Infrared Spectra of Nitrated Polymeric Carbohydrates

Nitrated Polymeric carbohydrates are not very pure when used, as their physical constants are neither sharp nor unique for positive identification purposes. The ingredients of explosives are so numerous and it was considered beyond the scope of this investigation to include them.     

Harnessing social dynamics through persuasive technology to promote healthier lifestyle

In light of current calls by medical professionals to confront the global issue of obesity and related illnesses, we developed a mobile application called STEP UP that monitors physical activity and provides data that can be easily shared within a social network. We then conducted an exploratory, theoretical study based on the theory of reasoned action (TRA) followed by an experimental trial and user study. The purpose of the studies was to explore the effect of persuasive technology on physical activity behavior and to investigate its effectiveness in motivating users to use the technology to be more physically active. The application was found to have a positive effect on the participants and their level of physical activity. They enjoyed using the application and were motivated to walk more, especially when enabled to share their step counts with their friends. The social component of the application clearly enhanced users’ walking experience, as the atmosphere of friendly competition motivated them to walk more. Based on user responses, we conclude that a further enhanced application that includes chat functionality may be even more successful in supporting increased physical activity and thus healthier lifestyle.     

Radar Pulse Compression with Optimized Weighting Window for SAR Receivers

Wireless Personal Communications - This paper proposes a novel design of a software-defined matched filter (MF) for digital receivers of synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The block diagram of the...     

Apodized chirped fiber Bragg grating for postdispersion compensation in wavelength division multiplexing optical networks

In this paper, a postdispersion compensation unit is proposed leading to a better performance for the optical communication systems. This unit utilizes a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG). For enhanced performance of the CFBG, a proper apodization function is chosen to improve the quality factor (Q‐factor) and the bit error rate (BER) of the system. A 110‐km wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical link is investigated. The system performance is evaluated through its Q‐factor, eye diagram, and BER showing best performance when using the Hamming apodization function.     

Improved low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy and its optimum cluster head selection

ABSTRACT

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a vital role in present-day world, which are being used in different types of applications and occupy an important part in networking domain. The main objective of WSNs is to sense and collect the information from a given area of interest and provide the gathered data to the sink. WSN comprises of number of sensor nodes with batteries of limited energy for communication and computational activities, which are not possible to recharge the batteries after their deployment in the region of interest. Therefore, saving battery energy and utilising the limited power to the optimum level for extending network lifetime became the main factor of WSN. Hence, optimum cluster head (CH) selection will make the network to support longer lifetime and balanced energy consumption during its lifetime. Our proposed protocol selects the optimum CH and found out to be more efficient than the existing low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy. The simulated output shows better network lifetime and in some other performance metric.     

Security and key management in IoT‐based wireless sensor networks: An authentication protocol using symmetric key

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of hundreds of miniature sensor nodes to sense various events in the surrounding environment and report back to the base station. Sensor networks are at the base of internet of things (IoT) and smart computing applications where a function is performed as a result of sensed event or information. However, in resource‐limited WSN authenticating a remote user is a vital security concern. Recently, researchers put forth various authentication protocols to address different security issues. Gope et al presented a protocol claiming resistance against known attacks. A thorough analysis of their protocol shows that it is vulnerable to user traceability, stolen verifier, and denial of service (DoS) attacks. In this article, an enhanced symmetric key‐based authentication protocol for IoT‐based WSN has been presented. The proposed protocol has the ability to counter user traceability, stolen verifier, and DoS attacks. Furthermore, the proposed protocol has been simulated and verified using Proverif and BAN logic. The proposed protocol has the same communication cost as the baseline protocol; however, in computation cost, it has 52.63% efficiency as compared with the baseline protocol.     

Microbiological survey of tofu sold in a rural Illinois county.

The purpose of this study was to determine the microbial status of tofu sold in a rural Illinois county and assess the factors contributing to the safety of tofu. Six brands of tofu from eight different stores (60 total samples) were purchased and analyzed for temperature, pH, total aerobic bacteria, and the presence of coliforms. Relationships between age, temperature, pH of tofu, and total aerobic bacteria were tested. An analysis of variance was also performed to test for differences in total bacterial counts among the brands. Mean aerobic bacterial counts ranged from 0 to 7.76 x 10(7) CFU/g. Fifty-five percent of the tofu tested fell within the excellent range for freshness as delineated by the standards developed by the Soyfoods Association of North America, 6.7% fell within the acceptable range, 6.7% within the marginal range, and 28% within the unacceptable range. Sixteen percent of the samples contained coliform bacteria. No significant correlation was found between variables, except pH with total aerobic bacterial counts (r = -0.51) and pH with eosin-methylene blue agar counts (r = -0.67). Most of the tofu was displayed at unsafe temperatures (>5 degrees C) for potentially hazardous foods. This study confirmed the concerns regarding safety of tofu sold in the grocery stores. Based on these results, special training on tofu storage and handling is recommended for grocery stores selling this food product.     

Secure Remote User Mutual Authentication Scheme with Key Agreement for Cloud Environment

Authentication schemes are widely used mechanisms to thwart unauthorized access of resources over insecure networks. Several smart card based password authentication schemes have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we demonstrate the security limitations of a recently proposed password based authentication scheme, and show that their scheme is still vulnerable to forgery and offline password guessing attacks and it is also unable to provide user anonymity, forward secrecy and mutual authentication. With the intention of fixing the weaknesses of that scheme, we present a secure authentication scheme. We show that the proposed scheme is invulnerable to various attacks together with attacks observed in the analyzed scheme through both rigorous formal and informal security analysis. Furthermore, the security analysis using the widely-accepted Real-Or-Random (ROR) model ensures that the proposed scheme provides the session key (SK) security. Finally, we carry out the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme and other related schemes, and the result favors that the proposed scheme provides better trade-off among security and performance as compared to other existing related schemes.