Small Number Of States Research Articles

Upper bounds for small trellis codes

An upper bound on the minimum squared distance of trellis codes by packing Voronoi cells is derived and compared with previously known bounds. The authors focus on codes with small memory for modulation formats such as pulse amplitude modulation (PAM), m-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), and m-ary phase shift keying (PSK). The bound is tight to search results for coset codes with a small number of states.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Relative Gains and the Pattern of International Cooperation

Many political situations involve competitions where winning is more important than doing well. In international politics, this relative gains problem is widely argued to be a major impediment to cooperation under anarchy. After discussing why states might seek relative gains, I demonstrate that the hypothesis holds very different implications from those usually presumed. Relative gains do impede cooperation in the two-actor case and provide an important justification for treating international anarchy as a prisoner's dilemma problem; but if the initial absolute gains situation is not a prisoner's dilemma, relative gains seeking is much less consequential. Its significance is even more attenuated with more than two competitors. Relative gains cannot prop up the realist critique of international cooperation theory, but may affect the pattern of cooperation when a small number of states are the most central international actors.

World marine fish catch in the age of exclusive economic zones and exclusive fishery zones

Abstract The international legal system that governs ocean space and its uses has undergone substantial changes in recent years. Such changes may have significant implications for a variety of states and their nationals. This study seeks to contribute to an evaluation of the possible consequences of the revised legal system. The establishment of extended zones of national jurisdiction, such as the exclusive economic zone as provided for in the J982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and evolving international practice, alters traditional access rights to important fishing grounds and may change prior patterns of marine fish catch. Expectations with respect to changes in national fish catch, in the degree of concentration of world marine fish catch among a relatively small number of states, in the situation of distant water fishing states, and in the comparative importance of different fishing grounds are examined.

Baseband trellis-coded modulation with combined equalization/decoding for high bit rate digital subscriber loops

The authors present a simulation study evaluating the performance of trellis-coded modulation with combined code/ISI sequence estimation for high bit rate (800 kb/s) transmission on subscriber loops. The receiver contains a fractionally spaced forward filter of a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) as a front end. This is shown to suppress phase synchronized crosstalk very effectively. The performance is further enhanced by the use of trellis code with a large number of states received with an M algorithm sequence-estimating receiver with a smaller number of states. >

Expanding the Use of Non‐Custodial Sentencing Options: An Evaluation of the Kansas Community Corrections Act

Abstract: Part II of the recent Green Paper Punishment, Custody and the Community has focussed attention on non‐custodial sentencing options. A similar emphasis on community‐based sanctions is currently to be found in the United States, where severe prison crowding conditions have resulted in court‐imposed restrictions on custodial sentences in several states, Partly in response to this problem a small number of states have introduced comprehensive Community Corrections Acts (C.C.A.s) which seek to provide viable ‘alternatives to incarceration’. Research evaluations of such programmes have highlighted several problem areas, particularly surrounding the issues of diuersion and public safety. While the ‘nothing works’ label is clearly inappropriate there is scepticism about the efficacy of extending the use of community based programmes. This paper discusses these issues and draws on the findings of a recent assessment of the Community Corrections Act of Kansas.

Fiscal Support for Education in American States: The "Parity-to-Dominance" View Examined

Many policy analysts have characterized the 1980s as a period of emerging state activism. This view is clearly supported in public school financing at the aggregate level, where the state share has shifted from a to a dominance status over the past decade. This article examines this prevailing parity-to-dominance perspective by conducting an analysis of state school aid in each of the 50 states from 1968 to 1986. Instead of finding states converging toward activism, our analysis shows significant interstate diversity in school financing. Only a very small number of states have actually followed the parity-to-dominance path. More important, each of the 50 states can be systematically classified into one of several distinct patterns, each of which can be defined in terms of (1) a state's fiscal support status (i. e., parity or dominance) at the initial period (i. e., late 1960s) and (2) whether state support has increased, remained stable, or decreased over the 19-year period. Through a synthesis...

Flashlight Coverage

Content analysis of the early evening national newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC from July 1985 to June 1987 reveals that the New Federalism has failed to focus national media attention on state issues. State news was extremely sparse, spotlighted a small number of states, and lacked political substance. Disaster, crime, and trivia stories prevailed. A parallel content analysis of state news covered by the New York Times indicates that newsworthy political stories were plentiful so that much better coverage of this important aspect of American politics was possible. When population is used as a yardstick of political significance, the concerns of midwesterners received the least attention while the Pacific region dominated in television as well as in print news. Compared to news broadcasts in the seventies, media attention has shifted from the Northeastern and New England regions to the West and Southwest, possibly contributing to the economic decline of Rust Belt states. State news coverage during presidential campaigns suggests ways for increasing coverage at other times.

