Adverse effects of ocean acidification on early development of squid (Doryteuthis pealeii)

Anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) is being absorbed into the ocean, altering seawater chemistry, with potentially negative impacts on a wide range of marine organisms. The early life stages of invertebrates with internal and external aragonite structures may be particularly vulnerable to this ocean acidification. Impacts to cephalopods, which form aragonite cuttlebones and statoliths, are of concern because of the central role they play in many ocean ecosystems and because of their importance to global fisheries. Atlantic longfin squid (Doryteuthis pealeii), an ecologically and economically valuable taxon, were reared from eggs to hatchlings (paralarvae) under ambient and elevated CO2 concentrations in replicated experimental trials. Animals raised under elevated pCO2 demonstrated significant developmental changes including increased time to hatching and shorter mantle lengths, although differences were small. Aragonite statoliths, critical for balance and detecting movement, had significantly reduced surface area and were abnormally shaped with increased porosity and altered crystal structure in elevated pCO2-reared paralarvae. These developmental and physiological effects could alter squid paralarvae behavior and survival in the wild, directly and indirectly impacting marine food webs and commercial fisheries.

A Video-Aware FEC-Based Unequal Loss Protection Scheme for RTP Video Streaming

A video-aware unequal loss protection (ULP) system for protecting RTP video streaming in bursty packet loss networks is proposed. Just considering the relevance of the frame, the state of the channel and the bitrate constraints of the protection bitstream, our algorithm selects in real time the most suitable frames to be protected through forward error correction (FEC) techniques. It benefits from a wise RTP encapsulation that allows working at a frame level without requiring any further process than that of parsing RTP headers, so it is perfectly suitable to be included in commercial transmitters. The simulation results show how our proposed ULP technique outperforms non-smart schemes.

Noise in neurons is message dependent

Neuronal responses are conspicuously variable. We focus on one particular aspect of that variability: the precision of action potential timing. We show that for common models of noisy spike generation, elementary considerations imply that such variability is a function of the input, and can be made arbitrarily large or small by a suitable choice of inputs. Our considerations are expected to extend to virtually any mechanism of spike generation, and we illustrate them with data from the visual pathway. Thus, a simplification usually made in the application of information theory to neural processing is violated: noise is not independent of the message. However, we also show the existence of error-correcting topologies, which can achieve better timing reliability than their components.

Implementation of basic software for significant digit arithmetic.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

An analysis of burst encoding methods and transmission properties /

Thesis (M. S.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Technical documentation for FIXDIME 3.

Mode of access: Internet.

Gates for the kane quantum computer in the presence of dephasing

In this paper we investigate the effect of dephasing on proposed quantum gates for the solid-state Kane quantum computing architecture. Using a simple model of the decoherence, we find that the typical error in a controlled-NOT gate is 8.3x10(-5). We also compute the fidelities of Z, X, swap, and controlled Z operations under a variety of dephasing rates. We show that these numerical results are comparable with the error threshold required for fault tolerant quantum computation.

Transmission of optical coherent-state qubits

We discuss the long-distance transmission of qubits encoded in optical coherent states. Through absorption, these qubits suffer from two main types of errors, namely the reduction of the amplitude of the coherent states and accidental application of the Pauli Z operator. We show how these errors can be fixed using techniques of teleportation and error-correcting codes.