Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2021 August 15

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August 15

The edjumacated anti-vaxer

Is there a decent FAQ or document somewhere, with well-document info about the good and bad points of covid vaccination, that addresses the various controversies with currently accepted scientific info? I know that there was a thing like that debunking astrology many years ago. I'm not looking for debunking per se, but just what the current info points to, which from what I can tell is pretty one-sided. Unfortunately most of the stuff in the media is at best non-sequiturs. Thanks. 2602:24A:DE47:BA60:8FCB:EA4E:7FBD:4814 (talk) 07:03, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Try Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia - Questions and Answers about COVID-19 Vaccines. Alansplodge (talk) 09:45, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

How is light signal decoded as data?

From here: So, the optical fiber transmits “data” by light to a receiving end, where the light signal is decoded as data. How is light signal decoded as data? Rizosome (talk) 13:25, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Try: "Communication - How is digital information encoded/decoded in light or radio waves?". Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange. --2603:6081:1C00:1187:CCAA:B747:6F3D:D81B (talk) 14:36, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

See also Fiber-optic communication. A signal lamp is another very crude mechanism for sending data via a light signal. Of course, it's a different principle than is used in most fiber optic systems. CodeTalker (talk) 19:06, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Fiber-optic communication can use both phase modulation and amplitude modulation of the signal. Typically, the data is encoded in digital form. A signal lamp uses the simplest form of amplitude modulation (only two amplitude values, on and off) for transmitting a digital signal, so it is not an entirely different principle.  --Lambiam 23:07, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

The math behind decoding data from a signal is the Fourier analysis . Waves can be added together using the Superposition principle to form a composite wave. The composite wave is the carrier wave plus the wave that encodes the data. Fourier analysis is the way that the composite wave can be decomposed into its component waves to extract the signal. There are many practical engineering ways to do this, many of which don't actually involve "doing the math" to extract the signal itself. But the deep math behind the process is in the Fourier analysis. --Jayron32 12:31, 16 August 2021 (UTC)