Interlude At Dawn

Joey, Minnie Wilson\u27s little black rooster, ended his raucous greeting to the new day and began to strut proudly about the back yard, pausing only to preen the glossy feathers of his neck or to peck at some nearly invisible object on the ground

Fast nuclear staining of head hair roots as a screening method for successful STR analysis in forensics

The success rate of STR profiling of hairs found at a crime scene is quite low and negative results of hair analysis are frequently reported. To increase the success rate of DNA analysis of hairs in forensics, nuclei in hair roots can be counted after staining the hair root with DAPI. Two staining methods were tested: a longer method with two 1 h incubations in respectively a DAPI-and a wash-solution, and a fast, direct staining of the hair root on microscope slides. The two staining methods were not significantly different. The results of the STR analysis for both procedures showed that 20 nuclei are necessary to obtain at least partial STR profiles. When more than 50 nuclei were counted, full STR profiles were always obtained. In 96% of the cases where no nuclei were detected, no STR profile could be obtained. However, 4% of the DAPI-negative hair roots resulted in at least partial STR profiles. Therefore, each forensic case has to be evaluated separately in function of the importance of the evidential value of the found hair. The fast staining method was applied in 36 forensic cases on 279 hairs in total. A fast screening method using DAPI can be used to increase the success rate of hair analysis in forensics

Cyclic Imaging for All-Sky Interference Forecasting with Array Radio Telescopes

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is threatening modern radio astronomy. A classic approach to mitigate its impact on astronomical data involves discarding the corrupted time and frequency data samples through a process called flagging and blanking. We propose the exploitation of the cyclostationary properties of the RFI signals to reliably detect and predict their locations within an array radio telescope field-of-view, and dynamically schedule the astronomical observations such as to minimize the probability of RFI data corruption

Ziv-Zakai Error Bounds for Quantum Parameter Estimation

I propose quantum versions of the Ziv-Zakai bounds as alternatives to the widely used quantum Cram\'er-Rao bounds for quantum parameter estimation. From a simple form of the proposed bounds, I derive both a "Heisenberg" error limit that scales with the average energy and a limit similar to the quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound that scales with the energy variance. These results are further illustrated by applying the bound to a few examples of optical phase estimation, which show that a quantum Ziv-Zakai bound can be much higher and thus tighter than a quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound for states with highly non-Gaussian photon-number statistics in certain regimes and also stay close to the latter where the latter is expected to be tight.Comment: v1: preliminary result, 3 pages; v2: major update, 4 pages + supplementary calculations, v3: another major update, added proof of "Heisenberg" limit, v4: accepted by PR

Thinned coprime arrays for DOA estimation

Sparse arrays can generate a larger aperture than traditional uniform linear arrays (ULA) and offer enhanced degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) which can be exploited in both beamforming and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. One class of sparse arrays is the coprime array, composed of two uniform linear subarrays which yield an effective difference co-array with higher number of DOFs. In this work, we present a new coprime array structure termed thinned coprime array (TCA), which exploits the redundancy in the structure of the existing coprime array and achieves the same virtual aperture and DOFs as the conventional coprime array with much fewer number of sensors. An analysis of the DOFs provided by the new structure in comparison with other sparse arrays is provided and simulation results for DOA estimation using the compressive sensing based method are provided

Detection and Estimation Theory

Contains research objectives, summary of research and reports on one research project.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DA 28-043-AMC-02536(E

Detection and Estimation Theory

Contains research objectives, summary of research and reports on one research project.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DA 28-043-AMC-02536(E

Detection and Estimation Theory

Contains research objectives and summary of research.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DAAB07-71-C-030

Statistical Communication Theory

Contains reports on four research projects