You have free access to this content 5.8 GHz full duplex amplitude shift keying retrodirective interrogator array

This article describes a practical demonstration of a complete full-duplex “amplitude shift keying (ASK)” retrodirective radio frequency identification (RFID) transceiver array.The interrogator incorporates a “retrodirective array (RDA)” with a dual-conversion phase conjugating architecture in order to achieve better performance than is possible with conventional RFID solutions. Here mixers phase conjugate the incoming signal and a carrier recovery circuit recovers incoming angle of arrival phase information of an encoded amplitude shift keyed signal. The resulting interrogator provides a receiver sensitivity level of -109 dBm. A four element square patch RDA gives a 3 dB automatic beam steering angle of acceptance of ±45°. When compared to an RFID system operating by conventional (non-retrodirective) means retrodirective action leads to improved range extension of up to 16 times at ±45°. Operator pointing accuracy requirements are also reduced due to automatic retrodirective self-pointing. These features significantly enhance deployment opportunities requiring long range low equivalent isotropic radiation power (EIRP) and/or RFID tagging of moving platforms. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:160–164, 2013; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27258

BAILII, Legal Education and Open Access to Law

The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) entered the online legal information landscape in 2001 with charitable status as a provider of UK and European judgments, and has over the past decade or so moved from a system quickly put together with any materials which could be found, to a system which provides a core resource to professionals in law. In this article we provide an overview for the law teacher of the system’s first years and we then look at whether usage in law schools has matched that of the professional, how the JISC funded Open Law project enabled development for law students, and where we might go in the future as part of the Legal Information Institute collective which operates under the ‘Free Access to Law’ banner.
As members of the Open Law team who sought funding, carried out the research and implemented the project, it seems to us that the project was generally successful. Our indications were that prior to Open Law the use of BAILII by students was low – it was not readily found or discussed by lecturers, was difficult to use, and generally less user friendly than it could have been. The changes implemented by Open Law appear to have changed that position considerably. However, our findings also indicate that there is much work to do to re-energise digital legal information as a legal education research field.

Research activities in the MaRINET project: keeping the European marine energy development facilities at world class level

The MaRINET project aims to build a synergy in the European marine renewable energy development infrastructure network, involving a total of 28 partners across the union. Its scope extends from small to large scale testing, in both tank and field. The main activities of the project are to standardize test procedures, to provide centralized free access for European technology developers, and to innovate for improving test infrastructures and techniques.
This paper presents the work carried in this last part, which focuses on research objectives identified to be current challenges for industrial development. They are distributed in 6 topics. On the one hand are issues that concern directly one of the 3 types of energy scoped in the project: wave, tidal, and offshore wind energy. Two examples are the real time estimation of incident waves, and the measurement of turbulence in tidal flows. On the other hand, collaborative effort is drawn on aspects that are common to those technologies: electrical components, environmental monitoring, and dedicated moorings.

Update on Research Activities in the MaRINET Project

The MaRINET FP7 project aims to build a synergy in the European marine renewable energy development infrastructure network, involving a total of 28 partners across the union. Its scope extends from small to large scale testing, in both tank and field. The main activities of the project are to standardize test procedures, to provide centralized free access for European technology developers, and to innovate for improving test infrastructures and techniques.
Two years to the end of the project, this paper presents an update of the work being carried in this last part. It focuses on research objectives identified to be current challenges for industrial development. They are distributed in 6 topics. On the one hand are issues directly related to one of the 3 types of energy scoped in the project: wave, tidal, and offshore wind. On the other hand, collaborative effort is drawn on aspects that are common to those technologies: electrical components, environmental monitoring, and dedicated moorings.
Theory and validation of new test techniques are presented, for example in the case of non-intrusive wave measurements. This is done in coordination with extensive experimental analysis of the phenomena implying tests, such as nonlinearities in moorings.

