Socio-behavioural factors influencing meat intake and meat reduction intention in Vietnam and Switzerland.

Meat consumption is declining in developed countries but increasing in emerging countries. This study, for the first time, compares the socio-behavioural factors influencing individuals' meat consumption level and meat reduction intention between Vietnam, an emerging economy and Switzerland, a developed country. Online consumer surveys were conducted in late 2022, yielding 552 usable replies from Switzerland and 592 from Vietnam for this study. Drawing upon an extended Protection Motivation Theory and using structural equation modelling, we found similarities as well as differences in the determinants of meat consumption behaviour. Perceived health risks of meat overconsumption, self-efficacy of meat reduction, attitude toward ethical and environmental issues, and pressure from family members' reluctance to change diet drove the intention to reduce meat in both countries. Meat attachment emerges as the most important determinant of meat consumption level in not only Switzerland but also Vietnam and thus presents the largest barrier to meat reduction. The association between response cost of eating less meat and intention to reduce meat was negative in Switzerland but positive in Vietnam. Self-efficacy of meat consumption reduction influenced meat consumption level solely in Switzerland. Ethical and environmental attitudes significantly facilitated meat reduction intention of Swiss respondents only, reflecting cultural differences. Policy implications were discussed.

Carnobacterium Species Capable of Growth at Pressures Ranging Over 5 Orders of Magnitude, from the Surface of Mars (103 Pa) to Deep Oceans (107 Pa) in the Solar System.

Several permanently cold solar system bodies are being investigated with regard to their potential habitability, including Mars and icy moons. In such locations, microbial life would have to cope with low temperatures and both high and low pressures, ranging from ∼102 to 103 Pa on the surface of Mars to upward of ∼108-109 Pa in the subsurface oceans of icy moons. The bacterial genus Carnobacterium consists of species that were previously shown to be capable of growth in the absence of oxygen at low temperatures and at either low pressure or high pressure, but to date the entire pressure range of the genus has not been explored. In the present study, we subjected 14 Carnobacterium strains representing 11 species to cultivation in a complex liquid medium under anaerobic conditions at 2°C and at a range of pressures spanning 5 orders of magnitude, from 103 to 107 Pa. Eleven of the 14 strains showed measurable growth rates at all pressures tested, representing the first demonstration of terrestrial life forms capable of growth under such a wide range of pressures. These findings expand the physical boundaries of the capabilities of life to occur in extreme extraterrestrial environments.

Wavelength switching technique for phase interrogation of Mach Zehnder interferometer-based optical sensors.

A method for determining the phase shift of a Mach Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is presented. It is based on switching the wavelength of continuous wave (CW) laser light illuminating the MZI and measuring the interferometer output amplitudes at DC and switching frequency. The method can measure the MZI phase shift unambiguously over the entire phase shift range of 2π. A practical proof of concept demonstration shows that the method can perform real-time measurement with high repeatability and accuracy limited by the optical frequency drift and power fluctuation of the lasers. The method does not require modifications of the sensor or accessing to the laser electronics and also uses simple detection. It is, therefore, suitable for bio and medical sensing applications.

Mach-Zehnder modulator condition for a low chirp factor versus DC bias.

An analysis of the Mach-Zehnder modulator's chirp factor α versus DC bias is presented. Unlike the well-known belief that α is infinite at 0 and π biases, it is shown that α can be zero at these biases under a careful balance of the modulations in the two modulator arms. Derivation of the condition to achieve this effect is given, and practical verifications are presented, where an excellent agreement with the theory is obtained. It is shown that modulators with a low residual chirp over a wide range of DC bias are achieved by designing the RF driving such that α would be minimized at zero bias instead of at quadrature bias as used currently in the modulator design.

Characterization of optical Mach-Zehnder modulator using DC measurements.

This Letter presents a simple but effective method for characterizing the frequency response of broadband Mach-Zehnder optical modulators. The method measures the modulator's direct current output versus the modulating frequency to determine the frequency response and requires no calibrated broadband photodetector or measurements of the electrical or optical spectrum or radio frequency power. Therefore, it significantly simplifies characterization. The method is suitable for in-situ measurements and can be automated.

