The wrong stuff? [computer viruses]

Antivirus observers are hard pressed to argue that we are winning the war against malicious mobile code (MMC). In fact, viruses are so common that the term is now embedded in popular culture - there are even advertising campaigns that use the idea to sell products. When average users know the latest widespread worm or virus by name, we know computer viruses are firmly established and here to stay. While researchers and industry developers have done much hard work, virus-detection technology is based on fairly simple rules, and numerous pitfalls remain. The author examines virus detection's current technology and highlights some of its shortcomings. As a community, we need an honest reassessment of our defenses. Are we pursuing a failed solution or focusing on the wrong stuff?.     

Thinking about stuff: posthumanist phenomenology and cognition

Emerging digital technologies, such as sensors and pervasive computing, provide a robust interplay between digital and physical space. Architecture as a disciplinary endeavor has subsumed the capacities of these technologies without allowing the difference these technologies afford to challenge fundamental notions of architecture, such as cognition, visibility, and presence. This essay explores the inverse of the architectural ground by exploring the cognitive capacity for non-animate entities. The implication of this posthuman phenomenology is that entities themselves pose questions and that “stuff” thinks. Given an expanded definition of thinking, the environment is an active agent of entities that respond to human building with forces, tensions, marks, and crossings—physical elements that yield symbolic significance in our world.     

饲料配料自动化生产线的设计与实现

文章介绍采用微计算机、PLC可编程控制器控制饲料配料生产线的系统组成，系统功能，硬件电路设计．软件模块设计。PLC软件模型采用分段PID调节，在满足精度要求的条件下，提高生产量的方法。     

双油分智能加油机设计

提出加油机的一种双油分加油控制，介绍了系统结构及工作原理，给出了系统硬件及软件设计。对实际中的应用情况进行了探讨。     

Finding the WRITE stuff: automatic identification of discourse structure in student essays

An essay-based discourse analysis system can help students improve their writing by identifying relevant essay-based discourse elements in their essays. Our discourse analysis software, which is embedded in Criterion, an online essay evaluation application, uses machine learning to identify discourse elements in student essays. The system makes decisions that exemplify how teachers perform this task. For instance, when grading student essays, teachers comment on the discourse structure. Teachers might explicitly state that the essay lacks a thesis statement or that an essay's single main idea has insufficient support. Training the systems to model this behavior requires human judges to annotate a data sample of student essays. The annotation schema reflects the highly structured discourse of genres such as persuasive writing. Our discourse analysis system uses a voting algorithm that takes into account the discourse labeling decisions of three independent systems.     

Structures,forms, and stuff: the materiality and medium of interaction

Though information is popularly, and often academically, understood to be immaterial, nonetheless, we only encounter it in material forms, in books, on laptops, in our brains, in spoken language, and so forth. In the past decade, HCI has increasingly focused on the material dimensions of interacting with computational devices and information. This paper explores three major strands of this research—tangible user interfaces, theories of computational materiality, and craft-oriented approaches to HCI. We argue that each of these offers a formulation of the materiality of interaction: as physical, as metaphysical, or as tradition communicating. We situate these three formulations in relation to debates on the nature of media, from philosophical aesthetics (the ontology of art, in particular), media studies, and visual cultural studies. We argue that the formulations of materiality, information, and meaning from HCI and those from the humanities have deeper underlying similarities than may be expected and that exploring these similarities have two significant benefits. Such an analysis can benefit these differing threads in different ways, taking their current theories and adding to them. It also serves as a basis to import philosophical art concepts in a robust way into HCI, that is, not simply as prepackaged ideas to be applied to HCI, but rather as ideas always already enmeshed in productive and living debates that HCI is now poised to enter—to the benefit of both HCI and the humanities.     

