Cochlear action potential threshold and single unit thresholds.

There is a close correlation between the sound pressure of tone burst required to affect a primary auditory neuron at its characteristic frequency and that which will produce a detectable N1 response at the same frequency. Units with thresholds from 80--0 db SPL (recorded from damaged and undamaged cochleas) were 0--20 dB , respectively, more sensitive than the action potential response.     

Group delay measurement from spiral ganglion cells in the basal turn of the guinea pig cochlea

Measurements of group delay were made extracellularly from spiral ganglion cells in the 3.7 to 5.0-mm region of the guinea pig cochlea, using sinusoidally amplitude modulated tones with constant modulating frequency (100 Hz) and depth of modulation (0.19). Threshold cochlear tuning was accompanied by frequency-dependent group delays. The group delay on the low-frequency tail was independent of carrier frequency; the interunit variation was 0.28-1.28 ms. The difference in group delay between CF and the low-frequency tail decreased as the CF threshold increased (-0.09 +/- 0.02 ms per 10 dB, beginning at 0.62 +/- 0.07 ms at 0 dB SPL). The group delay decreased above CF; at the units' maximum frequency it was less than the low-frequency tail value, and was sometimes negative. Following arterial injections of furosemide the CF threshold increased and the group delay peak decreased; the low-frequency tail was unaffected. The group delay decreased with increasing intensity; the reduction near and above CF was not only larger than that on the low-frequency tail, but also the change at 5-10 dB above threshold was far greater than expected from the Q10dB of the suprathreshold iso-rate tuning curves. A minimum-phase analysis suggested that the group delay response above CF, together with its nonlinear behavior, can be accounted for by a high-frequency, level-independent, amplitude plateau, in combination with the single unit, amplitude nonlinearity which is known to exist above CF.     

Anomalous phonon intensities in the Raman spectrum of disordered CsMg1−xCoxCl3

The five Raman-active $\text{k}\text{= 0}$ phonons have been measured at low temperatures and for a range of x in the disordered lattice CsMg_1-xCo_xCl₃. While the E_2g^a, E_2g^b, E_2g^c and A_1g modes at 55.0, 132.0, 189.0 and 255.0 cm^?1 for x = 0 exhibit normal one-mode behaviour, the intensity of the E_1g phonon at 127.5 cm^?1 has a most unusual concentration dependence which requires a new theory.     

A self-assembling polymer-bound rotaxane under thermodynamic control

The thermodynamically controlled self-assembly of a neutral donor-acceptor rotaxane, stoppered via porphyrin coordination and bound to polystyrene beads is described, and the dynamic equilibrium between solid and solution phases has been examined by HR MAS nmr spectroscopy.     

Calibration of hot-wire probes using non-uniform mean velocity profiles

A simple iterative procedure is illustrated here to overcome two problems frequently encountered in hot-wire anemometry: (1) the calibration of hot wires at low velocity and (2) to account for the wall-proximity correction in the actual measurements. The low-velocity calibration method used an iterative correction procedure based on laminar pipe velocity profiles. It is shown that the use of this approach, together with a simple wall proximity correction procedure, provides a simple and accurate calibration of both single and cross hot wires, and gives reliable measurements.     

Local and global convergence of a general inertial proximal splitting scheme for minimizing composite functions

This paper is concerned with convex composite minimization problems in a Hilbert space. In these problems, the objective is the sum of two closed, proper, and convex functions where one is smooth and the other admits a computationally inexpensive proximal operator. We analyze a family of generalized inertial proximal splitting algorithms (GIPSA) for solving such problems. We establish weak convergence of the generated sequence when the minimum is attained. Our analysis unifies and extends several previous results. We then focus on \(\ell _1\)-regularized optimization, which is the ubiquitous special case where the nonsmooth term is the \(\ell _1\)-norm. For certain parameter choices, GIPSA is amenable to a local analysis for this problem. For these choices we show that GIPSA achieves finite “active manifold identification”, i.e. convergence in a finite number of iterations to the optimal support and sign, after which GIPSA reduces to minimizing a local smooth function. We prove local linear convergence under either restricted strong convexity or a strict complementarity condition. We determine the rate in terms of the inertia, stepsize, and local curvature. Our local analysis is applicable to certain recent variants of the Fast Iterative Shrinkage–Thresholding Algorithm (FISTA), for which we establish active manifold identification and local linear convergence. Based on our analysis we propose a momentum restart scheme in these FISTA variants to obtain the optimal local linear convergence rate while maintaining desirable global properties.