Modified fast frequency acquisition via adaptive least squares algorithm

A method and the associated apparatus for estimating the amplitude, frequency, and phase of a signal of interest are presented. The method comprises the following steps: (1) inputting the signal of interest; (2) generating a reference signal with adjustable amplitude, frequency and phase at an output thereof; (3) mixing the signal of interest with the reference signal and a signal 90 deg out of phase with the reference signal to provide a pair of quadrature sample signals comprising respectively a difference between the signal of interest and the reference signal and a difference between the signal of interest and the signal 90 deg out of phase with the reference signal; (4) using the pair of quadrature sample signals to compute estimates of the amplitude, frequency, and phase of an error signal comprising the difference between the signal of interest and the reference signal employing a least squares estimation; (5) adjusting the amplitude, frequency, and phase of the reference signal from the numerically controlled oscillator in a manner which drives the error signal towards zero; and (6) outputting the estimates of the amplitude, frequency, and phase of the error signal in combination with the reference signal to produce a best estimate of the amplitude, frequency, and phase of the signal of interest. The preferred method includes the step of providing the error signal as a real time confidence measure as to the accuracy of the estimates wherein the closer the error signal is to zero, the higher the probability that the estimates are accurate. A matrix in the estimation algorithm provides an estimate of the variance of the estimation error

8th Britain-Nepal Academic Council Annual Lecture

Dr Rajendra Pradhan is currently Dean of Nepâ School of Social Sciences and Humanities and was a founding member and the Chair of Social Science Baha (January 2002 - June 2010). He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. He has conducted research on several topics, including religion among Hindu Newars of Kathmandu, care of the elderly in a Dutch village, food habits of Tarai inhabitants, water rights in Nepal, legal history of land, forest and water in Nepal, traditional dispute settlement processes, and more recently court cases. He has served as research consultant to various organisations, including the International Water Management Institute, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. He has conducted several research workshops and training sessions for Nepali and international participants, including on topics such as legal pluralism, ethnography, and water rights. His publications include several edited and co-edited books such as Water Rights, Conflict and Policy (1997), Water, Land and Law: Changing Rights to Land and Water in Nepal (2000), Law, History and Culture of Water in Nepal (2003), Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law in Social, Economic and Political Development (2003) and articles in books and journals on a wide range of topics. He is currently co-editing a book entitled Unpacking Water Rights: A Comparative Reader to be published in 2011 by Sage and is working on a manuscript on Supreme Court cases pertaining to women’s rights and gender justice.In the nineteen nineties, encouraged by the restoration of multiparty parliamentary democracy, a new more liberal constitution, better organized and funded social movements, and the increasing influence of international organizations and laws, legal activists filed numerous public interest litigations pertaining to women’s rights and gender justice in the Supreme Court of Nepal. These cases concerned a wide range of issues, including ancestral property, marriage, divorce, marital rape, sexual harassment, and citizenship. The decisions of the Supreme Court were on the whole favourable to women’s rights and contributed to the changes in the laws, especially discriminatory provisions in the Muluki Ain (National Code), making them more supportive of gender equality and justice. In today’s lecture, I will offer one reading or interpretation of these laws and court cases using a legal anthropological perspective to make two points. First, I will demonstrate the usefulness of using the concept of legal pluralism to understand the historical as well as contemporary legal fields in Nepal and make a case for state legal pluralism. I will then discuss the ‘paradigm of argument’ (Comaroff and Roberts 1977) used by the petitioners, the respondents (Government) and the judges in the Supreme Court, paying attention to the different laws they cite to justify their arguments, including the Constitution, international law, customary law and Hindu norms and ‘Nepali culture’ to demonstrate legal pluralism in the Supreme Court. Second, I will argue that these court cases are not only about women’s rights and gender justice but more importantly they are cultural contestations concerning gender relations, family, marriage, property, individuals, citizenship, and so on and more generally about different visions of Nepali society. In conclusion, I will reflect on the relations between law and culture and law and social change in a legal pluralistic, multicultural, predominantly rural society.Digital Himalaya Project & the Britain-Nepal Academic Counci

SNe Ia Redshift in a Non-Adiabatic Universe

By relaxing the constraint of adiabatic universe used in most cosmological models, we have shown that the new approach provides a better fit to the supernovae Ia redshift data with a single parameter, the Hubble constant $H_0$, than the standard $\Lambda$CDM model with two parameters, $H_0$ and the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ related density $\Omega_{\Lambda}$. The new approach is compliant with the cosmological principle. It yields the H_0=68.28 (+- 0.53) km s-1Mpc-1 with an analytical value of the deceleration parameter q_0=-0.4. The analysis presented is for a matter only, flat universe. The cosmological constant $\Lambda$ may thus be considered as a manifestation of a non-adiabatic universe that is treated as an adiabatic universe.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, communicated for journal publicatio

Microstructure, vacancies and moments of nuclear magnetic resonance of hydrogenated amorphous silicon

Recent experiments on hydrogenated amorphous silicon using infrared absorption spectroscopy have indicated the presence of mono- and divacancy in samples for concentration of up to 14\% hydrogen. Motivated by this observation, we study the microstructure of hydrogen in two model networks of hydrogen-rich amorphous silicon with particular emphasis on the nature of the distribution (of hydrogen), the presence of defects, and the characteristic features of the nuclear magnetic resonance spectra at low and high concentration of hydrogen. Our study reveals the presence of vacancies, which are the built-in features of the model networks. The study also confirms the presence of various hydride configurations in the networks that include from silicon monohydrides and dihydrides to open chain-like structures, which have been observed in the infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance experiments. The broad and the narrow line widths of the nuclear magnetic resonance spectra are calculated from a knowledge of the distribution of spins (hydrogen) in the networks.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figure