复式布料系统生产线的方案设计及其评价

以复式布料系统为对象,对生产线布局进行分析和研究。在对昨式布料系统生产线各个工位进行模块划分的基础上,按照基本模块进行组合的方式,提出一组结合生产实际的布局方案,并根据布料系统的技术特性,产生3类初步布局方案作为具体可行方案群,在此基础上介绍了对多方案进行评价和选优的相关系数法基本算法;最后利用面向对象的分析和技术,设计出相应的软件。     

基于嵌入式GPU的汗孔识别算法并行设计

基于NVIDIA Jetson Tx2平台,结合OpenCV计算机视觉库与计算统一设备架构(CUDA)程序设计,对汗孔特征提取与匹配算法实现了并行设计.实验结果表明:并行设计算法能够实现最多180倍的加速,推动指纹匹配算法在嵌入式系统领域的应用.     

Validation and adjustment of the mathematical prediction model for human sweat rate responses to outdoor environmental conditions

Abstract

Based on indoor laboratory studies, a mathematical model to predict sweat loss response was suggested as follows:

Under outdoor conditions this model was over estimating sweat loss response in shaded (low solar radiation) environments, and underestimating the response when solar radiation was high (open field areas). The present study was conducted in order to adjust the model to be applicable under outdoor environmental conditions. Four groups of fit acclimated subjects participated in the study. They were exposed to three climatic conditions (30°, 65% rh; 31°C, 40% rh; and 40°C, 20% rh) and three levels of metabolic rate (100, 300 and 450W) in shaded and sunny areas while wearing shorts, cotton fatigues (BDUs) or protective garments. The original predictive equation for sweat loss was adjusted for the outdoor conditions by evaluating separately the radiative heat exchange, short-wave absorption in the body and long-wave emission from the body to the atmosphere and integrating them in the required evaporation component (E_req) of the model, as follows:

where SL is solar radiation (W m ^-2), M_ethis the Stephan Boltzman constant, and /T is the effective clothing insulation coefficient. This adjustment revealed a high correlation between the measured and expected values of sweat loss { r= 099, p< 0-0001).     

The impact of activity level on sweat accumulation and thermal comfort using different underwear

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the significance of work level and sweat production for the total amount accumulated and the location of the sweat in a three-layer ensemble as a function of material and textile construction. Furthermore, it was also an aim to investigate how this influenced thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort during work and during a rest period. Long-legged/long-sleeved underwear manufactured from two different 100% fibre-type materials, polypropylene and wool, was tested as part of a three-layer clothing system. The underwear manufactured from 100% polypropylene was tested in two different knit constructions, a 1 -by-1 rib knit and a fishnet structure, and the woollen underwear in a 1 -by-1 rib knit construction. The test was performed on eight male subjects (T^a= I0°C, RH = 85%, V^a <0-lm/s), and comprised a twice-repeated bout of 40-min cycle exercise followed by 20 min rest. Each subject conducted two tests with the work level approximating 30% [Vdot]o₂ max and 40% [Vdot]o₂ max, respectively. Skin temperatures, rectal temperature, weight loss and humidity near the skin were recorded during the test. Total changes in body and clothing weight were measured separately. Furthermore, subjective ratings on thermal comfort and on sensation of temperature and humidity were collected. The results demonstrated that high heat and sweat production during work periods, leading to increased sweat accumulation, will give higher thermal discomfort ratings for rest periods as well as for work periods compared to intermittent work with lower work intensities. Distribution of accumulated sweat in the clothing ensemble after heavy sweating is dependent on the fibre type in the underwear. Further, it can be concluded that underwear construction clearly has an influence on the evaporation rate in a three-layer ensemble during work at a high activity level.     

Gender-related difference in sweat loss and its impact on exposure limits to heat stress

The aim of this study was to evaluate the validity of the recently proposed predicted heat strain (PHS) model with respect to gender, particularly in relation to the estimation of admissible exposure durations for work in hot environments. Two experiments addressing the effects of the climatic conditions inside vehicles during summer with altogether 96 females and 114 males were analysed. Each subject was exposed for 2 h to a typical summer climate. Highly significant gender-related differences were found for the observed sweat rates. When adjusting the sweat rate to anthropometric measures the differences remained statistically significant, even if females and males were matched for body surface area or surface-to-mass ratio. There is much evidence in the literature that gender-related differences in sweat loss diminish once they are adjusted to anthropometric variables or to physical fitness. However, thermal indices like the PHS model rely on absolute values of the physiological response to heat stress. Therefore, a systematic overestimation of the sweat loss for women could imply an underestimation of body heat storage and core temperature accordingly. A possible approach to revised limit values in the PHS model could be to reduce the values of the maximum sweat rate for women.

Relevance to industry

Work in hot environments is still present at many industrial workplaces, particulary in underdeveloped countries. International standards provide exposure limits for the prevention of heat disorders. The results of this study indicate that these limits should be revised with respect to gender-related differences in sweat loss.     

On computing the determinant in small parallel time using a small number of processors

The determinant, characteristic polynomial and adjoint over an arbitrary commutative ring with unity can be computed by a circuit with size O(n^3.496) and depth O(log²n). Furthermore, the circuits can be constructed uniformly (by a log space bounded Turing machine).     

Hitting sets when the VC-dimension is small

We present an approximation algorithm for the hitting set problem when the VC-dimension of the set system is small. Our algorithm uses a linear programming relaxation to compute a probability measure for which ?-nets are always hitting sets (see Corollary 15.6 in Pach and Agarwal [Combinatorial Geometry, J. Wiley, New York, 1995]). The comparable algorithm of Brönnimann and Goodrich [Almost optimal set covers in finite VC-dimension, Discrete Comput. Geom. 14 (1995) 463] computes such a probability measure by an iterative reweighting technique. The running time of our algorithm is comparable with theirs, and the approximation ratio is smaller by a constant factor. We also show how our algorithm can be parallelized and extended to the minimum cost hitting set problem.     

MEMS: small machines for the microelectronics age

In the past few years, the micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) industry has exceeded the $1-billion-a-year mark. Some economic forecasters estimate that the industry will surpass $14 billion by the year 2000. The reason for this tremendous growth is the enabling nature of MEMS, which give engineers and researchers the tools to build things that have been impossible or prohibitively expensive with other techniques. MEMS are micron- to millimeter-scale devices that can be fabricated as discrete devices or in large arrays. MEMS borrow much of their technology from integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing, providing three-fold benefits: miniaturization, multiplicity and microelectronics. First, miniaturization of the devices is inherent in the processing techniques. Modern microelectronics fabrication techniques are designed to build submicron-scale devices. By using the same techniques, engineers can easily leverage this technology to produce MEMS that are orders of magnitude smaller than their macroworld counterparts. Second, the use of photolithography techniques makes producing thousands or even millions of copies of a single device easy. Thus, single devices can be arrayed into systems to produce an effect impossible with discrete devices. Finally, because MEMS technology is so similar to IC fabrication technology, MEMS are integrable with microelectronics     

On the small cycle transversal of planar graphs

We consider the problem of finding a k-edge transversal set that intersects all (simple) cycles of length at most s in a planar graph, where s≥3 is a constant. This problem, referred to as Small Cycle Transversal, is known to be NP-complete. We present a polynomial-time algorithm that computes a kernel of size 36s³k for Small Cycle Transversal. In order to achieve this kernel, we extend the region decomposition technique of Alber et al. (2004) [1] by considering a unique region decomposition that is defined by shortest paths. Our kernel size is a significant improvement in terms of s over the kernel size obtained under the meta-kernelization framework by Bodlaender et al. (2009) [7].     

On-board control in the RoboCup small robots league

We present the most recent version of our RoboCube system, a special robot controller hand-tailored for players in the small robots league. The RoboCube is conceptualized to implement players with as many on-board features as possible in an extremely flexible way. For this purpose, the RoboCube provides significant computation power and memory as well as a multitude of I/O interfaces within the space constraints. As it facilitates the use of many sensors and effectors, including their on-board processing, the RoboCube allows us to explore a large number of different robots and team set-ups.