartphones and propose the addition of an indoor localization mechanism that can be triggered depending on whether a user is detected to be indoors or outdoors. Based on our energy analysis and implementation of our proposed system, we provide experimental results-monitoring battery life over time-and show that an indoor localization method triggered by indoor or outdoor context can improve smartphone battery life and, potentially, location accuracy

New Constructions of Zero-Correlation Zone Sequences

In this paper, we propose three classes of systematic approaches for constructing zero correlation zone (ZCZ) sequence families. In most cases, these approaches are capable of generating sequence families that achieve the upper bounds on the family size ($K$) and the ZCZ width ($T$) for a given sequence period ($N$). Our approaches can produce various binary and polyphase ZCZ families with desired parameters $(N,K,T)$ and alphabet size. They also provide additional tradeoffs amongst the above four system parameters and are less constrained by the alphabet size. Furthermore, the constructed families have nested-like property that can be either decomposed or combined to constitute smaller or larger ZCZ sequence sets. We make detailed comparisons with related works and present some extended properties. For each approach, we provide examples to numerically illustrate the proposed construction procedure.Comment: 37 pages, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Angular Reconstruction of a Lead Scintillating-Fiber Sandwiched Electromagnetic Calorimeter

A new method called Neighbor Cell Deposited Energy Ratio (NCDER) is proposed to reconstruct incidence position in a single layer for a 3-dimensional imaging electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL).This method was applied to reconstruct the ECAL test beam data for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-02 (AMS-02). The results show that this method can achieve an angular resolution of 7.36\pm 0.08 / \sqrt(E) \oplus 0.28 \pm 0.02 degree in the determination of the photons direction, which is much more precise than that obtained with the commonly-adopted Center of Gravity(COG) method (8.4 \pm 0.1 /sqrt(E) \oplus 0.8\pm0.3 degree). Furthermore, since it uses only the properties of electromagnetic showers, this new method could also be used for other type of fine grain sampling calorimeters.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure