Counter-Interception and Counter-Exploitation Features of Noise Radar Technology

In defense applications, the main features of radars are the Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) and the Low Probability of Exploitation (LPE). The counterpart uses more and more capable intercept receivers and signal processors thanks to the ongoing technological progress. Noise Radar Technology (NRT) is probably a very effective answer to the increasing demand for operational LPI/LPE radars. The design and selection of the radiated waveforms, while respecting the prescribed spectrum occupancy, has to comply with the contrasting requirements of LPI/LPE and of a favorable shape of the ambiguity function. Information theory seems to be a “technologically agnostic” tool to attempt to quantify the LPI/LPE capability of noise waveforms with little, or absent, a priori knowledge of the means and the strategies used by the counterpart. An information theoretical analysis can lead to practical results in the design and selection of NRT waveforms.

An umbrella review of systematic reviews of β-hydroxy-β-methyl butyrate (HMB) supplementation in promoting skeletal muscle mass and function in aging and clinical practice

Review question / Objective: An umbrella review of systematic reviews of the use of β-hydroxy-β-methyl butyrate (HMB) supplementation in promoting skeletal muscle mass and function in aging and clinical practice. Condition being studied: Muscle mass (and various proxies thereof), strength, and physical function. Information sources: Pubmed, Web of Science, Embase.

Information Matrix-Based Adaptive Sampling in Hull Form Optimisation

Hull form optimisation involves challenges such as large design spaces, numerous design variables, and high nonlinearity. Therefore, optimisation that only use global approximate models alone cannot yield desirable results. An information matrix-based method is proposed for dynamically embedded local approximate models (IM-DEAM) in this paper, which uses the Gaussian-function information matrix to extract one or more subspaces for additional sampling and a Latin hypercube design (LHD) for adaptive sampling. In addition, to prevent overfitting by global approximate models in some spaces because of the uneven distribution of the samples, local approximate models are embedded in the subspaces identified for additional sampling to enable accurate description of subspaces. The effectiveness and robustness of the method are validated and analysed by applying the proposed method to optimise mathematical functions and the hull form of the DTMB 5415. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for improving the accuracies and can produce reliable optimisation results.

Willingness to Pay in Hedonic Pricing Models

The value of a differentiated product is simply the sum of its parts. This concept is easily observed in housing markets where the price of a home is determined by the underlying bundle of attributes that define it and by the price households are willing to pay for each attribute. These prices are referred to as implicit prices because their value is indirectly revealed through the price of another product (typically a home) and are of interest as they reveal the value of goods, such as nearby public amenities, that would otherwise remain unknown. This concept was first formalized into a tractable theoretical framework by Rosen, and is known as the hedonic pricing method. The two-stage hedonic method requires the researcher to map housing attributes into housing price using an equilibrium price function. Information recovered from the first stage is then used to recover inverse demand functions for nonmarket goods in the second stage, which are required for nonmarginal welfare evaluation. Researchers have rarely implemented the second stage, however, due to limited data availability, specification concerns, and the inability to correct for simultaneity bias between price and quality. As policies increasingly seek to deliver large, nonmarginal changes in public goods, the need to estimate the hedonic second stage is becoming more poignant. Greater effort therefore needs to be made to establish a set of best practices within the second stage, many of which can be developed using methods established in the extensive first-stage literature.

Air-cooled chiller screening noise analysis with preliminary building project information

For Inter-noise 2018, the author submitted a paper proposing techniques to derive reasonable preliminary estimates of building project stationary noise emission levels from sparse but available data that may seem unrelated to noise or vibration such as gross square footage (GSF), expected occupancy, and land use or function. Results from these predictions would be used to support or refine established buffer distances between exposed outdoor heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system noise sources and nearby noise-sensitive receptors, helping planners tasked with ambitious infill or growth goals better fit building projects into complicated campus development puzzles. This paper provides supplemental guidance by linking the same preliminary building project GSF, occupancy, and function information to estimates of cooling load (expressed as refrigeration tonnage) and thus an additional HVAC consideration not discussed in the author's previous study. When such refrigeration relies upon air-cooled condensers installed outdoors on building rooftops or at grade, substantial noise sources are introduced to the environment. Thus, this new study shares data and methodology to help expand the value and utility of the previous work and potentially provide more comprehensive building HVAC noise estimates for use by building developers and planners.

