Hollingsworth v. Perry: Expressive Harm and the Stakes of Marriage

This commentary previews an upcoming Supreme Court case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, in which the Court may decide whether Proposition 8 violates either the Equal Protection Clause or the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution

AN EXAMINATION OF THE TREND IN INDUSTRIAL DISPERSION IN OKLAHOMA FROM 1963 THROUGH 1974

Industrial Organization,

A study of refrigeration and constricting band for early treatment of pip viper snakebite

Refrigeration and constricting band for early treatment of pit viper snakebit

Sensor data to measure Hawthorne effects in cookstove evaluation.

This data in brief article includes estimated time cooking based on temperature sensor data taken every 30 min from three stone fires and introduced fuel-efficient Envirofit stoves in approximately 168 households in rural Uganda. These households were part of an impact evaluation study spanning about six months to understand the effects of fuel-efficient cookstoves on fuel use and pollution. Daily particulate matter (pollution) and fuelwood use data are also included. This data in brief file only includes the weeks prior to, during, and after an in-person measurement team visited each home. The data is used to analyze whether households change cooking patterns when in-person measurement teams are present versus when only the temperature sensor is in the home

Development of a Low-Noise High Common-Mode-Rejection Instrumentation Amplifier

Several previously used instrumentation amplifier circuits were examined to find limitations and possibilities for improvement. One general configuration is analyzed in detail, and methods for improvement are enumerated. An improved amplifier circuit is described and analyzed with respect to common mode rejection and noise. Experimental data are presented showing good agreement between calculated and measured common mode rejection ratio and equivalent noise resistance. The amplifier is shown to be capable of common mode rejection in excess of 140 db for a trimmed circuit at frequencies below 100 Hz and equivalent white noise below 3.0 nv/square root of Hz above 1000 Hz

Bolt: Accelerated Data Mining with Fast Vector Compression

Vectors of data are at the heart of machine learning and data mining. Recently, vector quantization methods have shown great promise in reducing both the time and space costs of operating on vectors. We introduce a vector quantization algorithm that can compress vectors over 12x faster than existing techniques while also accelerating approximate vector operations such as distance and dot product computations by up to 10x. Because it can encode over 2GB of vectors per second, it makes vector quantization cheap enough to employ in many more circumstances. For example, using our technique to compute approximate dot products in a nested loop can multiply matrices faster than a state-of-the-art BLAS implementation, even when our algorithm must first compress the matrices. In addition to showing the above speedups, we demonstrate that our approach can accelerate nearest neighbor search and maximum inner product search by over 100x compared to floating point operations and up to 10x compared to other vector quantization methods. Our approximate Euclidean distance and dot product computations are not only faster than those of related algorithms with slower encodings, but also faster than Hamming distance computations, which have direct hardware support on the tested platforms. We also assess the errors of our algorithm's approximate distances and dot products, and find that it is competitive with existing, slower vector quantization algorithms.Comment: Research track paper at KDD 201

Design of a Torque Current Generator for Strapdown Gyroscopes

The design, analysis, and experimental evaluation of an optimum performance torque current generator for use with strapdown gyroscopes, is presented. Among the criteria used to evaluate the design were the following: (1) steady-state accuracy; (2) margins of stability against self-oscillation; (3) temperature variations; (4) aging; (5) static errors drift errors, and transient errors, (6) classical frequency and time domain characteristics; and (7) the equivalent noise at the input of the comparater operational amplifier. The DC feedback loop of the torque current generator was approximated as a second-order system. Stability calculations for gain margins are discussed. Circuit diagrams are shown and block diagrams showing the implementation of the torque current generator are discussed

Which EpeakE_{\rm peak}? - The Characteristic Energy of Gamma-Ray Burst Spectra

A characteristic energy of individual gamma-ray burst (GRB) spectra can in most cases be determined from the peak energy of the energy density spectra ($\nu{\cal F}_{\nu}$), called '$E_{\rm peak}$'. Distributions of $E_{\rm peak}$ have been compiled for time-resolved spectra from bright GRBs, and also time-averaged spectra and peak flux spectra for nearly every burst observed by CGRO-BATSE and Fermi-GBM. Even when determined by an instrument with a broad energy band, such as GBM (8 keV to 40 MeV), the distributions themselves peak at around 240 keV in the observer's frame, with a spread of roughly a decade in energy. $E_{\rm peak}$ can have considerable evolution (sometimes greater than one decade) within any given burst, as amply demonstrated by single pulses in GRB110721A and GRB130427A. Meanwhile, several luminosity or energy relations have been proposed to correlate with either the time-integrated or peak flux $E_{\rm peak}$. Thus, when discussing correlations with $E_{\rm peak}$, the question arises, "Which $E_{\rm peak}$?". A single burst may be characterized by any one of a number of values for $E_{\rm peak}$ that are associated with it. Using a single pulse simulation model with spectral evolution as a proxy for the type of spectral evolution observed in many bursts, we investigate how the time-averaged $E_{\rm peak}$ emerges from the spectral evolution within a single pulse, how this average naturally correlates with the peak flux derived $E_{\rm peak}$ in a burst and how the distribution in $E_{\rm peak}$ values from many bursts derives its surprisingly narrow width.Comment: 49 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables; accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal (version 2: prettified 2-column format; content unchanged