Finite length LT codes over higher order Galois fields Fq for unequal error protection (UEP) are analysed under maximum likelihood (ML) decoding. We consider a biased sampling method to create the LT code graph. In contrast to a previous approach by Rahnavard et al., where a predetermined number of edges is created per importance class given a check node of degree d, our procedure allows to pre...

Trees contribute to the environment by providing oxygen, improving air quality, climate amelioration, conserving water, preserving soil, and supporting wildlife. During the process of photosynthesis, trees take in carbon dioxide and produce the oxygen we breathe. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “One acre of forest absorbs six tons of carbon dioxide and puts out four tons of oxy...

The mean resultant length (MRL) is the length of the average of random vectors on the unit circle. It is used to measure the concentration of unimodal circular distributions. The sample MRL, as an estimator for the population MRL, has not been investigated thoroughly yet. This work examines the bias, variance and mean squared error of the MRL. Unbiased or near unbiased estimators are developed ...

Effects of contextual length are known to affect pause durations in neutral speech. The present study investigates these effects on an expressive corpus of read tales in French. Computational models of intra-sentence, and inter-sentence pause durations, as functions of contextual lengths are proposed. These models are aimed at improving Text-To-Speech synthesis systems, and provide clues for sy...

Sexual dimorphism is common across the animal kingdom, but the contribution of environmental factors shaping differences between the sexes remains controversial. In ectotherms, life-history traits are known to correlate with latitude, but sex-specific responses are not well understood. We analyzed life-history trait variation between the sexes of European perch (Perca fluviatilis L.), a common ...

It has been widely reported that men have a lower ratio of the 2nd and 4th human finger lengths (2D : 4D). Size-scaling ratios, however, have the seldom-appreciated potential for providing biased estimates. Using an information-theoretic approach, we compared 12 candidate models, with different assumptions and error structures, for scaling untransformed 2D to 4D lengths from 154 men and 262 wom...

A biased graph consists of a graph T and a subclass B of the polygons of T, such that no theta subgraph of T contains exactly two members of B. A subgraph is balanced when all its polygons belong to B. A vertex is a balancing vertex if deleting it leaves a balanced graph. We give a construction for unbalanced biased graphs having a balancing vertex and we show that an unbalanced biased graph ha...

An exact method to compute the entire equilibrium-reduced density matrix for systems characterized by a system-bath Hamiltonian is presented. The approach is based upon a stochastic unraveling of the influence functional that appears in the imaginary time path integral formalism of quantum statistical mechanics. This method is then applied to study the effects of thermal noise, static disorder,...

The Charadrii (shorebirds, gulls and alcids) are one of the most diverse avian groups from the point of view of sexual size dimorphism, exhibiting extremes in both male-biased and female-biased dimorphism, as well as monomorphism. In this study we use phylogenetic comparative analyses to investigate how size dimorphism has changed over evolutionary time, distinguishing between changes that have...

The production of entangled pairs electrons in ferromagnet-superconductor-ferromagnet or normal metal-superconductor-normal metal three-terminal structures has aroused considerable interest the last twenty years. In these studies, distance between contacts is limited by zero-energy superconducting coherence length. Here, we demonstrate nonlocality and quantum correlations voltage-biased Josephs...