The incidence and position of melanocytic nevi for the purposes of forensic image comparison

Expert witness opinion based on the comparison of images has been accepted by UK courts as admissible evidence in relation to issues of identity. Within images of the hand are a multiplicity of anatomical features of different aetiology, incidence and distribution patterns and this includes melanocytic nevi, referred to more colloquially as moles and/or birthmarks. The hand is not a common place for these isolated features to develop and so their presence in this anatomical region has the potential to be useful for issues of identity. The results of this study show that approximately 9 % of individuals in a sample of 476 hands, displayed at least one nevus on the back of their hand and, contrary to the literature, the incidence was found to be greater in females (15 % of female cohort) than males (7 % of male cohort). Almost a third of all nevi identified on the dorsum of the hand were abnormal or dysplastic. The most frequent location for these aggregations of melanocytes was in the central region of the dorsum of the hand or at the base of the index finger. The relevance of nevi identified in the image of a perpetrator’s hand and also on that of a suspect/accused is discussed in relation to the issue of whether the images have originated from the same individual

Does current UK research address priorities in palliative and end-of-life care?

The Palliative and end of life care Priority Setting Partnership uncovered 83 unanswered research questions. Florence Todd Fordham, Bridget Candy, Stevie McMillan and Sabine Best show that, as current UK research starts to address some of these questions, UK open grant data have the potential to encourage collaboratio

Two-photon interference between disparate sources for quantum networking

Quantum networks involve entanglement sharing between multiple users. Ideally, any two users would be able to connect regardless of the type of photon source they employ, provided they fulfill the requirements for two-photon interference. From a theoretical perspective, photons coming from different origins can interfere with a perfect visibility, provided they are made indistinguishable in all degrees of freedom. Previous experimental demonstrations of such a scenario have been limited to photon wavelengths below 900 nm, unsuitable for long distance communication, and suffered from low interference visibility. We report two-photon interference using two disparate heralded single photon sources, which involve different nonlinear effects, operating in the telecom wavelength range. The measured visibility of the two-photon interference is 80+/-4%, which paves the way to hybrid universal quantum networks

Low-Temperature Excitations of Dilute Lattice Spin Glasses

A new approach to exploring low-temperature excitations in finite-dimensional lattice spin glasses is proposed. By focusing on bond-diluted lattices just above the percolation threshold, large system sizes $L$ can be obtained which lead to enhanced scaling regimes and more accurate exponents. Furthermore, this method in principle remains practical for any dimension, yielding exponents that so far have been elusive. This approach is demonstrated by determining the stiffness exponent for dimensions $d=3$, $d=6$ (the upper critical dimension), and $d=7$. Key is the application of an exact reduction algorithm, which eliminates a large fraction of spins, so that the reduced lattices never exceed $\sim10^3$ variables for sizes as large as L=30 in $d=3$, L=9 in $d=6$, or L=8 in $d=7$. Finite size scaling analysis gives $y_3=0.24(1)$ for $d=3$, significantly improving on previous work. The results for $d=6$ and $d=7$, $y_6=1.1(1)$ and $y_7=1.24(5)$, are entirely new and are compared with mean-field predictions made for d>=6.Comment: 7 pages, LaTex, 7 ps-figures included, added result for stiffness in d=7, as to appear in Europhysics Letters (see http://www.physics.emory.edu/faculty/boettcher/ for related information

Using Flow Specifications of Parameterized Cache Coherence Protocols for Verifying Deadlock Freedom

We consider the problem of verifying deadlock freedom for symmetric cache coherence protocols. In particular, we focus on a specific form of deadlock which is useful for the cache coherence protocol domain and consistent with the internal definition of deadlock in the Murphi model checker: we refer to this deadlock as a system- wide deadlock (s-deadlock). In s-deadlock, the entire system gets blocked and is unable to make any transition. Cache coherence protocols consist of N symmetric cache agents, where N is an unbounded parameter; thus the verification of s-deadlock freedom is naturally a parameterized verification problem. Parametrized verification techniques work by using sound abstractions to reduce the unbounded model to a bounded model. Efficient abstractions which work well for industrial scale protocols typically bound the model by replacing the state of most of the agents by an abstract environment, while keeping just one or two agents as is. However, leveraging such efficient abstractions becomes a challenge for s-deadlock: a violation of s-deadlock is a state in which the transitions of all of the unbounded number of agents cannot occur and so a simple abstraction like the one above will not preserve this violation. In this work we address this challenge by presenting a technique which leverages high-level information about the protocols, in the form of message sequence dia- grams referred to as flows, for constructing invariants that are collectively stronger than s-deadlock. Efficient abstractions can be constructed to verify these invariants. We successfully verify the German and Flash protocols using our technique

