Life stress and lymphocyte alterations among patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Studied the relation between life stress and immune parameters for 33 30–70 yr old female rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients interviewed during 3 routine monthly clinic checkups. Life stress from major and minor events, coping efficacy, and self-reported psychological distress were assessed, and immunofluorescence of T-cells and B-cells was performed on the blood drawn during each visit. Small stressful events were positively related to the proportion of circulating B-cells, psychological distress was inversely related to proportion of circulating T-cells, and major life events were associated with lower T-helper/T-suppressor cell ratios. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reducing Average and Peak Test Power Through Scan Chain Modification

Parallel test application helps reduce the otherwise considerable test times in SOCs; yet its applicability is limited by average and peak power considerations. The typical test vector loading techniques result in frequent transitions in the scan chain, which in turn reflect into significant levels of circuit switching unnecessarily. Judicious utilization of logic in the scan chain can help reduce transitions while loading the test vector needed. The transitions embedded in both test stimuli and the responses are handled through scan chain modifications consisting of logic gate insertion between scan cells as well as inversion of capture paths. No performance degradation ensues as these modifications have no impact on functional execution. To reduce average and peak power, we herein propose computationally efficient schemes that identify the location and the type of logic to be inserted. The experimental results confirm the significant reductions in test power possible under the proposed scheme.     

Danckwerts’ law for mean residence time revisited

This paper shows that Danckwerts’ law for mean residence time in a vessel with continuous and steady throughflow holds for a stochastic model based on a Markov chain for the particle spatial position, under a set of three very general conditions on the transfer probabilities. These are natural conditions and represent mass balance conditions on the transfer between spatial regions in the process. It is shown that a stochastic model for particle residence time distribution with these three conditions may describe almost any physical flow configuration, and also covers published mathematical RTD models, independent of their mathematical form or the nature of the associated boundary conditions, models for which Danckwert's law has hitherto been shown to be satisfied on a case-by-case basis. Two examples, namely those birth-death Markov chains and fluidized bed models are discussed.     

Patch Management

Imagine this scenario. As a security manager for your organization, your responsibilities include analyzing and applying patches to all Windows servers across the enterprise. Your process is going to each machine and manually evaluating what patches are missing and installing the most critical security patches as soon as possible. How long does this take? One hour per server? Two hours? Maybe more? How many patches are critical? How often do you do it? And, how many servers do you have? It doesn’t take long to do the math to realize that your battle may be a futile one to keep up with the most critical, let alone every, patch that’s released.     

Instability of diatomic deuterium in fcc palladium

To clarify some of the solid-state aspects of cold fusion in deuterated transition metal electrodes, we have carried out first-principles self-consistent total energy calculations for various configurations of atomic and diatomic deuterium inside fcc palladium. We find that the stability of the Pd+D system is controlled by the relative position of the deuterium-inducedantibonding level with respect to the Fermi energy. The equilibrium D-D distance in dense PdD up to =3 is found to be much larger than the free space value. The calculated Born-Oppenheimer energy surface of diatomic D₂ in crystalline palladiuim is shown to have but metastable local minima whose internuclear separation is at least 0.2 Ålarger than that of the isolated D₂ molecule. We conclude that D₂ incrystalline Pd will have a substantially lower tunneling probability than hitherto thought and that explanation for fusion mechanisms should be sought elsewhere.     

Investigation of long term drift of an intraocular pressure sensor

Microsystem Technologies - “Zero drift” behavior of an optical intraocular pressure sensor is studied using an analytical model based on the deflection of a circular membrane. Results...     

Long-term information collection with energy harvesting wireless sensors: a multi-armed bandit based approach

This paper reports on the development of a multi-agent approach to long-term information collection in networks of energy harvesting wireless sensors. In particular, we focus on developing energy management and data routing policies that adapt their behaviour according to the energy that is harvested, in order to maximise the amount of information collected given the available energy budget. In so doing, we introduce a new energy management technique, based on multi-armed bandit learning, that allows each agent to adaptively allocate its energy budget across the tasks of data sampling, receiving and transmitting. By using this approach, each agent can learn the optimal energy budget settings that give it efficient information collection in the long run. Then, we propose two novel decentralised multi-hop algorithms for data routing. The first proveably maximises the information throughput in the network, but can sometimes involve high communication cost. The second algorithm provides near-optimal performance, but with reduced computational and communication costs. Finally, we demonstrate that, by using our approaches for energy management and routing, we can achieve a 120% improvement in long-term information collection against state-of-the-art benchmarks.     

A secure cookie scheme

Cookies are the primary means for web applications to authenticate HTTP requests and to maintain client states. Many web applications (such as those for electronic commerce) demand a secure cookie scheme. Such a scheme needs to provide the following four services: authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and anti-replay. Several secure cookie schemes have been proposed in previous literature; however, none of them are completely satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a secure cookie scheme that is effective, efficient, and easy to deploy. In terms of effectiveness, our scheme provides all of the above four security services. In terms of efficiency, our scheme does not involve any database lookup or public key cryptography. In terms of deployability, our scheme can be easily deployed on existing web services, and it does not require any change to the Internet cookie specification. We implemented our secure cookie scheme using PHP and conducted experiments. The experimental results show that our scheme is very efficient on both the client side and the server side.A notable adoption of our scheme in industry is that our cookie scheme has been used by Wordpress since version 2.4. Wordpress is a widely used open source content management system.