Excess volumes and excess viscosities of binary mixtures of some cyclic ethers + bromocyclohexane at 298.15 and 313.15 K

Excess Volumes,V ^E, and excess viscosities, ^E, at 293.15 and 313.15 K are reported for binary mixtures of some cyclic ethers (tetrahydrofuran, tetrahydropyran, 2-methyltetrahydrofuran and 2,5-dimethyltetrahydrofuran) + bromocyclohexane. These properties were obtained from density and viscosity measurements. ^E and ^E show negatives values for all the mixtures.     

The urologic work of Doctor Alejandro Settier (1858-1915). (V). Specialist Alejandro Settier

In spite of the names and works of practically all the early 19th Century Spanish specialists in urinary tract being widely known, there are still in my opinion several names and writings, either forgotten or misplaced in newspaper libraries, archives and general libraries, awaiting to be discovered. The second half of the 19th Century was a prolific age in every aspect of Spanish life, most particularly literature. In Medicine, apart from the well known professional writings, the number of scientific journals and publications, whether in the form of brochures or divulgative articles, that came to light was countless. Computer management of collections currently under implementation in many registers, will allow their location and the finding of new texts. One of these long forgotten pioneers, is Doctor Alejandro Settier (1858-1915), a Valencian practitioner who describes himself as a "disciple of the Paris hospitals and specialist in genitourinary tract disorders", who practised in Madrid between 1883 and 1890. Surprisingly, and in spite of him being the most prolific author in urological issues during the last century (my investigations show he is the author of 2 books, 3 brochures and 40 articles in journals), neither his name nor his work, as far as we know, are mentioned by none of the historians consulted, which is nothing but highly surprising if we also take into consideration that Alejandro Settier was the founder of the first Spanish monographic journal for urinary disorders: "Gaceta de enfermedades de los órganos génito-urinarios" (Gazette of genitourinary organs disorders), Madrid 1887, which in spite of its short existence, can be considered as the first scientific periodical publication in our specialty.     

An improved method for voice pathology detection by means of a HMM-based feature space transformation

This paper presents new a feature transformation technique applied to improve the screening accuracy for the automatic detection of pathological voices. The statistical transformation is based on Hidden Markov Models, obtaining a transformation and classification stage simultaneously and adjusting the parameters of the model with a criterion that minimizes the classification error. The original feature vectors are built up using classic short-term noise parameters and mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. With respect to conventional approaches found in the literature of automatic detection of pathological voices, the proposed feature space transformation technique demonstrates a significant improvement of the performance with no addition of new features to the original input space. In view of the results, it is expected that this technique could provide good results in other areas such as speaker verification and/or identification.     

Invariant-driven specifications in Maude

This work presents a general mechanism for executing specifications that comply with given invariants, which may be expressed in different formalisms and logics. We exploit Maude’s reflective capabilities and its properties as a general semantic framework to provide a generic strategy that allows us to execute Maude specifications taking into account user-defined invariants. The strategy is parameterized by the invariants and by the logic in which such invariants are expressed. We experiment with different logics, providing examples for propositional logic, (finite future time) linear temporal logic and metric temporal logic.     

Resilient overlay network for real-time interactive multimedia sessions in corporate networks

Real-time interactive multimedia communications are becoming increasingly useful for education, business, e-commerce and e-government, providing an enriched user experience in teleconferencing, e-meetings, distance training and product demonstrations. Large corporations are usually located at several sites, so real-time multipoint sessions within corporations are especially difficult. IP multicast is available or feasible within each site of an organization. Thus, corporate networks can be considered as various multicast-capable networks interconnected through a wide area network without multicast connectivity. This paper proposes a resilient self-managed overlay network to support real-time multipoint interactive sessions within corporate networks. The proposed overlay takes advantage of the configuration of corporate networks to self-organize and provide an efficient media delivery service, making use of multicast communications wherever available. Various self-healing techniques are implemented allowing for the continuity of ongoing sessions in spite of network disruptions and entity failures. Extensive simulations and tests have been carried out to assess the performance and resilience of the overlay facing several types of disruptions.     

A note on the security of PAP

In this letter, we analyze the security of an RFID authentication protocol proposed by Liu and Bailey [1], called privacy and authentication protocol (PAP). We present two traceability attacks and an impersonation attack.     

Constructive semantics for instantaneous reactions

This paper presents some results towards a game-theoretic account of the constructive semantics of step responses for synchronous languages, providing a coherent semantic framework encompassing both non-deterministic Statecharts (as per Pnueli & Shalev) and deterministic esterel. In particular, it is shown that esterel arises from a finiteness condition on strategies whereas Statecharts permits infinite games. Beyond giving a novel and unifying account of these concrete languages the paper sketches a general theory for obtaining different notions of constructive responses in terms of winning conditions for finite and infinite games and their characterisation as maximal post-fixed points of functions in directed complete lattices of intensional truth-values.     

An Analysis of Edge Detection by Using the Jensen-Shannon Divergence

This work constitutes a theoretical study of the edge-detection method by means of the Jensen-Shannon divergence, as proposed by the authors. The overall aim is to establish formally the suitability of the procedure of edge detection in digital images, as a step prior to segmentation. In specific, an analysis is made not only of the properties of the divergence used, but also of the method's sensitivity to the spatial variation, as well as the detection-error risk associated with the operating conditions due to the randomness of the spatial configuration of the pixels. Although the paper deals with the procedure based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence, some problems are also related to other methods based on local detection with a sliding window, and part of the study is focused to noisy and textured images.