Optical frequency comb based system for photonic refractive index sensor interrogation.

In this contribution, we demonstrate how an optical frequency comb can be used to enhance the functionality of an integrated photonic biosensor platform. We show that if an optical frequency comb is used to sample the spectral response of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and if the line spacing is arranged to sample the periodic response at 120° intervals, then it is possible to combine these samples into a single measurement of the interferometer phase. This phase measurement approach is accurate, independent of the bias of the interferometer and robust against intensity fluctuations that are common to each of the comb lines. We demonstrate this approach with a simple silicon photonic interferometric refractive index sensor and show that the benefits of our approach can be obtained without degrading the lower limit of detection of 3.70×10-7 RIU.

Microwave photonics instantaneous frequency measurement receiver based on a Sagnac Loop: publisher's note.

This publisher's note amends the author listing in Opt. Lett.43, 2233 (2018).OPLEDP0146-959210.1364/OL.43.002233.

DGCNN: A convolutional neural network over large-scale labeled graphs.

Exploiting graph-structured data has many real applications in domains including natural language semantics, programming language processing, and malware analysis. A variety of methods has been developed to deal with such data. However, learning graphs of large-scale, varying shapes and sizes is a big challenge for any method. In this paper, we propose a multi-view multi-layer convolutional neural network on labeled directed graphs (DGCNN), in which convolutional filters are designed flexibly to adapt to dynamic structures of local regions inside graphs. The advantages of DGCNN are that we do not need to align vertices between graphs, and that DGCNN can process large-scale dynamic graphs with hundred thousands of nodes. To verify the effectiveness of DGCNN, we conducted experiments on two tasks: malware analysis and software defect prediction. The results show that DGCNN outperforms the baselines, including several deep neural networks.

Boundary Inheritance Codec for high-accuracy structured light three-dimensional reconstruction with comparative performance evaluation.

This paper presents a new method of structured light-based 3D reconstruction, referred to here as Boundary Inheritance Codec, that provides high accuracy and low noise in projector-camera correspondence. The proposed method features (1) real-boundary recovery: the exact locations of region boundaries, defined by a coded pattern, are identified in terms of their real coordinates on the image plane. To this end, a radiance independent recovery of accurate boundaries and a disambiguation of true and false boundaries are presented. (2) Boundary inheritance: the consistency among the same boundaries of different layers in pattern hierarchy is exploited to further enhance the accuracy of region correspondence and boundary estimation. Extensive experimentations are carried out to verify the performance of the proposed Boundary Inheritance Codec, especially, in comparison with a number of well-known methods currently available, including Gray-code (GC) plus line/phase shift (LS/PS). The results indicate that the proposed method of recovering real boundaries with boundary inheritance is superior in accuracy and robustness to Gray-code inverse (GCI), GC+LS/PS. For instance, the error standard deviation and the percentile of outliers of the proposed method were 0.152 mm and 0.089%, respectively, while those of GCI were 0.312 mm and 3.937%, respectively, and those of GC+LS/PS were 0.280/0.321 mm and 0.159/7.074%, respectively.

Remoted all optical instantaneous frequency measurement system using nonlinear mixing in highly nonlinear optical fiber.

A novel remoted instantaneous frequency measurement system using all optical mixing is demonstrated. This system copies an input intensity modulated optical carrier using four wave mixing, delays this copy and then mixes it with the original signal, to produce an output idler tone. The intensity of this output can be used to determine the RF frequency of the input signal. This system is inherently broadband and can be easily scaled beyond 40 GHz while maintaining a DC output which greatly simplifies receiving electronics. The remoted configuration isolates the sensitive and expensive receiver hardware from the signal sources and importantly allows the system to be added to existing microwave photonic implementations without modification of the transmission module.

Amplitude independent instantaneous frequency measurement using all optical technique.

A novel all-optical system which independently measures both the amplitude and frequency of an RF signal is proposed and demonstrated. A photonic Hilbert transformer provides two orthogonal measurements of an RF signal. These are compared using four wave mixing in a highly nonlinear fiber, producing two independent outputs enabling determination of both signal frequency and amplitude. This all optical approach requires only simple, low cost DC electronics at the receiver. The system is demonstrated up to 20 GHz but can be scaled to 40 GHz and beyond.

