Performance Investigation on Scan-On-Receive and Adaptive Digital Beam-Forming for High-Resolution Wide-Swath Synthetic Aperture Radar

The work investigates the performance of the Smart Multi-Aperture Radar Technique (SMART) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system for high-resolution wide-swath imaging based on Scan-on-Receive (SCORE) algorithm for receive beam steering. SCORE algorithm works under model mismatch conditions in presence of topographic height. A study on the potentiality of an adaptive approach for receive beam steering based on spatial spectral estimation is presented. The impact of topographic height on SCORE performance in different operational scenarios is examined, with reference to a realistic SAR system. The SCORE performance is compared to that of the adaptive approach by using the Cramèr Rao lower bound analysis

Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors: 2004

As states continue to claw their way out of the worst state budget hole in years, this report presents the findings of the Cato Institute's seventh biennial fiscal policy report card on the nation's governors. The report card's grading is based on 15 objective measures of fiscal performance. Governors who have cut taxes and spending the most receive the highest grades. Those who have increased spending and taxes the most receive the lowest grades. Our analysis shows that states that keep tax rates low and restrain spending growth have the best economic performance and thus the best longterm fiscal health.This year, four governors receive the grade of A: Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, Craig Benson of New Hampshire, Bill Owens of Colorado, and Judy Martz of Montana. Four governors receive Fs for their poor performance in dealing with the state fiscal crisis: Bob Holden of Missouri, Bob Taft of Ohio, Edward Rendell of Pennsylvania, and James McGreevey of New Jersey.The grades of the governors of some of America's most populous states are Jeb Bush of Florida, B; George Pataki of New York, B; Rick Perry of Texas, B; and Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, D

Non-Coherent Code Acquisition in the Multiple Transmit/Multiple Receive Antenna Aided Single- and Multi-Carrier DS-CDMA Downlink

We analyse the characteristics of the Non-Coherent (NC) Multiple Transmit/Multiple Receive (MTMR) antenna aided Multi-Carrier (MC) DS-CDMA downlink employing a serial search based acquisition scheme, when communicating over spatially uncorrelated Rayleigh channels. The associated Mean Acquisition Time (MAT) performance trends are characterised as a function of both the number of antennas and that of the number of subcarriers. It is shown that the employment of both multiple transmit antennas and multiple subcarriers is typically detrimental in terms of the achievable NC acquisition performance, while that obtained by exploiting multiple receive antennas is always beneficial, regardless whether single-path or multi-path scenarios are considered. Based on our results justified by information theoretic considerations, our acquisition design guidelines are applicable to diverse NC MTMR antenna aided scenarios. Index Terms—MC-DS-CDMA, non-coherent, transmit/receive/ frequency diversity

Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors: 2006

This report presents the findings of the Cato Institute's eighth biennial fiscal policy reportcard on the nation's governors. The report card's grading is based on 23 objective measures of fiscal performance. Governors who have cut taxes and spending the most receive the highest grades. Those who have increased spending and taxes the most receive the lowest grades

Is a Higher Calling Enough? Incentive Compensation in the Church (CRI 2009-011)

We study the compensation and productivity of more than 2,000 Methodist ministers in a 43-year panel data set. The church appears to use pay-for-performance incentives for its clergy, as their compensation follows a sharing rule by which pastors receive approximately 3% of the incremental revenue from membership increases. Ministers receive the strongest rewards for attracting new parishioners who switch from other congregations within their denomination. Monetary incentives are weaker in settings where ministers have less control over their measured performance

Performance Analysis of Dual-User Macrodiversity MIMO Systems with Linear Receivers in Flat Rayleigh Fading

The performance of linear receivers in the presence of co-channel interference in Rayleigh channels is a fundamental problem in wireless communications. Performance evaluation for these systems is well-known for receive arrays where the antennas are close enough to experience equal average SNRs from a source. In contrast, almost no analytical results are available for macrodiversity systems where both the sources and receive antennas are widely separated. Here, receive antennas experience unequal average SNRs from a source and a single receive antenna receives a different average SNR from each source. Although this is an extremely difficult problem, progress is possible for the two-user scenario. In this paper, we derive closed form results for the probability density function (pdf) and cumulative distribution function (cdf) of the output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and signal to noise ratio (SNR) of minimum mean squared error (MMSE) and zero forcing (ZF) receivers in independent Rayleigh channels with arbitrary numbers of receive antennas. The results are verified by Monte Carlo simulations and high SNR approximations are also derived. The results enable further system analysis such as the evaluation of outage probability, bit error rate (BER) and capacity.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures; IEEE Transaction of Wireless Communication 2012 Corrected typo

The Role of Locus of Control and Feedback on Performance of Primary School Students

This study examined Students' Locus of Control and Teacher Feedback using a 2x3 factorial to measure the performance of thirty-six (36) primary school students utilizing the two locus of control types and three levels of teacher feedback: no feedback, attributional feedback, and progressive feedback. No significant difference was found between the performances of students with the two types of locus of control (t=0.352, P>0.05). Also, no significant difference was found between the students who received attributional feedback and those who did not receive feedback (t=0.38, P>0.05). There was, however, a significant difference in the performance between the students who received progressive feedback and those who did not receive feedback (t=2.09, P0.05). The results obtained from this study suggest that providing progressive feedback might enhance the performance of students. There is need for further studies on the interaction between locus of control and performance enhancement techniques through the use of feedback. Notwithstanding, progressive feedback can be applied to produce improvement in performance