Enabling Free On-line Access to UK Law Reports: The Copyright Problem

The history of publishing legal decisions (law reporting) in the UK has been that of a privatised system since its inception, and that history has encompassed several hundred years. The privatised nature of this has meant that the product (the law report) has been, except in limited cases, viewed as the property of the publisher, rather than the property of the court or public. BAILII is an open access legal database that came about in part because of the copyrighted, privatised nature of this legal information. In this paper, we will outline the problem of access to pre-2000 judgments in the UK and consider whether there are legal or other remedies which might enable BAILII to both develop a richer historic database and also to work in harmony, rather than in competition, with legal publishers. We argue that public access to case law is an essential requirement in a democratic common law system, and that BAILII should be seen as a potential step towards a National Law Library.

A distributed contention-vector division multiple access (D-CVDMA) protocol for wireless networks

Traditional Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) protocol provides deterministic periodic collision free data transmissions. However, TDMA lacks flexibility and exhibits low efficiency in dynamic environments such as wireless LANs. On the other hand contention-based MAC protocols such as the IEEE 802.11 DCF are adaptive to network dynamics but are generally inefficient in heavily loaded or large networks. To take advantage of the both types of protocols, a D-CVDMA protocol is proposed. It is based on the k-round elimination contention (k-EC) scheme, which provides fast contention resolution for Wireless LANs. D-CVDMA uses a contention mechanism to achieve TDMA-like collision-free data transmissions, which does not need to reserve time slots for forthcoming transmissions. These features make the D-CVDMA robust and adaptive to network dynamics such as node leaving and joining, changes in packet size and arrival rate, which in turn make it suitable for the delivery of hybrid traffic including multimedia and data content. Analyses and simulations demonstrate that D-CVDMA outperforms the IEEE 802.11 DCF and k-EC in terms of network throughput, delay, jitter, and fairness.

Refresh-free dynamic standard-cell based memories: Application to a QC-LDPC decoder

The area and power consumption of low-density parity check (LDPC) decoders are typically dominated by embedded memories. To alleviate such high memory costs, this paper exploits the fact that all internal memories of a LDPC decoder are frequently updated with new data. These unique memory access statistics are taken advantage of by replacing all static standard-cell based memories (SCMs) of a prior-art LDPC decoder implementation by dynamic SCMs (D-SCMs), which are designed to retain data just long enough to guarantee reliable operation. The use of D-SCMs leads to a 44% reduction in silicon area of the LDPC decoder compared to the use of static SCMs. The low-power LDPC decoder architecture with refresh-free D-SCMs was implemented in a 90nm CMOS process, and silicon measurements show full functionality and an information bit throughput of up to 600 Mbps (as required by the IEEE 802.11n standard).

Reversal in gender valuations of cataract surgery after the implementation of free screening and low-priced high-quality surgery in a rural population of southern China.

PURPOSE: To assess the impact of community outreach and the availability of low-cost surgeries [500 Renminbi (RMB) or 65 United States dollars (US$) per surgery] on the willingness to pay for cataract surgery among male and female rural-dwelling Chinese.METHODS: Cross-sectional willingness-to-pay surveys were conducted at the initiation of a cataract outreach programme in June 2001 and then again in July 2006. Respondents underwent visual acuity testing and provided socio-demographic data.RESULTS: In 2001 and 2006, 325 and 303 subjects, respectively, were interviewed. On average the 2006 sample subjects were of similar age, more likely to be female (p < 0.01), illiterate (p < 0.01), and less likely to come from a household with annual income of less than US$789 (62% vs. 87%, p < 0.01). Familiarity with cataract surgery increased from 21.2% to 44.4% over the 5 years for male subjects (p < 0.01) and 15.8%-44.4% among females (p < 0.01). The proportion of respondents willing to pay at least 500 RMB for surgery increased from 67% to 88% (p < 0.01) among male subjects and from 50% to 91% (p < 0.01) among females.CONCLUSIONS: Five years of access to free cataract testing and low-cost surgery programmes appears to have improved the familiarity with cataract surgery and increased the willingness to pay at least 500 RMB (US$65) for it in this rural population. Elderly women are now as likely as men to be willing to pay at least 500 RMB, reversing gender differences present 5 years ago.