Interaction of soliton with sinusoidal wave packet

The interaction of a soliton of the Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation (NSE) with a weak sinusoidal wave packet is treated analytically. The second-order soliton solution containing the original soliton and a perturbing soliton is expanded to first order in the amplitude of the perturbating soliton. From this expansion, one obtains the associate function of Gordon (1992) and a continuous change of position and phase of the perturbed soliton. One finds that the soliton experiences a second-order change of velocity under the influence of the perturbation. This result is then used to derive the displacement due to a wave packet of general shape, which is also confirmed by computer simulation     

Augmenting a conceptual model with geospatiotemporal annotations

While many real-world applications need to organize data based on space (e.g., geology, geomarketing, environmental modeling) and/or time (e.g., accounting, inventory management, personnel management), existing conventional conceptual models do not provide a straightforward mechanism to explicitly capture the associated spatial and temporal semantics. As a result, it is left to database designers to discover, design, and implement - on an ad hoc basis - the temporal and spatial concepts that they need. We propose an annotation-based approach that allows a database designer to focus first on nontemporal and nongeospatial aspects (i.e., "what") of the application and, subsequently, augment the conceptual schema with geospatiotemporal annotations (i.e., "when" and "where"). Via annotations, we enable a supplementary level of abstraction that succinctly encapsulates the geospatiotemporal data semantics and naturally extends the semantics of a conventional conceptual model. An overarching assumption in conceptual modeling has always been that expressiveness and formality need to be balanced with simplicity. We posit that our formally defined annotation-based approach is net only expressive, but also straightforward to understand and implement.     

Bi-Allelic Mutations in Zebrafish pank2 Gene Lead to Testicular Atrophy and Perturbed Behavior without Signs of Neurodegeneration

Coenzyme A (CoA) is an essential cofactor in all living organisms, being involved in a large number of chemical reactions. Sequence variations in pantothenate kinase 2 (PANK2), the first enzyme of CoA biosynthesis, are found in patients affected by Pantothenate Kinase Associated Neurodegeneration (PKAN), one of the most common forms of neurodegeneration, with brain iron accumulation. Knowledge about the biochemical and molecular features of this disorder has increased a lot in recent years. Nonetheless, the main culprit of the pathology is not well defined, and no treatment option is available yet. In order to contribute to the understanding of this disease and facilitate the search for therapies, we explored the potential of the zebrafish animal model and generated lines carrying biallelic mutations in the pank2 gene. The phenotypic characterization of pank2-mutant embryos revealed anomalies in the development of venous vascular structures and germ cells. Adult fish showed testicular atrophy and altered behavioral response in an anxiety test but no evident signs of neurodegeneration. The study suggests that selected cell and tissue types show a higher vulnerability to pank2 deficiency in zebrafish. Deciphering the biological basis of this phenomenon could provide relevant clues for better understanding and treating PKAN.     

A Fast Hardware Approach for Approximate, Efficient Logarithm and Antilogarithm Computations

The realization of functions such as log() and antilog() in hardware is of considerable relevance, due to their importance in several computing applications. In this paper, we present an approach to compute log() and antilog() in hardware. Our approach is based on a table lookup, followed by an interpolation step. The interpolation step is implemented in combinational logic, in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), resulting in an area-efficient, fast design. The novelty of our approach lies in the fact that we perform interpolation efficiently, without the need to perform multiplication or division, and our method performs both the log() and antilog() operation using the same hardware architecture. We compare our work with existing methods, and show that our approach results in significantly lower memory resource utilization, for the same approximation errors. Also our method scales very well with an increase in the required accuracy, compared to existing techniques.     

Mechanism of C2+ oxygenate synthesis on Rh catalysts

This paper examines the reaction pathways and the nature of active sites for CO hydrogenation in general and C₂₊ oxygenate synthesis over Rh catalysts in particular.     

Fiber Quality Evaluation of Pakistan’s Locally Developed Cotton Varieties for Yarn Manufacturing

This paper discusses relation between fiber quality parameters and yarn quality, presenting results of the quality assessment of Pakistan’s five popular cotton varieties. Abadgar-901 was found to have highest effective length followed by Tarzen-1 when compared to other fibers studied and the Sattari showed the least effective length. Whereas, Tarzen-1 showed highest tenacity, Sindh-1 was second to that, yet Nayab-78 showed the least strength of the studied cotton fibers. Further, it was also found that except Nayab-78, all the other cotton varieties were found to have fineness value of premium cotton standards, however, Nayab proved to be a coarse fiber, Sindh-1 was finest fiber of them all. Moreover, Sattari was found to be the whitest in color when measured for CIE and Berger whiteness index, Nayab-78 followed it just after and the Abadgar proved to be the least white compared to the studied cotton varieties.     

