This report summarizes the most important results presented at the recent conference held at the Yukawa Institute of Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, devoted to the recently confirmed light σ resonance. Remarkably, all speakers at this meeting took the light σ for granted and many mass and width estimations near 500 MeV were presented. We emphasize that if the light and broad σ is accepted as a tr...

This research note is about a project aiming at elaborating an online platform for the promotion of route-based cultural tourism. In order to better meet tourists’ expectations in terms of suitability and organisation of contents, an end-user development platform based on Web 2.0 technologies and mash-up tools has been designed. The platform appears to be complete, costeffective, and easily upd...

In this study the Mantel-Haenszel procedure, widely used in studies for identifying differential item functioning, is proposed as an alternative to the delta-plot method and applied in a test-equating context for flagging common items that behave differentially across cohorts of examinees. The Mantel-Haenszel procedure has the advantage of conditioning on ability when making comparisons of perf...

This paper proposes an approach for unsupervised speaker segmentation and gender discrimination of broadcast news. In this paradigm, a speaker segmentation mechanism using MDL-based Gaussian model is firstly adopted to determine the speaker changes using mean and covariance of the Gaussian model. These speaker segments partitioned by speaker changes are smoothed and discriminated into male or f...

If the price of an asset follows a jump diffusion process, the market is in general incomplete. In this case, hedging a contingent claim written on the asset is not a trivial matter, and other instruments besides the underlying must be used to hedge in order to provide adequate protection against jump risk. We devise a dynamic hedging strategy that uses a hedge portfolio consisting of the under...

This paper discusses important elements of the Pockels sensing cell design. A novel electrode geometry is analyzed in order to obtain maximum sensitivity response from Pockels crystals (Bi(12)GeO(20)). This neither transversal nor truly longitudinal geometry, results in electrical field distribution along the sensing beam path that provides high modulation depth. Demonstrated performance level ...

Recent work has shown that high-order single-bit sigma-delta modulators suffer from lowlevel artifacts such as idle tones and noise modulation. Techniques that have been proposed to reduce or eliminate these errors include the application of dither inside the one-bit quantiser loop, and selecting a loop filter which makes the modulator chaotic. This paper compares the efficacy of these two appr...

This paper investigates the effects of Integral NonLinearity (INL) on the performances of both A/D converters and Digital Communication Systems, which exploit Direct Digital Modulation. The performances of both PCM and Sigma-Delta converters affected by INL are considered and compared. Then, the effects of INL upon the BER performances of an OFDM system are evaluated and modeled. The accuracy o...

This work proposes a novel structure for adaptive sigma delta modulation that leads to considerable improvement in the dynamic range of the modulator. The quantizer step-size is adapted based on estimates of the input signal to the quantizer block rather than on estimates of the input signal to the modulator itself, as is common in current schemes. The proposed structure can be implemented rath...