Near lossless source coding with side information only at the decoder, was first considered by Slepian and Wolf in 1970s, and rediscovered recently due to applications such as sensor network and distributed video coding. Suppose X is a source and Y is the side information. The coding scheme proposed by Slepian and Wolf, called SW coding, in which information only flows from the encoder to the decoder, was shown to achieve the rate H(X|Y) asymptotically for stationary ergodic source pairs, but not for non-ergodic case, shown by Yang and He. Recently, a new source coding paradigm called interactive encoding and decoding(IED) was proposed for near lossless coding with side information only at the decoder, where information flows in both ways, from the encoder to the decoder and vice verse. The results by Yang and He show that IED schemes are much more appealing than SW coding schemes to applications where the interaction between the encoder and the decoder is possible. However, the IED schemes proposed by Yang and He do not have an intrinsic structure that is amenable to design and implement in practice. Towards practical design, we restrict the encoding method to linear block codes, resulting in linear IED schemes. It is then shown that this restriction will not undermine the asymptotical performance of IED. Another step of practical design of IED schemes is to make the computational complexity incurred by encoding and decoding feasible. In the framework of linear IED, a scheme can be conveniently described by parity check matrices. Then we get an interesting trade-off between the density of the associated parity check matrices and the resulting symbol error probability. To implement the idea of linear IED and follow the instinct provided by the result above, Low Density Parity Check(LDPC) codes and Belief Propagation(BP) decoding are utilized. A successive LDPC code is proposed, and a new BP decoding algorithm is proposed, which applies to the case where the correlation between $Y$ and $X$ can be modeled as a finite state channel. Finally, simulation results show that linear IED schemes are indeed superior to SW coding schemes.

One of the major limiting factors in fuel cell production is the time and effort that are required in the ink coating process of the Nafion film that is at the heart of what makes a fuel cell work. The principle reason that this issued has not been tackled by the industry at large is the inherent difficulties that arise. First and foremost is the rapid and extensive expansion of the material upon contact with the liquid ink causing the Nafion film to wrinkle while being processed. In the drive to help mitigate this issue it must be understood by what conditions and severity that wrinkling occurs. The method chosen to detect this was to develop a laser profile scanner to record and output the severity of any wrinkles present in the film. This thesis showcases and explains the laser scanning system designed specifically for this problem and material. / Mechanical Engineering / text

Lietuvoje dekoratyviųjų želdinių poreikio augimas stebimas kasmet. Kartu su augančia rinka daugėja ir įmonių užsiimančių sodinukų prekyba. Deja, jų auginimas Lietuvoje yra kur kas mažiau populiarus. Nežiūrint to, kad pirkėjas dažnai mieliau renkasi vietoje išaugintus sodmenis, dauguma medelynų negali pasiūlyti pakankamos augalų įvairovės. Tokia situacija susidaro dėl gana sudėtingų aplinkybių, susiformuojančių šiame versle. Viena priežasčių yra augalų įšaknydijimui gana nepalankios klimato sąlygos ir brangūs augimo reguliatoriai. Šio darbo tikslas: įvertinti augimo reguliatoriaus „POKON“ poveikį erškėtinių, sausmedinių ir raugerškinių šeimų augalų žaliųjų auginių įsišaknidijimui. Tikslui pasiekti buvo suformuoti tokie uždaviniai: išanalizuoti medelynų veiklą, apibendrinti augalų šaknijimąsi lemiančius veiksnius bei įvertinti augimo reguliatoriaus „POKON“ veiksmingumą pasirinktų augalų šeimų žaliųjų auginių rizogenezei. Eksperimentai buvo atlikti Kaišiadorių rajone, Kalniškių kaime per laikotarpį nuo 2010 birželio 17 dienos iki 2010 rugpjūčio 17 dienos. Vertinant auginių įsišaknijimo potencialą, buvo skaičiuojamas auginių įsišaknijimo procentas, išaugusių šaknų bei naujų ūglių skaičius. Apibendrinus tyrimo rezultatus, padarytos tokios išvados: 1. Bakalauro darbe atliktais eksperimentais parodyta, kad augimo reguliatorius „POKON“ gali būti naudojamos augalų rizogenezei inicijuoti. 2. Nustatytas teigimas „POKON“ poveikis šaknų augimui žaliaisiais auginiais dauginant... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / In Lithuania ornamental plants demand is growing every year and it is monitored annually. Coupled with the growing of market, the same time is growing and plants marketing. Unfortunately, their production in Lithuania is much less popular in spite of the fact that buyers often prefer to shop locally harvested saplings, most nurseries can not offer a sufficient variety of plants. This situation arises for quite difficult circumstances in this business. One of the reason is that plant roots are growing bad in this climatic conditions, plus expensive growing regulators. The point of this work is: to evaluate the growing regulator „POKON“ impact for rose, honeysuckles and barberry families for green cuttings of plants. In order to achieve the following objectives were set to analyze: the nursery operations, plant roots growing summarize and assess the determinants of „POKON“ the effectiveness for selected plant families. The experiments were carried out at Kaišiadorys district, Kalniškės village during the period from 2010 June 17 until 2010 August 17. The assessment of the cuttings roots potential, was calculated by the percentage increase in the roots and new shoots. Summarizing the results, was made following conclusions: 1. Undergraduate work performed experiments showed that the growing regulator „POKON“ can be used to initiate plant rhizogenesis. 2. Set assertion of „POKON“ for root cuttings by multiplying the sturgeon, honeysuckles and barberry families of plants. 3... [to full text]