Radar systems for the water resources mission, volume 2

The application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in monitoring and managing earth resources was examined. The function of spaceborne radar is to provide maps and map imagery to be used for earth resource and oceanographic applications. Spaceborne radar has the capability of mapping the entire United States regardless of inclement weather; however, the imagery must have a high degree of resolution to be meaningful. Attaining this resolution is possible with the SAR system. Imagery of the required quality must first meet mission parameters in the following areas: antenna patterns, azimuth and range ambiguities, coverage, and angle of incidence

Radar systems for the water resources mission. Volume 4: Appendices E-I

The use of a scanning antenna beam for a synthetic aperture system was examined. When the resolution required was modest, the radar did not use all the time the beam was passing a given point on the ground to build a synthetic aperture, so time was available to scan the beam to other positions and build several images at different ranges. The scanning synthetic-aperture radar (SCANSAR) could achieve swathwidths of well over 100 km with modest antenna size. Design considerations for a SCANSAR for hydrologic parameter observation are presented. Because of the high sensitivity to soil moisture at angles of incidence near vertical, a 7 to 22 deg swath was considered for that application. For snow and ice monitoring, a 22 to 37 deg scan was used. Frequencies from X-band to L-band were used in the design studies, but the proposed system operated in C-band at 4.75 GHz. It achieved an azimuth resolution of about 50 meters at all angles, with a range resolution varying from 150 meters at 7 deg to 31 meters at 37 deg. The antenna required an aperture of 3 x 4.16 meters, and the average transmitter power was under 2 watts

Radar systems for the water resources mission, volume 1

The state of the art determination was made for radar measurement of: soil moisture, snow, standing and flowing water, lake and river ice, determination of required spacecraft radar parameters, study of synthetic-aperture radar systems to meet these parametric requirements, and study of techniques for on-board processing of the radar data. Significant new concepts developed include the following: scanning synthetic-aperture radar to achieve wide-swath coverage; single-sideband radar; and comb-filter range-sequential, range-offset SAR processing. The state of the art in radar measurement of water resources parameters is outlined. The feasibility for immediate development of a spacecraft water resources SAR was established. Numerous candidates for the on-board processor were examined

Experimentally exploring compressed sensing quantum tomography

In the light of the progress in quantum technologies, the task of verifying the correct functioning of processes and obtaining accurate tomographic information about quantum states becomes increasingly important. Compressed sensing, a machinery derived from the theory of signal processing, has emerged as a feasible tool to perform robust and significantly more resource-economical quantum state tomography for intermediate-sized quantum systems. In this work, we provide a comprehensive analysis of compressed sensing tomography in the regime in which tomographically complete data is available with reliable statistics from experimental observations of a multi-mode photonic architecture. Due to the fact that the data is known with high statistical significance, we are in a position to systematically explore the quality of reconstruction depending on the number of employed measurement settings, randomly selected from the complete set of data, and on different model assumptions. We present and test a complete prescription to perform efficient compressed sensing and are able to reliably use notions of model selection and cross-validation to account for experimental imperfections and finite counting statistics. Thus, we establish compressed sensing as an effective tool for quantum state tomography, specifically suited for photonic systems.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Generating Non-Linear Interpolants by Semidefinite Programming

Interpolation-based techniques have been widely and successfully applied in the verification of hardware and software, e.g., in bounded-model check- ing, CEGAR, SMT, etc., whose hardest part is how to synthesize interpolants. Various work for discovering interpolants for propositional logic, quantifier-free fragments of first-order theories and their combinations have been proposed. However, little work focuses on discovering polynomial interpolants in the literature. In this paper, we provide an approach for constructing non-linear interpolants based on semidefinite programming, and show how to apply such results to the verification of programs by examples.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure