Lung herniation secondary to minimally invasive direct coronary artery bypass grafting

Lung herniation after thoracotomy is rare. We report a 66-year-old man who presented with this complication after undergoing attempted minimally invasive direct coronary artery bypass grafting. The defect was repaired with a composite of Marlex mesh and methyl methacrylate.     

New Zealand Local Government at the Crossroads? Reflections on the Recent Local Government Reforms

The first new local government statute to be brought before the New Zealand parliament in almost 30 years has brought significant changes which are informed by a participatory democracy paradigm. Notwithstanding the significance of these innovations, we question the extent to which these changes can be construed as a reinvention of local government in New Zealand. It is argued that the Act expresses a model of collaboration between central and local government and communities embodied in the ideology of the 'Third Way', a political programme which aims to renew social democracy by including civil society as a partner in managing the economy. However, as strong as these new attributes are, the drive behind the Act must be considered an example of the centre-left being pragmatic, not of fundamental reform.     

Application of factorial design in optimization of anion exchange resin based methylation of vegetable oil and fats

A simple, rapid and fairly selective method for the preparation of fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) based on anion exchange resin Amberlite IRA-904 catalyzed transesterification of vegetable oil/fat with iodomethane has been described. The vegetable oil and animal fats used were sunflower oil, palm oil, vanaspati (hydrogenated vegetable oil), olive oil, tallow and butter. A Plackett–Burman factorial experimental design was used as a multivariate strategy for the evaluation of the effects of varying several variables at once. The effects of five different variables amount of resin, strength of sodium hydroxide, volume of iodomethane, heating time and temperature of thermostatic water bath, on the yield of fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) have been investigated. From these studies, certain variable showed up as significant, and they were optimized by a using 2³ + star central composite design, which involved 16 experiments. The best conditions for transesterification reaction were as follows: amount of resin 2 g, strength of sodium hydroxide 0.25 N, volume of iodomethane 400 µl, heating time 2 min at 70 °C. A standard IUPAC method was used to prepare FAMEs from vegetable oil/fats for comparative purpose. Finally samples of oil/fat obtained from both methods were analysed by Gas liquid chromatography. Analytical results for the FAMEs by resin based proposed method, and conventional IUPAC method showed a good agreement, thus indicating the possibility of using Amberlite IRA-904 based transesterification instead of intensive treatments inherent with the conventional time-consuming methods.

Industrial relevance

Fatty acids are the main components of edible oil and fats, therefore determination of fatty acid composition is so far one of the important parameters for quality evaluation and nutritional value determination of edible oil and fats. The analysis of fatty acid is usually carried out by Gas liquid chromatography (GLC) after conversion of volatile fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) although other ester may be prepared for specific purpose.The endeavor of present work was to improve the FAMEs preparation method, proposing the development of anion exchange resin Amberlite IRA-904 based transesterification of edible oil/fat with iodomethane as alkylating reagent. The present method besides being rapid and reproducible avoids the use of classical saponification, washing of esters and solvent extraction step.     

A buyer-seller watermarking protocol

Digital watermarks have previously been proposed for the purposes of copy protection and copy deterrence for multimedia content. In copy deterrence, a content owner (seller) inserts a unique watermark into a copy of the content before it is sold to a buyer. If the buyer sells unauthorized copies of the watermarked content, then these copies can be traced to the unlawful reseller (original buyer) using a watermark detection algorithm. One problem with such an approach is that the original buyer whose watermark has been found on unauthorized copies can claim that the unauthorized copy was created or caused (for example, by a security breach) by the original seller. In this paper, we propose an interactive buyer-seller protocol for invisible watermarking in which the seller does not get to know the exact watermarked copy that the buyer receives. Hence the seller cannot create copies of the original content containing the buyer's watermark. In cases where the seller finds an unauthorized copy, the seller can identify the buyer from a watermark in the unauthorized copy and furthermore the seller can prove this fact to a third party using a dispute resolution protocol. This prevents the buyer from claiming that an unauthorized copy may have originated from the seller.     

Coupled dictionary learning in wavelet domain for Single-Image Super-Resolution

In this paper a coupled dictionary learning mechanism with mapping function is proposed in the wavelet domain for the task of Single-Image Super-Resolution. Sparsity is used as the invariant feature for achieving super-resolution. Instead of using a single dictionary multiple compact dictionaries are proposed in the wavelet domain. Such dictionaries will exhibit the properties of the wavelet transform such as compactness, directionality and redundancy. Six pairs of dictionaries are designed using a coupled dictionary mechanism with mapping function which helps in strengthening the similarity between the sparse coefficients. Low-resolution image is assumed as the approximation image of the first-level wavelet decomposition. High resolution is achieved by estimating the wavelet sub-bands of this low-resolution image by dictionary learning and sparsity. The proposed algorithm outperforms a well-known spatial domain and wavelet domain algorithm as evaluated on the existing comparative parameters such as structural similarity index measure and peak signal-to-noise ratio.     

Semiconductor Laser in Distributed Optical Feedback Regime

Wireless Personal Communications - In this work, we first analyse the behaviour of semiconductor laser in the presence of weak-to-moderate feedback from a single (lumped) and double external cavity...     

Robust Optimal PID type ILC for Linear Batch Process

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - The proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller is standard technique for controlling the industrial batch process. However, the...     

Chinese-Based Spearcons: Improving Pedestrian Navigation Performance in Eyes-Free Environment

This article presents nonspeech audio (i.e., English-based spearcons and Chinese-based spearcons) to represent distance, and forward-direction for pedestrian navigation in an eyes-free environment. Experiment in the field is carried out with the involvement of 10 participants (i.e., native Chinese) using within-subject design to evaluate English-based spearcons, Chinese-based spearcons, and Chinese text-to-speech (TTS). Results from the experiment suggest that Chinese-based spearcons are efficient in task completion compared to Chinese TTS. Moreover, Chinese-based spearcons are more effective in conveying distance and forward-direction compared to English-based spearcons in pedestrian navigation. Overall, participants have shown their satisfaction with Chinese-based spearcons as an auditory feedback in pedestrian navigation.     

Digital Forensics

This issue is one of a pair of coordinated special issues on digital forensics by IEEE Security & Privacy and IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. S&P's special issue has articles debating the effectiveness of forensics, on capturing live forensics analysis of computers, on the new Microsoft Office file formats and their implications on forensics, on licensing issues for digital forensics investigators, and finally a review article on the use of hashing in forensics.