A flexible Bayesian model for describing temporal variability of N2O emissions from an Australian pasture

Soil-based emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), a well-known greenhouse gas, have been associated with changes in soil water-filled pore space (WFPS) and soil temperature in many previous studies. However, it is acknowledged that the environment-N2O relationship is complex and still relatively poorly unknown. In this article, we employed a Bayesian model selection approach (Reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo) to develop a data-informed model of the relationship between daily N2O emissions and daily WFPS and soil temperature measurements between March 2007 and February 2009 from a soil under pasture in Queensland, Australia, taking seasonal factors and time-lagged effects into account. The model indicates a very strong relationship between a hybrid seasonal structure and daily N2O emission, with the latter substantially increased in summer. Given the other variables in the model, daily soil WFPS, lagged by a week, had a negative influence on daily N2O; there was evidence of a nonlinear positive relationship between daily soil WFPS and daily N2O emission; and daily soil temperature tended to have a linear positive relationship with daily N2O emission when daily soil temperature was above a threshold of approximately 19°C. We suggest that this flexible Bayesian modeling approach could facilitate greater understanding of the shape of the covariate-N2O flux relation and detection of effect thresholds in the natural temporal variation of environmental variables on N2O emission.

Interocular corneal symmetry in refractive error groups

Purpose: To examine between eye differences in corneal higher order aberrations and topographical characteristics in a range of refractive error groups. Methods: One hundred and seventy subjects were recruited including; 50 emmetropic isometropes, 48 myopic isometropes (spherical equivalent anisometropia ≤ 0.75 D), 50 myopic anisometropes (spherical equivalent anisometropia ≥ 1.00 D) and 22 keratoconics. The corneal topography of each eye was captured using the E300 videokeratoscope (Medmont, Victoria, Australia) and analyzed using custom written software. All left eye data were rotated about the vertical midline to account for enantiomorphism. Corneal height data were used to calculate the corneal wavefront error using a ray tracing procedure and fit with Zernike polynomials (up to and including the eighth radial order). The wavefront was centred on the line of sight by using the pupil offset value from the pupil detection function in the videokeratoscope. Refractive power maps were analysed to assess corneal sphero-cylindrical power vectors. Differences between the more myopic (or more advanced eye for keratoconics) and the less myopic (advanced) eye were examined. Results: Over a 6 mm diameter, the cornea of the more myopic eye was significantly steeper (refractive power vector M) compared to the fellow eye in both anisometropes (0.10 ± 0.27 D steeper, p = 0.01) and keratoconics (2.54 ± 2.32 D steeper, p < 0.001) while no significant interocular difference was observed for isometropic emmetropes (-0.03 ± 0.32 D) or isometropic myopes (0.02 ± 0.30 D) (both p > 0.05). In keratoconic eyes, the between eye difference in corneal refractive power was greatest inferiorly (associated with cone location). Similarly, in myopic anisometropes, the more myopic eye displayed a central region of significant inferior corneal steepening (0.15 ± 0.42 D steeper) relative to the fellow eye (p = 0.01). Significant interocular differences in higher order aberrations were only observed in the keratoconic group for; vertical trefoil C(3,-3), horizontal coma C(3,1) secondary astigmatism along 45 C(4, -2) (p < 0.05) and vertical coma C(3,-1) (p < 0.001). The interocular difference in vertical pupil decentration (relative to the corneal vertex normal) increased with between eye asymmetry in refraction (isometropia 0.00 ± 0.09, anisometropia 0.03 ± 0.15 and keratoconus 0.08 ± 0.16 mm) as did the interocular difference in corneal vertical coma C (3,-1) (isometropia -0.006 ± 0.142, anisometropia -0.037 ± 0.195 and keratoconus -1.243 ± 0.936 μm) but only reached statistical significance for pair-wise comparisons between the isometropic and keratoconic groups. Conclusions: There is a high degree of corneal symmetry between the fellow eyes of myopic and emmetropic isometropes. Interocular differences in corneal topography and higher order aberrations are more apparent in myopic anisometropes and keratoconics due to regional (primarily inferior) differences in topography and between eye differences in vertical pupil decentration relative to the corneal vertex normal. Interocular asymmetries in corneal optics appear to be associated with anisometropic refractive development.

Extensions of the cube attack based on low degree annihilators

At Crypto 2008, Shamir introduced a new algebraic attack called the cube attack, which allows us to solve black-box polynomials if we are able to tweak the inputs by varying an initialization vector. In a stream cipher setting where the filter function is known, we can extend it to the cube attack with annihilators: By applying the cube attack to Boolean functions for which we can find low-degree multiples (equivalently annihilators), the attack complexity can be improved. When the size of the filter function is smaller than the LFSR, we can improve the attack complexity further by considering a sliding window version of the cube attack with annihilators. Finally, we extend the cube attack to vectorial Boolean functions by finding implicit relations with low-degree polynomials.

Insight into the fractional calculus via a spreadsheet

Many students of calculus are not aware that the calculus they have learned is a special case (integer order) of fractional calculus. Fractional calculus is the study of arbitrary order derivatives and integrals and their applications. The article begins by stating a naive question from a student in a paper by Larson (1974) and establishes, for polynomials and exponential functions, that they can be deformed into their derivative using the μ-th order fractional derivatives for 0<μ<1. Through the power of Excel we illustrate the continuous deformations dynamically through conditional formatting. Some applications are discussed and a connection made to mathematics education.

A Novel High Order Space-Time Spectral Method for the Time Fractional Fokker--Planck Equation

The fractional Fokker-Planck equation is an important physical model for simulating anomalous diffusions with external forces. Because of the non-local property of the fractional derivative an interesting problem is to explore high accuracy numerical methods for fractional differential equations. In this paper, a space-time spectral method is presented for the numerical solution of the time fractional Fokker-Planck initial-boundary value problem. The proposed method employs the Jacobi polynomials for the temporal discretization and Fourier-like basis functions for the spatial discretization. Due to the diagonalizable trait of the Fourier-like basis functions, this leads to a reduced representation of the inner product in the Galerkin analysis. We prove that the time fractional Fokker-Planck equation attains the same approximation order as the time fractional diffusion equation developed in [23] by using the present method. That indicates an exponential decay may be achieved if the exact solution is sufficiently smooth. Finally, some numerical results are given to demonstrate the high order accuracy and efficiency of the new numerical scheme. The results show that the errors of the numerical solutions obtained by the space-time spectral method decay exponentially.

Analytical study of implementation issues of NTRU

Nth-Dimensional Truncated Polynomial Ring (NTRU) is a lattice-based public-key cryptosystem that offers encryption and digital signature solutions. It was designed by Silverman, Hoffstein and Pipher. The NTRU cryptosystem was patented by NTRU Cryptosystems Inc. (which was later acquired by Security Innovations) and available as IEEE 1363.1 and X9.98 standards. NTRU is resistant to attacks based on Quantum computing, to which the standard RSA and ECC public-key cryptosystems are vulnerable to. In addition, NTRU has higher performance advantages over these cryptosystems. Considering this importance of NTRU, it is highly recommended to adopt NTRU as part of a cipher suite along with widely used cryptosystems for internet security protocols and applications. In this paper, we present our analytical study on the implementation of NTRU encryption scheme which serves as a guideline for security practitioners who are novice to lattice-based cryptography or even cryptography. In particular, we show some non-trivial issues that should be considered towards a secure and efficient NTRU implementation.