Broadcast spectrum restrictions require greater efficiency from wireless transmission systems, particularly in applications where sections of spectrum previously reserved for military purposes have been sold to private interests. A joint source-channel coding system, in tandem with smart data selection techniques, is proposed as a potential solution to this problem. The workings of this joint source-channel coding system are detailed, with particular attention given to the decoding process.

No description available.

Stem tip cuttings of Calliandra californica were treated, prior to rooting with 0, 4,000, 4000, 12,000 or 16,000 ppm IBA in a talc formulation. Rooting was enhanced by application of 12,000 and 16,000 ppm IBA. Root system fresh weight increased with increasing concentration of IBA. No treatment effected percent survival of cuttings.

Mortonia scabrella can be successfully propagated by stem -tip cuttings during May to September. Better rooting seems to occur during the less stressful months of May and September than in mid-summer. A wide range of rooting response occurs between different clones; the best will root in the range of 70-80%, which should be acceptable in a commercial propagation situation. In one cycle of selection in which the best 3 out of 16 clones were selected for a repeat study, average rooting success increased from 6% to 33 %. Apparently genetic differences for rooting potential occur. Further selection from larger populations, and/or breeding for this trait should result in cutting propagation becoming relatively easy for this species.

Treatment of seed with gibberellic acid (GA) resulted in significant increases in germination percent for Penstemon ambiguous, P. barbatus, P. eatoni, P. palmeri, P. parryi. P. pseudospectabilis, P. secundiflorus, and P. strictus in one or both of two experiments which were conducted. Germination of several other species increased with GA treatment, but differences were not significant.

Several species of low -water requiring species have been successfully propagated through vegetative and sexual means. Auxin treatments and bottom healing were beneficial in many cases. Development of improved propagation schemes, and subsequent growing practices, will increase grower success and profitability, eventually increasing availability of new low water use plants to the Arizona consumer. The long-term result of this work will be the availability of new, low-water use plant species which may be utilized by the homeowner and landscape contractor. The addition of new and exciting plant materials to the consumer market, it is hoped will accelerate the use of arid species in the Arizona landscape, resulting in water savings throughout the state, particularly in urban areas.

Luby Transform Codes were the first class of universal erasure codes introduced to fully realize the concept of scalable and fault‐tolerant distribution of data over computer networks, also called Digital Fountain. Later Raptor codes, a generalization of the LT codes were introduced to trade off complexity with performance. In this work, we show that an even broader class of codes exists that are near optimal for the erasure channel and that the Raptor codes form a special case. More precisely, Raptorlike codes can be designed based on an iterative (joint) decoding schedule wherein information is transferred between the LT decoder and an outer decoder in an iterative manner. The design of these codes can be formulated as a LP problem using EXIT Charts and density evolution. In our work, we show the existence of codes, other than the Raptor codes, that perform as good as the existing ones. We extend this framework of joint decoding of the component codes to the additive white Gaussian noise channels and introduce the design of Rateless codes for these channels. Under this setting, for asymptotic lengths, it is possible to design codes that work for a class of channels defined by the signal‐to‐noise ratio. In our work, we show that good profiles can be designed using density evolution and Gaussian approximation. EXIT charts prove to be an intuitive tool and aid in formulating the code design problem as a LP problem. EXIT charts are not exact because of the inherent approximations. Therefore, we use density evolution to analyze the performance of these codes. In the Gaussian case, we show that for asymptotic lengths, a range of designs of Rateless codes exists to choose from based on the required complexity and the overhead. Moreover, under this framework, we can design incrementally redundant schemes for already existing outer codes to make the communication system more robust to channel noise variations.