A New Citation Recommendation Strategy Based on Term Functions in Related Studies Section

Purpose Researchers frequently encounter the following problems when writing scientific articles: (1) Selecting appropriate citations to support the research idea is challenging. (2) The literature review is not conducted extensively, which leads to working on a research problem that others have well addressed. This study focuses on citation recommendation in the related studies section by applying the term function of a citation context, potentially improving the efficiency of writing a literature review. Design/methodology/approach We present nine term functions with three newly created and six identified from existing literature. Using these term functions as labels, we annotate 531 research papers in three topics to evaluate our proposed recommendation strategy. BM25 and Word2vec with VSM are implemented as the baseline models for the recommendation. Then the term function information is applied to enhance the performance. Findings The experiments show that the term function-based methods outperform the baseline methods regarding the recall, precision, and F1-score measurement, demonstrating that term functions are useful in identifying valuable citations. Research limitations The dataset is insufficient due to the complexity of annotating citation functions for paragraphs in the related studies section. More recent deep learning models should be performed to future validate the proposed approach. Practical implications The citation recommendation strategy can be helpful for valuable citation discovery, semantic scientific retrieval, and automatic literature review generation. Originality/value The proposed citation function-based citation recommendation can generate intuitive explanations of the results for users, improving the transparency, persuasiveness, and effectiveness of recommender systems.

On the strength of the phase cross-correlation in retrieving the Green’s function information in a region affected by persistent aftershock sequences

Although research on seismic interferometry is now entering a phase of maturity, earthquakes are still the most troublesome issues that plague the process in real applications. To address the problems that arise from spatially scattered and temporally transient enormous earthquakes, preference is usually given to the use of time-dependent weights. However, small earthquakes can also have a disturbing effect on the accuracy of interpretations if they are persistently clustered right next to the perpendicular bisector of the line joining station pairs or in close proximity to one of the stations. With regard to the suppression of these cluster earthquakes, commonly used solutions for dealing with monochromatic microseismic cluster events (e.g., implementing a band-reject filter around a comparatively narrow frequency band or whitening the amplitude spectra before calculating the cross-spectrum between two signals) may not have the necessary efficiency since earthquake clusters are generally a collection of events with different magnitudes, each having its own frequency and energy contents. Therefore, the only solution left in such a situation is to use stronger non-linear time-dependent weights (e.g., square of the running average or one-bit normalization), which may cause Green’s function amplitude information to be lost. In this paper, by simulating the records of a benchmark earthquake MN 5.2 with the help of empirical Green’s functions (EGF) obtained after the Ahar-Varzeghan Earthquake Doublet (MN 6.4 and MN 6.3), it is shown that the amplitude-unbiased phase cross-correlation is a relatively efficient approach in the face of the issues concerning long-standing cluster events.

Evolution of Genre Parameters of Documentary Text (Exemplified by References)

The article considers reference as an information-and-assessment document, the dynamics of reference transformation is viewed from documentary linguistics angle. The research is carried out on the material of reference given to applicants in the field of education; the documents belong to different chronological periods (Soviet period (wartime): 1941–1945; Soviet period: 1970–1990s; modern period: 2015–2020). The functional purpose of the document was determined and the composition and content structure of its text was analyzed. Speech means representing the main genre characteristics of the text of reference have been identified; they are presented at three levels of the hierarchy, taking into account their interconnection and significance as genre-forming parameters: addresser/addressee and function; information, structure and dominant modality; space and time. The author reveals the regularities of text formation, as well as genre peculiarities of the text, determined by social and linguistic factors. When analyzing the genre parameters of the document, the fact that the properties of the text are influenced by the specifics of the communication situation is taken into account. It was shown that social changes caused a shift in the nature of the information transmitted by the document; affected the structure and dominant modality of the text, space and time representation. Extralinguistic determination of speech organization of documentary text is demonstrated. It was established that speech representation of genre parameters is associated with the implementation of informational and presentation functions of the document.

Implementation of higher-order velocity mapping between marker particles and grid in the particle-in-cell code XGC

The global total- $f$ gyrokinetic particle-in-cell code XGC, used to study transport in magnetic fusion plasmas or to couple with a core gyrokinetic code while functioning as an edge gyrokinetic code, implements a five-dimensional continuum grid to perform the dissipative operations, such as plasma collisions, or to exchange the particle distribution function information with a core code. To transfer the distribution function between marker particles and a rectangular two-dimensional velocity-space grid, XGC employs a bilinear mapping. The conservation of particle density and momentum is accurate enough in this bilinear operation, but the error in the particle energy conservation can become undesirably large and cause non-negligible numerical heating in a steep edge pedestal. In the present work we update XGC to use a novel mapping technique, based on the calculation of a pseudo-inverse, to exactly preserve moments up to the order of the discretization space. We describe the details of the implementation and we demonstrate the reduced interpolation error for a tokamak test plasma using first- and second-order elements with the pseudo-inverse method and comparing with the bilinear mapping.