A lower bound for structuring element decompositions

A theoretical lower bound on the number of points required in the decomposition of morphological structuring elements is described. It is shown that the decomposition of an arbitrary N-point structuring element will require at least [3 ln N/ln 3]points. Using this lower bound it is possible to find the optimal decompositions (in terms of the minimum number of unions or the minimum number of points) for all one-dimensional connected line segments. L-dimensional rectangles may be decomposed by optimally decomposing the L one-dimensional line segments that describe the rectangle     

The UK Cleanfeed system — Lessons for the German debate?

As readers of this journal will of course know, the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz has caused considerable and often very profound debate in Germany about the limits of legal and technological interference with the freedom of access to information, culminating in the temporary refusal of the President to sign the law into action. In the UK by contrast, a core aspect of this law, the technical prevention of access to sites hosting illegal content by ISPs, was introduced through the so called “Cleanfeed system” as early as 1996, with little or no public debate, and bypassing by and large all parliamentary procedure and scrutiny. This article has a threefold aim: First, it gives a brief account of the history and implementation of the UK Cleanfeed system1; second, it explains some of its more unusual aspects by putting them into the historical and constitutional context of policing in the UK, and third, it highlights those experiences made with the system that are of direct relevance for the German discussion.     

Geometrically non-linear behavior of structural systems with random material property: An asymptotic spectral stochastic approach

An asymptotic spectral stochastic approach is presented for computing the statistics of the equilibrium path in the post-bifurcation regime for structural systems with random material properties. The approach combines numerical implementation of Koiter’s asymptotic theory with a stochastic Galerkin scheme and collocation in stochastic space to quantify uncertainties in the parametric representation of the load–displacement relationship, specifically in the form of uncertain post-buckling slope, post-buckling curvature, and a family of stochastic displacement fields. Using the proposed method, post-buckling response statistics for two plane frames are obtained and shown to be in close agreement with those obtained from Monte Carlo simulation, provided a fine enough spectral representation is used to model the variability in the random dimension.     

Fundamentals of electrosorption on activated carbon for wastewater treatment of industrial effluents

The potential of electroadsorption/desorption on activated carbon for waste water treatment of industrial effluents is studied. Adsorption isotherms of hydrophobic differently charged model substances on activated carbon were measured in order to obtain specific information about the influence of the charge (+1,–1 and 0) on the adsorbability of comparable, aromatic species and the influence of the bed potential on the adsorption equilibria. In all these cases the adsorption equilibria show a dependence on applied potential in electrolyte of approximately 1m ionic strength. With electrosorption from aqueous solution, a fivefold enhancement of the concentration in one potential controlled adsorption/desorption cycle is achievable. The use of the solvent methanol instead of water for desorption allows for a concentration enhancement by a factor of hundred in the desorptive step. The adsorption capacity of the activated carbon changes only slightly with cycle number. Two cell designs for the performance of potential controlled adsorption/desorption cycles on the large scale are discussed.     

Lossless compression of digital audio

Lossless audio compression is likely to play an important part in music distribution over the Internet, DVD audio, digital audio archiving, and mixing. The article is a survey and a classification of the current state-of-the-art lossless audio compression algorithms. This study finds that lossless audio coders have reached a limit in what can be achieved for lossless compression of audio. It also describes a new lossless audio coder called AudioPak, which low algorithmic complexity and performs well or even better than most of the lossless audio coders that have been described in the literature     

Automatic tracking, feature extraction and classification of C elegans phenotypes

This paper presents a method for automatic tracking of the head, tail, and entire body movement of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) using computer vision and digital image analysis techniques. The characteristics of the worm's movement, posture and texture information were extracted from a 5-min image sequence. A Random Forests classifier was then used to identify the worm type, and the features that best describe the data. A total of 1597 individual worm video sequences, representing wild type and 15 different mutant types, were analyzed. The average correct classification ratio, measured by out-of-bag (OOB) error rate, was 90.9%. The features that have most discrimination ability were also studied. The algorithm developed will be an essential part of a completely automated C. elegans tracking and identification system.     

Ray-density normalization for ray-optical wave propagation modelingin arbitrarily shaped tunnels

This work is concerned with the calculation of natural electromagnetic (EM) wave propagation and the determination of the propagation channel characteristics in highway or railway tunnels in the ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) range and above (>300 MHz). A novel ray-tracing technique based on geometrical optics (GO) is presented. Contrary to classical ray tracing, where the one ray representing a locally plane wave front is searched, the new method requires multiple representatives of each physical EM wave at a time. The contribution of each ray to the total field at the receiver is determined by the proposed ray-density normalization (RBN). This technique has the further advantage of overcoming one of the major disadvantages of GO, the failure at caustics. In contrast to existing techniques, the new approach does not use ray tubes or adaptive reception spheres. Consequently, it does not suffer their restrictions to planar geometries. Therefore, it allows one to predict the propagation of high-frequency EM waves in confined spaces with curved boundaries, like tunnels, with an adequate precision. The approach is verified theoretically with canonical examples and by various measurements at 120 GHz in scaled tunnel models     

Buckling behavior of cold-formed zed-purlins partially restrained by steel sheeting

This paper presents a study on the buckling behaviour of purlin-sheeting systems under wind uplift loading. The restraint provided by the sheeting to the purlin is modeled by using two springs representing the translational and rotational restraints. The analysis is performed using finite strip methods in which the pre-buckling stress is calculated based on the same model used for the buckling analysis rather than taken as the ‘pure bending’ stress. The results obtained from this study show that, for both local and distortional buckling, the restraints have significant influence on the critical loads through their influence on the pre-buckling stress rather than directly on the buckling modes. While for lateral-torsional buckling, the influence of the restraints on the critical loads is mainly due to their influence on the buckling modes rather than the pre-buckling stress.     

The SEXTANT Software Exploration Tool

In this paper, we discuss a set of functional requirements for software exploration tools and provide initial evidence that various combinations of these features are needed to effectively assist developers in understanding software. We observe that current tools for software exploration only partly support these features. This has motivated the development of SEXTANT, a software exploration tool tightly integrated into the Eclipse IDE that has been developed to fill this gap. By means of case studies, we demonstrate how the requirements fulfilled by SEXTANT are conducive to an understanding needed to perform a maintenance task