Stochastic high-level Petri nets and applications

A class of stochastic Petri nets called stochastic high-level Petri nets (SHLPNs) is proposed. SHLPNs are high-level Petri nets augmented with exponentially distributed firing times. SHLPNs generally lead to models with a smaller state space. A computer marking concept is introduced that allows a considerable reduction of the number of states and induces a correct grouping of states in the Markov-domain SHLPN models of multiprocessor systems. The main advantage of modeling homogeneous systems using SHLPNs is that the resulting models are simpler and more intuitive and have a smaller number of states, as shown by examples. >

Diffusion models of ion-channel gating and the origin of power-law distributions from single-channel recording.

The lifetimes of the unitary currents from ion channels, as revealed from single-channel recording, are traditionally thought to follow exponential or multiexponential distributions. The interpretation of these event-time distributions is that the gating process follows Markov kinetics among a small number of states. There is recent evidence, however, that certain systems exhibit distributions that follow power laws or functions related to power laws. Likewise, it has been suggested that data sets that appear to be multiexponential may be fit to simple power laws as well. In this paper we propose a different view of ion-channel-gating kinetics that is consistent with these recent experimental observations. We retain the Markovian nature of the kinetics, but, in contrast to the traditional models, we suggest that ion-channel proteins have a very large number of states all of similar energy. Gating, therefore, resembles a diffusion process. We show that our simplest one-dimensional model exhibits single-channel distributions that follow power laws of the form t-a, where 1/2 less than or equal to a less than or equal to 3/2. Exponents determined from recent experiments approximately fall within this range. We believe that this model is consistent with modern views of protein dynamics and, thus, may provide a key to the molecular details of the gating process.

Negative sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa

Martin Wight once compared ‘the increasing number of small states which are the debris of colonial empires’ to ‘the increasing number of small principalities’ of an earlier period in international history which were ‘the debris of feudalism’. The citystates, monarchies, republics, confederations and various other emergent states of Europe eventually found an alternative to the mediaeval societas Christiana on which their independence and intercourse could be legitimately based. This was, of course, the practice of dynastic legitimacy or what Burke glorified as ‘prescription’: the right of inherited and established states to international recognition which sufficed as the constitution of European international society until the French revolution. Burke invoked it to condemn the revolution and justify foreign intervention not only to destroy the Jacobins and restore the monarchy but also to defend ‘the college of the ancient states of Europe’.3 It was a lost cause.

The convergence properties and stochastic characteristics inherent in force-biased and in metropolis Monte Carlo simulations on liquids

The very large number of states arise in a typical Monte Carlo simulation of a liquid was replaced by a relatively small number of states by discretizing the energy distribution function. We found that the subdominant eigenvalues of transition matrices defined over these states only weakly depend on the number of states used in the representation. Transition matrices defined over distribution functions with 276 states were then used to approximate the true transition matrices underlying the force-bias and Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithms. We examine the influence of limited state-to-state accessibility, and of distortion in the force-bias biasing function, on a variety of properties, most notably the subdominant eigenvalues of the transition matrices and the stochastic characteristics of the developing distribution function. Our results suggest that because of the inevitable presence of both limited accessibility and distortion in the biasing function, the force-biased algorithm with a moderate degree of biasing is best.

Conduction in Small Localized 2D Systems

Studies have been made of two types of small localized 2D systems on silicon surfaces. In one type the samples were long (~12 μm) and narrow (~0.05 μm). These samples showed variable range (1D) hopping above about 300 mK. Below strong structure occurs as a function of chemical potential because of the small number of states within 10 kT (10-100). Because single hops are involved, conduction in the peaks is simply activated and rectifying. The second type of sample was short (0.5 μm) and conduction was dominated by tunnelling at low temperatures (<200 mK). The peaks observed did not vary in width or length below about 80 mK but broadened and decreased at higher temperatures as expected of tunneling. Temporal fluctuations and substructure were seen that might reasonably be caused by fluctuations in the occupation of other sites. The long samples were studied with R A Webb, J Wainer and A Hartstein. The tunneling samples were studied with G Timp, R A Webb and J Wainer.

A Simple Protocol Whose Proof Isn't

Aho, Ullman, and Yannakakis have proposed a set of protocols that ensure reliable transmission of data across an error-prone channel. They have obtained lower bounds on the complexity required of the protocols to assure reliability for different classes of errors. They specify these protocols with finite-state machines. Although the protocol machines have only a small number of states, they are nontrivial to prove correct. In this paper we present proofs of one of these protocols using the finite-state-machine approach and the abstract-program approach. We also show that the abstract-program approach gives special insight into the operation of the protocol.

A systematic procedure for extracting fragment matrices for the method of diatomics-in-molecules from a b i n i t i o calculations on diatomics

A computationally practical prescription is given for defining the fragment matrices which constitute the input to the method of diatomics-in-molecules (DIM). It is shown how a mixed-state energy matrix e and the mixing coefficient matrix c for each required diatomic manifold may be obtained from nonempirical calculations on a small number of states within the manifold. Apart from the eigenvalues and eigenvectors for these states, the only extra information required is the overlap of the DIM basis with the diatomic wave functions. It is suggested to define the DIM basis in terms of the eigenfunctions of selected atomic states so that any type of ab initio calculation may be used to compute the input fragment matrix b = cec−1. The procedure is illustrated by application to the molecule BeFH for which minimum and saddle point properties are computed for a variety of DIM bases. It is also shown how empirical information can be introduced into the DIM formalism in a reasonable fashion.

