Effects of Weathering on Treatment of Lead Contaminated Soils

Treatment of lead-contaminated material focuses on the reduction of leached lead concentrations in laboratory leaching tests. There has been little study on the chemical stability of treated materials after waste disposal. To investigate the effects of weathering on several solidification/stabilization chemistries, lead-contaminated soil was treated with various agents (cement, phosphates, dithiocarbamate, calcium hydroxide, calcium carbonate, and metallic iron) and subjected to natural weathering for one year. Lead concentrations and pH values in field percolates and leachates from toxicity characteristic leaching procedure (TCLP) and water leaching tests were used to evaluate changes in the treatment effectiveness. Weathering altered the treatment chemistry of several additives—alkaline additives were neutralized, while reduced additives were oxidized. Lead concentrations in field percolates from the untreated soil were around 1.0?mg/L, and did not vary over one year of weathering time. After one year of weathering, lead concentrations in field percolates from most samples were reduced to low levels (<0.15 mg/L). Weathering also affected lead concentrations in the TCLP and water leach test leachates from the treated wastes. Treated wastes in which the alkaline additives were neutralized or reduced additives oxidized gave higher TCLP lead concentrations after weathering than before, in contrast to the decreasing lead concentrations in the field percolates. Water leaching tests on the alkaline treated wastes had lower lead concentrations after weathering than before.     

WALRUS: a similarity retrieval algorithm for image databases

Approaches for content-based image querying typically extract a single signature from each image based on color, texture, or shape features. The images returned as the query result are then the ones whose signatures are closest to the signature of the query image. While efficient for simple images, such methods do not work well for complex scenes since they fail to retrieve images that match the query only partially, that is, only certain regions of the image match. This inefficiency leads to the discarding of images that may be semantically very similar to the query image since they may contain the same objects. The problem becomes even more apparent when we consider scaled or translated versions of the similar objects. We propose WALRUS (wavelet-based retrieval of user-specified scenes), a novel similarity retrieval algorithm that is robust to scaling and translation of objects within an image. WALRUS employs a novel similarity model in which each image is first decomposed into its regions and the similarity measure between a pair of images is then defined to be the fraction of the area of the two images covered by matching regions from the images. In order to extract regions for an image, WALRUS considers sliding windows of varying sizes and then clusters them based on the proximity of their signatures. An efficient dynamic programming algorithm is used to compute wavelet-based signatures for the sliding windows. Experimental results on real-life data sets corroborate the effectiveness of WALRUS'S similarity model.     

Analysis of assembly operations’ difficulty using enhanced expert high-level colored fuzzy Petri net model

Majority of the products can be assembled in several ways that means the same final product can be realized by different sequences of assembly operations. Different degree of difficulty is associated with each sequence of assembly operation and such difficulties are caused by the different mechanical constraints forced by the different sequences of operations. In the past, few notable attempts have been made to represent and enumerate the degree of difficulty associated with an assembly sequence (in the form of triangular fuzzy number) by using the concept of assembly graph. However, such representation schemes do not possess the capabilities to model the user's reasoning and preferences. In this research, an intelligent Petri net model that combines the abilities of modelling, planning and performance evaluation for assembly operation is presented. This modelling tool can represent the issues concerning degree of difficulty associated with assembly sequences. The proposed mechanism is enhanced expert high-level colored fuzzy Petri net (EEHLCFPN) that is a hybrid of knowledge-based system and colored Petri net. An example encompassing assembly of subassemblies is considered to efficiently delineate the modelling capabilities of proposed hybrid petri net model.     

On the Computational Complexity of Consumer Decision Rules

A consumer entering a new bookstore can face more than 250,000alternatives. The efficiency of compensatory and noncompensatory decisionrulesfor finding a preferred item depends on the efficiency of their associatedinformation operators. At best, item-by-item information operators lead tolinear computational complexity; set information operators, on the other hand,can lead to constant complexity. We perform an experiment demonstrating thatsubjects are approximately rational in selecting between sublinear and linearrules. Many markets are organized by attributes that enable consumers toemploya set-selection-by-aspect rule using set information operations. In cyberspacedecision rules are encoded as decision aids.     