Accurate estimation of the boundaries of a structured light pattern.

Depth recovery based on structured light using stripe patterns, especially for a region-based codec, demands accurate estimation of the true boundary of a light pattern captured on a camera image. This is because the accuracy of the estimated boundary has a direct impact on the accuracy of the depth recovery. However, recovering the true boundary of a light pattern is considered difficult due to the deformation incurred primarily by the texture-induced variation of the light reflectance at surface locales. Especially for heavily textured surfaces, the deformation of pattern boundaries becomes rather severe. We present here a novel (to the best of our knowledge) method to estimate the true boundaries of a light pattern that are severely deformed due to the heavy textures involved. First, a general formula that models the deformation of the projected light pattern at the imaging end is presented, taking into account not only the light reflectance variation but also the blurring along the optical passages. The local reflectance indices are then estimated by applying the model to two specially chosen reference projections, all-bright and all-dark. The estimated reflectance indices are to transform the edge-deformed, captured pattern signal into the edge-corrected, canonical pattern signal. A canonical pattern implies the virtual pattern that would have resulted if there were neither the reflectance variation nor the blurring in imaging optics. Finally, we estimate the boundaries of a light pattern by intersecting the canonical form of a light pattern with that of its inverse pattern. The experimental results show that the proposed method results in significant improvements in the accuracy of the estimated boundaries under various adverse conditions.

Localization for solving noisy multi-objective optimization problems.

This paper investigates the use of a framework of local models in the context of noisy evolutionary multi-objective optimization. Within this framework, the search space is explicitly divided into several nonoverlapping hyperspheres. A direction of improvement, which is related to the average performance of the spheres, is used for moving solutions within each sphere. This helps the local models to filter noise and increase the robustness of the evolutionary algorithm in the presence of noise. A wide range of noisy problems we used for testing and the experimental results demonstrate the ability of local models to better filter noise in comparison with that of global models.

Instantaneous frequency measurement system using optical mixing in highly nonlinear fiber.

A broadband photonic instantaneous frequency measurement system utilizing four-wave mixing in highly nonlinear fiber is demonstrated. This new approach is highly stable and does not require any high-speed electronics or photodetectors. A first principles model accurately predicts the system response. Frequency measurement responses from 1 to 40 GHz are demonstrated and simple reconfiguration allows the system to operate over multiple bands.

Observation of polychromatic gap solitons.

We study theoretically and observe experimentally polychromatic gap solitons generated by supercontinuum light in an array of optical waveguides. The solitons are formed through a sharp transition from diffraction-induced broadening and color separation to the simultaneous spatio-spectral localization of supercontinuum light inside the photonic bandgap with the formation of the characteristic staggered phase structure for all colors.

Wideband RF photonic in-phase and quadrature-phase generation.

A photonic implementation of a practical broadband RF Hilbert transformer is demonstrated by using a four-tap transversal system. An almost ideal 90 degrees phase shift with less than 3 dB of amplitude ripple has been achieved from 2.4 to 17.6 GHz. An efficient method to realize both transformed (quadrature-phase) and reference (in-phase) signal has been achieved by using a coarse wavelength division multiplexing coupler. Extension of the transformer bandwidth and further improvements of its implementation are discussed.

Nonlinear spectral-spatial control and localization of supercontinuum radiation.

We present the first observation of spatiospectral control and localization of supercontinuum light through the nonlinear interaction of spectral components in extended periodic structures. We use an array of optical waveguides in a LiNbO3 crystal and employ the interplay between diffraction and nonlinearity to dynamically control the output spectrum of the supercontinuum radiation. This effect presents an efficient scheme for optically tunable spectral filtering of supercontinua.

Multichannel vector sum phase shifter.

A novel multichannel vector sum phase shifter that is suitable for phased array antenna applications is demonstrated. Each channel is implemented using a distinct optical wavelength. Selective control of each channel is performed using an acousto-optic polarization coupler. The concept is successfully demonstrated for two individually controlled channels. For each channel, a continuously variable frequency linear phase shift is demonstrated between DC and 7 GHz, with the phasing range exceeding 100 degrees.