Hereditary Gottron''s acrogeria with recessive transmission: a report of four cases in one family

The tegumental topography of the plerocercoid of Gymnorhynchus gigas is described for the first time. The surface features were examined by scanning electron microscopy. Eight different types of microthrix pattern were found. Differences in the shape and density of microtriches depend on their location. A unique morphological feature is reported herein, namely, filamentous microtriches that were arranged in clusters with a dome-shaped pattern when the bothridial surface was relaxed but sunk into a crater when the bothridial surface was contracted. In contrast to other trypanorhynchan cestodes, palmate microtriches are not found on the tegument of this plerocercoid. The microtriches on the caudal extension gradually increased in length with growing distance from the blastocyst, which showed short knob-like structures. These structures developed into elongated filiform microtriches on the posterior region of the caudal extension.     

Production planning optimization with physical programming

This paper proposes an optimization-based model for production planning, and physical programming as an effective method to optimize the production planning process within this model's framework. This model seeks to minimize cost and manufacturing time, while maximizing production rate. The physical programming method is shown to offer an effective setting to address the conflicting nature of these objectives. A numerical example is provided, which illustrates the flexibility of such optimization-based models, and of this paper's model in particular. The ready inclusion of realistic production constraints and goals brings practical significance to this approach.     

Simulation of safety: A review of the state of the art in road safety simulation modelling

Recent decades have seen considerable growth in computer capabilities, data collection technology and communication mediums. This growth has had considerable impact on our ability to replicate driver behaviour and understand the processes involved in failures in the traffic system. From time to time it is necessary to assess the level of development as a basis of determining how far we have come. This paper sets out to assess the state of the art in the use of computer models to simulate and assess the level of safety in existing and future traffic systems. It reviews developments in the area of road safety simulation models. In particular, it reviews computer models of driver and vehicle behaviour within a road context. It focuses on stochastic numerical models of traffic behaviour and how reliable these are in estimating levels of safety on the traffic network. Models of this type are commonly used in the assessment of traffic systems for capacity, delay and general performance. Adding safety to this assessment regime may allow more comprehensive assessment of future traffic systems. To date the models have focused primarily on vehicular traffic that is, cars and heavy vehicles. It has been shown that these models have potential in measuring the level of conflict on parts of the network and the measure of conflict correlated well with crash statistics. Interest in the prediction of crashes and crash severity is growing and new models are focusing on the continuum of general traffic conditions, conflict, severe conflict, crash and severe crashes. The paper also explores the general data types used to develop, calibrate and validate these models. Recent technological development in in-vehicle data collection, driver simulators and machine learning offers considerable potential for improving the behavioural base, rigour and application of road safety simulation models. The paper closes with some indication of areas of future development.     

Spiral bacterial foraging optimization method: Algorithm,evaluation and convergence analysis

A biologically-inspired algorithm called Spiral Bacterial Foraging Optimization (SBFO) is investigated in this article. SBFO, previously proposed by the same authors, is a multi-agent, gradient-based algorithm that minimizes both the main objective function (local cost) and the distance between each agent and a temporary central point (global cost). A random jump is included normal to the connecting line of each agent to the central point, which produces a vortex around the temporary central point. This random jump is also suitable to cope with premature convergence, which is a feature of swarm-based optimization methods. The most important advantages of this algorithm are as follows: First, this algorithm involves a stochastic type of search with a deterministic convergence. Second, as gradient-based methods are employed, faster convergence is demonstrated over GA, DE, BFO, etc. Third, the algorithm can be implemented in a parallel fashion in order to decentralize large-scale computation. Fourth, the algorithm has a limited number of tunable parameters, and finally SBFO has a strong certainty of convergence which is rare in existing global optimization algorithms. A detailed convergence analysis of SBFO for continuously differentiable objective functions has also been investigated in this article.     

