Free Energy Cost of Reducing Noise while Maintaining a High Sensitivity

Free energy cost of reducing noise while maintaining a high sensitivity.

Living systems need to be highly responsive, and also to keep fluctuations low. These goals are incompatible in equilibrium systems due to the fluctuation dissipation theorem (FDT). Here, we show that biological sensory systems, driven far from equilibrium by free energy consumption, can reduce their intrinsic fluctuations while maintaining high responsiveness. By developing a continuum theory ...

Reducing Compressor Noise While Considering System Interactions

Refrigerant compressors can be a primary noise source in residential air conditioning and heat pump systems. When evaluating the contribution of a compressor to the total noise, it is necessary to consider how the compressor couples to the condensing unit. Compressors typically couple to the condensing unit via three different types of noise paths. First, the compressor couples structurally to ...

Reducing Psychology while Maintaining its Autonomy via Mechanistic Explanations

Arguments for the autonomy of psychology or other higher-level sciences have often taken the form of denying the possibility of reduction. The form of reduction most proponents and critics of the autonomy of psychology have in mind is theory reduction. Mechanistic explanations provide a different perspective. Mechanistic explanations are reductionist insofar as they appeal to lower-level entiti...

Maintaining Performance while Saving Energy on Wireless LANs

Minimizing the energy consumption of wireless network interfaces is crucial in the design of battery-powered mobile computing devices. The IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN specification describes a power-saving mode which allows the network interface on the mobile device to enter a sleep mode when the link is idle; periodically, the mobile device must wake up to listen to beacons from the access point ...

Accelerate Banking Automation While Reducing Risk and Cost