Special Somatic Sensory Afferent Systems Overview

The special somatic sensory afferent systems include the auditory, vestibular, and visual systems. Auditory and vestibular afferent information is received by cranial nerve VIII, which projects to central pathways. Cranial nerve II carries afferent visual information to central pathways. This chapter reviews the receptors and structural components of these special somatic sensory afferent systems. The ossicular chain (malleus, incus, and stapes) within the air-filled middle ear serves as a transformer that bridges the impedance mismatch between sound vibrations in air on the large tympanic membrane and the resulting vibrations onto the small stapedial footplate.

Extremely Low Effective Impedance in Stratified Graphene-Dielectric Metamaterials

The periodic reflections in frequency were observed in a stack of graphene layers and reported as a series of mini photonic bandgaps owing to the multiple interference by the graphene layers. In this research, the effective medium approach was employed to obtain the effective refractive index and Bloch impedance for understanding the wave propagation characteristic therein. Specifically, the pure real effective refractive index without attenuation as well as an extremely low Bloch impedance were found at the frequencies exhibiting periodic reflections. Some numerical examples were demonstrated to show that the series bandgap-like reflections in fact are attributed to considerable impedance mismatch caused by this ultra low Bloch impedance.

Noncontact Laser Ultrasound Detection of Cracks Using Hydrophone

We present a noncontact, non-immersion ultrasonic inspection method. A broadband ultrasound signal generated by a pulsed laser was measured using a hydrophone. The generated ultrasound signals propagated through the specimen and received a signal from the hydrophone in the water. Soldered chip ceramic capacitors, resistors, and surface-mount-type chip amplifiers were used as experimental specimens. A polydimethylsiloxane layer was used to prevent the specimen from being impacted by contact with water. The presence of a crack in the middle of the specimen resulted in an air layer, and the intermediate air layer reduced the magnitude of the signal transmitted owing to impedance mismatch. Using this principle, the cracks in each specimen could be distinguished. The image contrast ratio derived from the proposed method is approximately two to three times higher than that derived using the conventional immersion ultrasonic method. These results show that the proposed method can replace existing immersion-type ultrasound transmitted images.

Measurement of Analog Modulation Index with a Calibrated Radio Frequency Attenuator

This paper presents a method for the accurate and traceable measurement of the analog modulation index. A calibrated step attenuator was used as the main apparatus because it has a higher dynamic range and lower uncertainty than a spectrum analyzer or an oscilloscope. In amplitude modulation (AM), the modulation index is obtained from the amplitude difference between the carrier and the first sideband, as in the conventional method. The resolution and calibration uncertainties of the step attenuator were propagated to the measurement uncertainty of the modulation index. The uncertainty produced by the impedance mismatch and repeatability was also included. For frequency modulation (FM) and phase modulation (PM), the modulation index, β, was estimated (with the step attenuator) from the spectrum of each sideband through the nonlinear fitting of the Bessel function. Thus, the uncertainty of the fitting process was added to the uncertainty of the measurement. The three modulations, AM, FM, and PM, exhibited an expanded uncertainty (approximately 95% confidence level, k = 2) of 0.372% for 50% nominal depth of the AM, 88.8 Hz for the peak frequency deviation of 10 kHz, and 0.88 mrad for a 0.1 radian modulation index, respectively.

Rumble

This paper introduces Rumble, a query execution engine for large, heterogeneous, and nested collections of JSON objects built on top of Apache Spark. While data sets of this type are more and more wide-spread, most existing tools are built around a tabular data model, creating an impedance mismatch for both the engine and the query interface. In contrast, Rumble uses JSONiq, a standardized language specifically designed for querying JSON documents. The key challenge in the design and implementation of Rumble is mapping the recursive structure of JSON documents and JSONiq queries onto Spark's execution primitives based on tabular data frames. Our solution is to translate a JSONiq expression into a tree of iterators that dynamically switch between local and distributed execution modes depending on the nesting level. By overcoming the impedance mismatch in the engine , Rumble frees the user from solving the same problem for every single query, thus increasing their productivity considerably. As we show in extensive experiments, Rumble is able to scale to large and complex data sets in the terabyte range with a similar or better performance than other engines. The results also illustrate that Codd's concept of data independence makes as much sense for heterogeneous, nested data sets as it does on highly structured tables.