The influence of music on mood and performance while driving

Mood can influence our everyday behaviour and people often seek to reinforce, or to alter their mood, for example by turning on music. Music listening while driving is a popular activity. However, little is known about the impact of music listening while driving on physiological state and driving performance. In the present experiment, it was investigated whether individually selected music can induce mood and maintain moods during a simulated drive. In addition, effects of positive, negative, and no music on driving behaviour and physiological measures were assessed for normal and high cognitive demanding rides. Subjective mood ratings indicated that music successfully maintained mood while driving. Narrow lane width drives increased task demand as shown in effort ratings and increased swerving. Furthermore, respiration rate was lower during music listening compared to rides without music, while no effects of music were found on heart rate. Overall, the current study demonstrates that music listening in car influences the experienced mood while driving, which in turn can impact driving behaviour. PRACTITIONERS SUMMARY: Even though it is a popular activity, little is known about the impact of music while driving on physiological state and performance. We examined whether music can induce moods during high and low simulated drives. The current study demonstrates that in car music listening influences mood which in turn can impact driving behaviour. The current study shows that listening to music can positively impact mood while driving, which can be used to affect state and safe behaviour. Additionally, driving performance in high demand situations is not negatively affected by music.     

Building a peer-to-peer content distribution network with high performance,scalability and robustness

Content distribution networks (CDN) are fundamental, yet expensive technologies for distributing the content of web-servers to large audiences. The P2P model is a perfect match to build a low-cost and scalable CDN infrastructure for popular websites by exploiting the underutilized resources of their user communities. However, building a P2P-based CDN is not a straightforward endeavor. In contrast to traditional CDNs, peers are autonomous and volunteer participants with their own heterogeneous interests that should be taken into account in the design of the P2P system. Moreover, churn rate is much higher than in dedicated CDN infrastructures, which can easily destabilize the system and severely degrade the performance. Finally and foremostly, while many P2P systems abstract any topological information about the underlying network, a top priority of a CDN is to incorporate locality-awareness in query routing in order to locate close-by content. This paper aims at building a P2P CDN with high performance, scalability and robustness. Our proposed protocols combine DHT efficiency with gossip robustness and take into account the interests and localities of peers. In short, Flower-CDN provides a hybrid and locality-aware routing infrastructure for user queries. PetalUp-CDN is a highly scalable version of Flower-CDN that dynamically adapts to variable rates of participation and prevent overload situations. In addition, we ensure the robustness of our P2P CDN via low-cost maintenance protocols that can detect and recover from churn and dynamicity. Our extensive performance evaluation shows that our protocols yield high performance gains under both static and highly dynamic environments. Furthermore, they incur acceptable and tunable overhead. Finally we provide main guidelines to deploy Flower-CDN for the public use.     

反向还原工程有助于产品与技术普及

世界上有很多不同类型的汽车爱好者,但我们停下来仔细想一想就会发现,当某个汽车制造商推出一款新型号汽车时,其它制造商也会购买几部并拿回自己的工厂,然后分解看看里面有什么新特性与新技术,如果这些新东西具有销售价值,他们就会在自己的车型里运用类似的创新技术.上面这个普通例子,专业人员称之为"反向还原工程".具体来说,就是反向还原工程师拿到一项产品,然后作出分解,了解制造时使用的部件与技术.通过反向还原工程可以学到一个设备是由什么制造和怎样制造的,以及这种技术的应用情况,当然,这一切都是在法律规定的范围内进行.     

Design of PR NMDFB based up and down converters for transmit downlink and receive uplink of combined 3GPP LTE and UMTS radios

In this paper we present a novel application of perfect reconstruction (PR), non-maximally decimated (NMD) filter banks whose assembly gives life to compact digital up converter and digital down converter for combined Third Generation Partnership Protocol, Long Term Evolution radios and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System radios, which are Wideband Code Division Multiple Access based. The design of the PR NMD analysis–synthesis chains in both transmit downlink and receive uplink has been optimized to maximize the performance according to the specific application scenario. In the receive uplink an 80-path, 40-to-1, PR NMD polyphase down converter channelizer accomplishes the pre-processing task of decomposing the whole input frequency range and of aliasing all the spectral fragments to base-band while reducing the signal sample rate. A selector block is in charge of connecting the ports, which contain the fragments belonging to the same band, to a proper PR 2-to-N up converter channelizer, which synthesizes them in base-band. The dual architecture, composed of small N-to-2 polyphase down converters followed by an 80-path, 2-to-40, up converter, has been designed for the transmit downlink. The down converters accomplish the pre-processing task of decomposing the input spectra and of simultaneously aliasing their fragments to base-band while reducing the input sample rate to 7.68 Msps. The 80-path, 1-to-40 up converter, accomplishes the task of recombining the spectral fragments at the desired center frequencies while increasing the signal sample rate to 307.2 Msps.