Resonance structure in the (α, p) reaction on 58Ni AND 54Fe

Excitation functions have been carried out with the reactions 54Fe(α, p 0) 57Co and 58Ni(α, p 0) 61Cu to search for states with large α-widths in the compound nuclei 58Ni and 62Zn. Differential cross sections at three angles are measured for the 54Fe(α, p 0) 57Co reaction from 5.3 to 9.06 MeV and for the 58Ni(α, p 0) 61Cu reaction from 6.26 to 9.12 MeV. No evidence is found for states with extremely large α-widths. In both nuclei, however, the α-strength tends to be concentrated among a relatively small number of states. Qualitative agreement is found with the predictions of a weak coupling shell model.

Complexity of acceptors for prefix codes (Corresp.)

For a given finite set of messages and their assigned probabilities, Huffman's procedure gives a method of computing a length set (a set of codeword lengths) that is optimal in the sense that the average word length is minimized. Corresponding to a particular length set, however, there may be more than one code. Let <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">L(n)</tex> consist of all length sets with largest term <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</tex> , and, for any <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">\ell \in L(n)</tex> , let <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">{\cal S}( \ell)</tex> be the smallest number of states in any finite-state acceptor which accepts a set of codewords with length set <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">\ell</tex> . It is shown that, for all <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n &gt; 1</tex> , <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n^{2}/(16 \log_{2} n) \leq max {\cal S}(\ell) \leq 0(n^{2}).</tex> <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">\ell \in L(n)</tex>

A National Survey of the Program and Enrollment Characteristics of Counselor Education Programs

ACES sponsored a national survey of state supervisors of guidance and counselor education institutions and of nontraditional institutions offering graduate degrees in guidance and counseling in order to secure information regarding (a) the licensure of guidance counselors, (b) the use of a competency‐based approach to the certification of counselors, (c) the manpower needs for persons in guidance and personnel work, and (d) the program characteristics of counselor education institutions. Only a relatively small number of states anticipate becoming involved in the licensure of conselors in the foreseeable future; 53.6 percent of the states expect their certification of counselors to be competency‐based within 2 to 5 years, and 76.1 percent of counselor education institutions have decided to make their programs competency‐based but progress is slow. There is an oversupply of BA‐level guidance persons, school counselors, and doctoral‐level persons seeking faculty positions; there is a strong preference for ethnic minorities and women to fill counselor education positions; and abnormally high faculty/graduate ratios were reported for many institutions.

Three-nucleon transfer on 12C: The 12C(α, p) 15N reaction at 96.8 MeV

Angular distributions of protons from the 12C(α, p) 15N reaction have been measured over the angular range from 10–70° at an α-particle bombarding energy of 96.8 MeV. Well defined particle groups are observed up to an excitation energy of 18 MeV in 15N. The relatively small number of states excited implies a selectivity both in the reaction mechanism and in structure effects. DWBA calculations using a semi-microscopic three-nucleon form factor have been performed using several different sets of wave functions. Good agreement in the ratio σ exp/ σ th is obtained for most states using the 15N wave functions of de Meijer. The strongest state in the (α, p) spectrum is observed at 15.397 MeV in 15N and DWBA calculations give good agreement for a 13 2 + assignment. This state has been observed only in other three-nucleon transfer reactions involving heavy ions. The recent discovery of a 9 2 + state at 10.693 MeV in a p+ 14C resonance measurement is supported by our analysis.

Direct vibrational excitation via charge exchange in symmetric ion–molecule collisions

Integral and differential cross sections for vibrational excitation in symmetric H+2(X 2Σ+g, v′0) + H2(X 1Σ+g, v″0) collisions have been determined for incident kinetic energies E (keV) in the range 0.01&amp;lt;E&amp;lt;2.0. A multistate impact parameter description of the collision was used. At low kinetic energies, the inclusion of a relatively small number of states in the wavefunction expansion of the system achieves converged cross sections while at high energies a large number of product states are needed. The inelastic channels in this symmetric system are strongly coupled to each other and to the energy resonant charge exchange channels. Differential cross sections for excitation of individual product channels have been computed as a function of scattering angle within the multistate impact parameter approach. Small angle scattering within several degrees is dominant with forward inelastic scattering becoming more pronounced as the ion kinetic energy is increased. Integral cross sections for individual channels and integral cross sections summed over all product channels are presented as a function of both ion kinetic energy and reactant internal energy.

Practical Approach to the Continuum Shell Model

A second quantized version of the Lane-Robson reaction formalism is applied to the continuum shell-model problem. The dynamical equations have a matrix structure which differs from that encountered in the conventional shell model only through the addition of a relatively small number of states and the presence of complex, energy-dependent boundary-condition parameters. Oscillator basis states may be used throughout. All matrix elements may be evaluated by existing shell-model codes. The equations provide a practical basis for dynamical studies of resonance phenomena in single-nucleon scattering channels. An extension of the model to include cluster channels is suggested.