Vulnerability modeling of cryptographic hardware to power analysis attacks

Designers and manufacturers of cryptographic devices are always worried about the vulnerability of their implementations in the presence of power analysis attacks. This article can be categorized into two parts. In the first part, two parameters are proposed to improve the accuracy of the latest hypothetical power consumption model, so-called toggle-count model, which is used in power analysis attacks. Comparison between our proposed model and the toggle-count model demonstrates a great advance, i.e., 16%, in the similarity of hypothetical power values to the corresponding values obtained by an analog simulation. It is supposed that the attacker would be able to build such an accurate power model. Thus, in the second part of this article we aim at evaluating the vulnerability of implementations to power analysis attacks which make use of our proposed power model. Simple power analysis, various types of differential power analysis, and correlation power analysis are taken into account. Then, some techniques are proposed to examine the vulnerability of implementations to such kinds of power analysis attacks.     

Active Damping in DC/DC Power Electronic Converters: A Novel Method to Overcome the Problems of Constant Power Loads

Multi-converter power electronic systems exist in land, sea, air, and space vehicles. In these systems, load converters exhibit constant power load (CPL) behavior for the feeder converters and tend to destabilize the system. In this paper, the implementation of novel active-damping techniques on dc/dc converters has been shown. Moreover, the proposed active-damping method is used to overcome the negative impedance instability problem caused by the CPLs. The effectiveness of the new proposed approach has been verified by PSpice simulations and experimental results.     

Miniaturized Trapezoidal Patch Antenna with Folded Ramp-Shaped Feed for Ultra-Wideband Applications

A novel design for compact probe-fed wideband microstrip patch antenna for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications is proposed in this paper. The antenna consists of a folded ramp-shaped feed, trapezoidal patch and shorting pins. By adding two pins at end side of the patch, its size is miniaturized. The measured impedance bandwidth (VSWR  $\le $  2) of fabricated antenna is more than 130 % from 3.7 to 17.6 GHz. This antenna achieves an acceptable miniaturization and provides an excellent UWB impedance bandwidth with stable radiation patterns. It is shown by simulated results how the bandwidth can be considerably increased by introducing novel feeding method namely, the folded ramp-shaped feed. Likewise, the parametric study is performed to describe the characteristics of the proposed antenna. Moreover, good antenna performances such as radiation patterns, acceptable miniaturization and antenna gains over the operating band have been observed.     

Improved Two-Dimensional Millimeter-Wave Imaging for Concealed Weapon Detection Through Partial Fourier Sampling

Active millimeter-wave imaging based on synthetic aperture focusing offers certain unique and practical advantages in nondestructive testing applications. Traditionally, the imaging for this purpose is performed through a long procedure of raster scanning with a single antenna across a two-dimensional grid, leading to a slow, bulky, and expensive scanning platform. In this paper, an improved bistatic structure based on radial compressive sensing is proposed, where one fixed transmitter antenna and a linear array of receiving antennas are used. The main contributions of this paper are (a) reducing the scanning time, (b) improving the output quality, and (c) designing an inexpensive setup. These improvements are the result of the underlying proposed simpler scanning structure and faster reconstruction process.     

Thermally-aware modeling and performance evaluation for single-walled carbon nanotube-based interconnects for future high performance integrated circuits

Given the performance and reliability limits of conventional copper interconnects in the tens of nanometer regime, carbon-nanotube (CNT) based interconnects emerge as a potential reliable alternative for future high performance VLSI industry. In this paper, we present an accurate thermally-aware model for single-walled carbon-nanotube (SWCNT) based interconnects. Our thermally-aware model is an integration of temperature-dependent electrical parasitics model and thermal equivalent circuit that captures both self-heating and heat conduction phenomena. We verify the accuracy of our electro-thermal model against recently reported experimental measurements. By leveraging the presented electro-thermal model, we present a simulation platform to estimate the performance of SWCNT-based interconnects under different temperature conditions. Our thermally-aware model achieves improvement in the delay estimation accuracy of about 51.3% on average. Based on our simulation results, SWCNT-based interconnects offer more than 5×reduction in delay at dimensions of about 10-20 nm for 27- 127 °C temperature range.