Agustin de Betancourt's telegraph: Study and virtual reconstruction

The transmission of information has gone through various stages of evolution throughout its history. A stage before that of the electric telegraph was the so-called aerial/optical telegraph. It was developed towards the end of the 18th century and was in service until the middle of the 19th century. Chappe's system was widely used in France, and was the first to be in consistent use. However, a new and technologically superior system was developed soon afterwards which superseded it. Its inventor was Agustín de Betancourt, considered by some authors one of the founders of the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms, who, together with the distinguished clockmaker Breguet, presented it to the French Authorities in the turbulent decade of the 1790s.This article presents a historical review of this telegraph and analyzes its technical characteristics. It presents analytically, numerically and graphically some of the statements made about the telegraph, and corrects other subsequent observations. Lastly, a detailed reconstruction of the telegraph is made using different advanced CAD techniques, which provide an accurate static and dynamic view of each of its parts.     

Fractal dimension applied to plant identification

This article discusses methods to identify plants by analysing leaf complexity based on estimating their fractal dimension. Leaves were analyzed according to the complexity of their internal and external shapes. A computational program was developed to process, analyze and extract the features of leaf images, thereby allowing for automatic plant identification. Results are presented from two experiments, the first to identify plant species from the Brazilian Atlantic forest and Brazilian Cerrado scrublands, using fifty leaf samples from ten different species, and the second to identify four different species from genus Passiflora, using twenty leaf samples for each class. A comparison is made of two methods to estimate fractal dimension (box-counting and multiscale Minkowski). The results are discussed to determine the best approach to analyze shape complexity based on the performance of the technique, when estimating fractal dimension and identifying plants.     

A multiscale directional operator and morphological tools for reconnecting broken ridges in fingerprint images

In this paper, we introduce a multiscale operator which, together with some morphological tools, can be used to reconnect broken components of fingerprint images. This operator, which can be applied to both binary and gray-scale pictures, extracts the orientation field of an image by taking into account information parameters of sets of pixels in a given neighborhood and located in different directions. It has proved to be very robust to noise and outperforms the gradient- and directional mask-based methods, generally used for orientation field definition. Although we illustrate its application in the fingerprint domain, the approach described here can be easily extended to images whose components exhibit well-defined directional information.     

A hardware design of a massive-parallel, modular NN-based vector quantizer for real-time video coding

This report describes the design of a modular, massive-parallel, neural-network (NN)-based vector quantizer for real-time video coding. The NN is a self-organizing map (SOM) that works only in the training phase for codebook generation, only at the recall phase for real-time image coding, or in both phases for adaptive applications. The neural net can be learned using batch or adaptive training and is controlled by an inside circuit, finite-state machine-based hard controller. The SOM is described in VHDL and implemented on electrically (FPGA) and mask (standard-cell) programmable devices.     

Two proposals for the inclusion of directory information in the last-level private caches of glueless shared-memory multiprocessors

In glueless shared-memory multiprocessors where cache coherence is usually maintained using a directory-based protocol, the fast access to the on-chip components (caches and network router, among others) contrasts with the much slower main memory. Unfortunately, directory-based protocols need to obtain the sharing status of every memory block before coherence actions can be performed. This information has traditionally been stored in main memory, and therefore these cache coherence protocols are far from being optimal. In this work, we propose two alternative designs for the last-level private cache of glueless shared-memory multiprocessors: the lightweight directory and the SGluM cache. Our proposals completely remove directory information from main memory and store it in the home node’s L2 cache, thus reducing both the number of accesses to main memory and the directory memory overhead. The main characteristics of the lightweight directory are its simplicity and the significant improvement in the execution time for most applications. Its drawback, however, is that the performance of some particular applications could be degraded. On the other hand, the SGluM cache offers more modest improvements in execution time for all the applications by adding some extra structures that cope with the cases in which the lightweight directory fails.     

The Green language type system

A programming language that considers basic values and classes as objects brings more opportunities of code reuse and it is easier to use than a language that does not support this feature. However, popular statically typed object-oriented languages do not consider classes as first-class objects because this concept is difficult to integrate with static type checking. They also do not consider basic values as objects for sake of efficiency. This article presents the Green language type system which supports classes as classless objects and offers a mechanism to treat basic values as objects. The result is a reasonably simple type system which is statically typed and easy to implement. It simplifies several other language mechanisms and prevents any infinite regression of metaclasses.     

Post-embryonic development of the antennal sensilla in Melipona quadrifasciata anthidioides (Hymenoptera: Meliponini)

The sensilla are sensory organs formed by cuticular and cellular structures specialized in reception of chemical and physical stimuli from the environment and transmission to the insect's central nervous system. In function of the great concentration of sensilla, the antennae are the main organs for interaction between bees and with the environment. This work studied the presence of antennal sensilla in the different phases of pupal development of the stingless bee Melipona quadrifasciata anthidioides by means of scanning electron microscopy and light microscopy. The results showed that antennal sensilla begin their development in the transition of the prepupae to the white-eyed pupae and finish it in the pigmented-body pupae phase. The antennal sensilla were exposed to the environment in the black-eyed pupae when the old cuticle is completely digested, suggesting that only in the final pupal phases can these bees perceive the environmental stimuli.     

Clinical and epidemiological findings during a measles outbreak occurring in a population with a high vaccination coverage

Malignant mesothelioma is caused almost exclusively by occupational exposure to asbestos. During the past few years, however, increasing evidence has mounted that background exposure to asbestos could be sufficient to cause mesothelioma. Treatment of malignant mesothelioma remains a big problem. Some new approaches are on their way, and the most exciting ones are local immunotherapy in very early cases. Some success has been reported with local interferon treatment. As for treatment of metastatic pleural disease, the main purpose is symptomatic relief of dyspnea caused by fluid accumulation. The best way to achieve a lasting palliation is pleurodesis, and the most common way to do this, is by chemical means. The drug of choice in the United States has for many years been tetracycline, but since injectable tetracycline is no longer available, some substitute must be found. The substance that will "win" is not yet clear, but the two leading contestants are talc and doxycycline. Bleomycin also has its supporters, and a dark horse is quinacrine, which although not easily available in the United States, has been used in many European centers for decades.     

Ocular recognition databases and competitions: a survey

The use of the iris and periocular region as biometric traits has been extensively investigated, mainly due to the singularity of the iris features and the use of the periocular region when the image resolution is not sufficient to extract iris information. In addition to providing information about an individual’s identity, features extracted from these traits can also be explored to obtain other information such as the individual’s gender, the influence of drug use, the use of contact lenses, spoofing, among others. This work presents a survey of the databases created for ocular recognition, detailing their protocols and how their images were acquired. We also describe and discuss the most popular ocular recognition competitions (contests), highlighting the submitted algorithms that achieved the best results using only iris trait and also fusing iris and periocular region information. Finally, we describe some relevant works applying deep learning techniques to ocular recognition and point out new challenges and future directions. Considering that there are a large number of ocular databases, and each one is usually designed for a specific problem, we believe this survey can provide a broad overview of the challenges in ocular biometrics.