Transactional scheduling for read-dominated workloads

The transactional approach to contention management guarantees atomicity by aborting transactions that may violate consistency. A major challenge in this approach is to schedule transactions in a manner that reduces the total time to perform all transactions (the makespan), since transactions are often aborted and restarted. The performance of a transactional scheduler can be evaluated by the ratio between its makespan and the makespan of an optimal, clairvoyant scheduler that knows the list of resource accesses that will be performed by each transaction, as well as its release time and duration.     

Digital Image Forgery Detection Based on Lens and Sensor Aberration

A new approach to detecting forgery in digital photographs is suggested. The method does not necessitate adding data to the image (such as a Digital Watermark) nor require other images for comparison or training. The fundamental assumption in the presented approach is the notion that image features arising from the image acquisition process itself or due to the physical structure and characteristics of digital cameras, are inherent proof of authenticity and they are sensitive to image manipulation as well as being difficult to forge synthetically. Typically, such features do not affect image content nor quality and are often invisible to the inexperienced eye. The approach presented in this work is based on the effects introduced in the acquired image by the optical and sensing systems of the camera. Specifically, it exploits image artifacts that are due to chromatic aberrations as indicators for evaluating image authenticity.     

Determination of OH Extinction Coefficients in R2O-B2O3-SiO2 Glasses (R = Li, Na, K)

Infrared spectra of glasses of the system R₂O-B₂O₃-SiO₂ were investigated. The extinction coefficients of the hydroxyl absorption band ("free OH") were calculated by a method proposed for alkali borate glasses. The results confirmed the applicability of this method to homogeneous and phase-separated alkali borosilicate glasses. The variation of the hydroxyl absorption band position was interpreted according to the structural characteristics of the studied glasses.     

Water retention of treated stratum corneum measured by a coupling method: thermal desorption-mass spectrometry

A thermal desorption autosampler coupled to a mass spectrometer has been used to measure the in vitro water retention of human stratum corneum as a function of treatment applied. Samples were treated with ingredients possessing good hygroscopic properties which are used in the formulation of moisturizing creams. After being treated, stratum corneum samples were dried and rehydrated and then analysed. The paper describes the method used to quantify their hygroscopic capacity in terms of the percentage of water retained. Ten humectants were examined, of which urea, glycerine, ammonium lactate and a new salt of an α-hydroxy acid were found to have the highest activities. This method can also be used to quantify the water retention capacity of various types of pathological skin such as ichthyosis and psoriasis.     

Performance of linear MMSE multiuser detection combined with a standard IS-95 uplink

Current implementation of IS-95 based systems is performance limited due to the use of a “conventional” detection scheme, which is susceptive to inter-user interference. We focus on the uplink, and try to examine the performance enhancement achieved by a suboptimal linear multiuser MMSE pre-filter, applied in front of the “standard” detection mechanism. We demonstrate the limitations of this relatively simple approach, and the constellations in which it may show improved performance. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The complexity of updating snapshot objects

This paper proves Ω(m) lower bounds on the step complexity of UPDATE operations for space-optimal wait-free implementations of an m-component snapshot object from historyless objects. These lower bounds follow from lower bounds for a new, more general class of implementations from base objects of any type. This work extends a similar lower bound by Israeli and Shirazi for implementations of m-component single-writer snapshot objects from single-writer registers.