The variation of the stiffness coefficients for laminated open conical shell panels

To date, all analyses of laminated conical shells have been undertaken using constant stiffness coefficients in the laminate constitutive equations. In this paper, it is shown that the geometry of a conical surface actually renders the stiffness coefficients a function of circumferential location; they are not strictly constant, as has previously been assumed. The inclusion of this geometric complicating effect in a static or dynamic analysis will add considerably to the complication and cost of a solution scheme, yet may or may not have a significant effect on the end result. A brief study is undertaken here to help resolve this dilemma, and to assess whether a particular cone geometry should be modelled using variable, or constant, stiffness coefficients in the laminae constitutive relationships.     

The pattern of residual muscle paralysis in poliomyelitis

Rural schoolchildren between the ages of 6 and 18 years were screened for residual paralysis following poliomyelitis; 503 (0.85%) out of a total of 58,592 were victims. Of these, only 16 (3.8%) had received poliomyelitis vaccine, while the remainder had not been immunised. The disease had occurred before the age of 4 years in nearly 90%, the lower limbs being affected (98%) more often than the upper (2%). In the lower limbs, the quadriceps, hip adductors and tibialis anterior were frequently affected. The muscles supplied by the L4 and L5 spinal segments were most commonly involved, while those supplied by L1 and S3 were least. Some order does exist in the apparently irregular distribution of paralysis after poliomyelitis.     

Electrodeposition of Co-Pt continuous films and nanowires within diblock copolymer template

Patterned media for future ultrahigh-density magnetic data storage can be prepared by electrodeposition into ordered arrays of nanostructured templates. Diblock copolymer templates have been proposed as a promising alternative to alumina templates. They possess smaller feature sizes than alumina and thereby allow for higher storage densities. Templates with pore diameters of ∼8 nm have been fabricated by dip-coating a conducting substrate into a solution of polystyrene-block-poly(4-vinylpyridine) (PS-b-P4VP) and 2-(4′-hydroxybenzeneazo) benzoic acid (HABA). A vapor annealing step was interposed for better ordering. The pores are opened by dissolving the HABA from the supramolecular assembly and afterwards filled by electrodeposition.Fe-Pt and Co-Pt alloys are the materials of choice for filling the pores due to their hard magnetic properties like high coercivity and anisotropy. Co-rich Co₈₀Pt₂₀ was chosen for this study because it does not require post annealing as in the case of ordered L1₀ CoPt or FePt. Continuous films have been deposited in order to identify the optimum deposition conditions and the influence of deposition current density on chemical composition, growth morphology, and structural and magnetic properties has been studied systematically. The first results on templates electrochemically filled with Co-Pt are presented together with an analysis of their magnetic properties.     

A regularized pan-sharpening approach based on self-similarity and Gabor prior

In this article, we propose a new regularization-based approach for pan-sharpening based on the concepts of self-similarity and Gabor prior. The given low spatial resolution (LR) and high spectral resolution multi-spectral (MS) image is modelled as degraded and noisy version of the unknown high spatial resolution (HR) version. Since this problem is ill-posed, we use regularization to obtain the final solution. In the proposed method, we first obtain an initial HR approximation of the unknown pan-sharpened image using self-similarity and sparse representation (SR) theory. Using self-similarity, we obtain the HR patches from the given LR observation by searching for matching patches in its coarser resolution, thereby obtaining LR–HR pairs. An SR framework is used to obtain the patch pairs for which no matches are available for the patches in LR observation. The entire set of matched HR patches constitutes initial HR approximation (initial estimate) to the final pan-sharpened image which is used to estimate the degradation matrix as used in our model. A regularization framework is then used to obtain the final solution in which we propose to use a new prior which we refer as Gabor prior that extracts the bandpass details from the registered panchromatic (Pan) image. In addition, we also include Markov random field (MRF) smoothness prior that preserves the smoothness in the final pan-sharpened image. MRF parameter is derived using the initial estimate image. The final cost function consists of data fitting term and two prior terms corresponding to Gabor and MRF. Since the derived cost function is convex, simple gradient-based method is used to obtain the final solution. The efficacy of the proposed method is evaluated by conducting the experiments on degraded as well as on un-degraded datasets of three different satellites, i.e., Ikonos-2, Quickbird, and Worldview-2. The results are compared on the basis of traditional measures as well as recently proposed quality with no reference (QNR) measure, which does not require the reference image.