Execution History Guided Instruction Prefetching

The increasing gap in performance between processors and main memory has made effective instructions prefetching techniques more important than ever. A major deficiency of existing prefetching methods is that most of them require an extra port to I-cache. A recent study by Rivers et al. [19] shows that this factor alone explains why most modern microprocessors do not use such hardware-based I-cache prefetch schemes. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we present a method that does not require an extra port to I-cache. Second, the performance improvement for our method is greater than the best competing method BHGP [23] even disregarding the improvement from not having an extra port. The three key features of our method that prevent the above deficiencies are as follows. First, late prefetching is prevented by correlating misses to dynamically preceding instructions. For example, if the I-cache miss latency is 12 cycles, then the instruction that was fetched 12 cycles prior to the miss is used as the prefetch trigger. Second, the miss history table is kept to a reasonable size by grouping contiguous cache misses together and associated them with one preceding instruction, and therefore, one table entry. Third, the extra I-cache port is avoided through efficient prefetch filtering methods. Experiments show that for our benchmarks, chosen for their poor I-cache performance, an average improvement of 9.2% in runtime is achieved versus the BHGP methods [23], while the hardware cost is also reduced. The improvement will be greater if the runtime impact of avoiding an extra port is considered. When compared to the original machine without prefetching, our method improves performance by about 35% for our benchmarks.     

A Discrete Water Cycle Algorithm for Cellular Network Cost Management

Wireless Personal Communications - Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA) is a nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm. There is a lack of literature surrounding the use of WCA in modern cellular mobile...     

Self generating square/triangular wave and pulse width modulator using a single MO-CCCDTA

A self-generating square/triangular wave and pulse width modulator (PWM) using multiple output current controlled current differencing transconductance amplifier (MO-CCCDTA) is presented. To obtain all the three functions simultaneously from the same topology, the MO-CCCDTA is modified a little bit. The characterisation of the modified MO-CCCDTA structure shows that the parasitic resistances at input terminals (n and p) can be varied via bias current. The maximum useful frequency range is found to be 635 MHz, which is higher than the available literature. The waveform generator and PWM circuit use only one MO-CCCDTA, one grounded capacitor and no resistor; hence suitable for IC implementation. The duty cycle of proposed pulse width modulation can be tuned by bias current of MO-CCCDTA over a wide range. The performances of the proposed block and its applications (square/triangular/PWM) are verified by PSPICE simulation using TSMC 0.35 µm technology. The power consumption is about 1.12 mW. To verify experimentally, a prototype of MO-CCCDTA has been made using commercially available ICs (AD844AN and CA3080) on printed circuit board. The simulation and experimental results verify theoretical proposition well. Monte carlo simulation is carried out, which proves satisfactory performance of the proposed circuit against mismatches. The performance of the proposed circuit is also verified through pre-layout and post-layout simulation results. The required chip area is only 22.415 × 14.6 µm².     

Non-blind Arnold scrambled hybrid image watermarking in YCbCr color space

Microsystem Technologies - Due to fast technological development, human beings generally depend upon computer and other digital equipments in different areas of concern/applications. Therefore,...     

Image and Video Forensics: A Critical Survey

With the extensive use of multimedia on internet and easy approachability of powerful image and video editing software, doctored visual contents have been extensively appearing in our electronic-mail in-boxes, Whatsapp, Facebook or any other social media. Recently, attempting blind tampering in visual contents have been progressively adopted. This paper presents a collaborative survey on detection of such attempts. Our aim is to establish an effective path, for researchers working in the field of image and video forensics, to unfold new aspects of forgery. This paper will avail the comprehensive study that will assist the researchers to go through the various challenges encountered in the previous work. The focus of this paper is to review the splicing and copy–move forgery detection methods in images as well as inter and intra-frame forgery challenges in videos, highlighting the commonly used datasets and hence assisting new researchers to work on with. The efficacy of the paper is that such collaborative survey under one umbrella is not available yet.