Distinguishing attack on SOBER-128 with linear masking

We present a distinguishing attack against SOBER-128 with linear masking. We found a linear approximation which has a bias of 2^− − 8.8 for the non-linear filter. The attack applies the observation made by Ekdahl and Johansson that there is a sequence of clocks for which the linear combination of some states vanishes. This linear dependency allows that the linear masking method can be applied. We also show that the bias of the distinguisher can be improved (or estimated more precisely) by considering quadratic terms of the approximation. The probability bias of the quadratic approximation used in the distinguisher is estimated to be equal to O(2^− − 51.8), so that we claim that SOBER-128 is distinguishable from truly random cipher by observing O(2^103.6) keystream words.

An experimental based assessment of the deviation of the bearing characteristic frequencies

Slippage in the contact roller-races has always played a central role in the field of diagnostics of rolling element bearings. Due to this phenomenon, vibrations triggered by a localized damage are not strictly periodic and therefore not detectable by means of common spectral functions as power spectral density or discrete Fourier transform. Due to the strong second order cyclostationary component, characterizing these signals, techniques such as cyclic coherence, its integrated form and square envelope spectrum have proven to be effective in a wide range of applications. An expert user can easily identify a damage and its location within the bearing components by looking for particular patterns of peaks in the output of the selected cyclostationary tool. These peaks will be found in the neighborhood of specific frequencies, that can be calculated in advance as functions of the geometrical features of the bearing itself. Unfortunately the non-periodicity of the vibration signal is not the only consequence of the slippage: often it also involves a displacement of the damage characteristic peaks from the theoretically expected frequencies. This issue becomes particularly important in the attempt to develop highly automated algorithms for bearing damage recognition, and, in order to correctly set thresholds and tolerances, a quantitative description of the magnitude of the above mentioned deviations is needed. This paper is aimed at identifying the dependency of the deviations on the different operating conditions. This has been possible thanks to an extended experimental activity performed on a full scale bearing test rig, able to reproduce realistically the operating and environmental conditions typical of an industrial high power electric motor and gearbox. The importance of load will be investigated in detail for different bearing damages. Finally some guidelines on how to cope with such deviations will be given, accordingly to the expertise obtained in the experimental activity.

Crafting and retelling everyday lives : disabled people's contribution to bioethical concerns

This commentary draws out themes from the narrative symposium on “living with the label “disability”” from the perspective of auto/biography and critical disability studies in the humanities. It notes the disconnect between the experiences discussed in the stories and the preoccupations of bioethicists. Referencing Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s recent work, it suggests that life stories by people usually described as “disabled” offer narrative, epistemic and ethical resources for bioethics. The commentary suggests that the symposium offers valuable conceptual tools and critiques of taken-for-granted terms like “dependency”. It notes that these narrators do not un–problematically embrace the term “disability”, but emphasize the need to redefine, strategically deploy or reject this term. Some accounts are explicitly critical of medical practitioners while others redefine health and wellbeing, emphasizing the need for reciprocity and respect for the knowledge of people with disability, including knowledge from their experience of “the variant body” (Leach Scully, 2008).

Effect of Oil Price on Emissions Trading Market: VAR Analysis

In this study, we investigated the relationship of European Union carbon dioxide CO2 allowances EUAs prices and oil prices by employing a VAR analysis, Granger causality test and impulse response function. If oil price continues increasing, companies will decrease dependency on fossil fuels because of an increase in energy costs. Therefore, the price of EUAs may be affected by variations in oil prices if the greenhouse gases discharged by the consumption of alternative energy are less than that of fossil fuels. There are no previous studies that investigated these relationships. In this study, we analyzed eight types of EUAs EUA05 to EUA12 with a time series daily data set during 2005-2007 collected from a European Climate Exchange time series data set. Differentiations in these eight types were redemption period. We used the New York Mercantile Exchange light sweet crude price as an oil price. From our examination, we found that only the EUA06 and EUA07 types of EUAs Granger-cause oil prices and vice versa and other six types of EUAs do not Granger-cause oil price. These results imply that the earlier redemption period types of EUAs are more sensitive to oil price. In employing the impulse response function, the results showed that a shock to oil price has a slightly positive effect on all types of EUAs for a very short period. On the other hand, we found that a shock to price of EUA has a slightly negative effect on oil price following a positive effect in only EUA06 and EUA07 types. Therefore, these results imply that fluctuations in EUAs prices and oil prices have little effect on each other. Lastly, we did not consider the substitute energy prices in this study, so we plan to include the prices of coal and natural gas in future analyses.

Does the housing market respond to information disclosure? : Effects of toxicity indices in Japan

The policy instruments that provide information on a firm's or facility's environmental performance, such as the U.S. Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) and the Pollutant Release and Transfer Register system (PRTRs) used in some European countries and Japan, play an important role in encouraging firms or facilities to improve their environmental performance, if investors, consumers and residents recognize their environmental performance. This study uses a hedonic approach to explore how the Japanese rental housing market responds to carcinogenic risk arising from releases and transfers of chemical substances produced and used at close facilities. We found that residents do not perceive carcinogenic risk generated more than 1.0 km away from their residence and that they seem to recognize the increased carcinogenic risk at distances from 0.5 km to 1.0 km away; a 1% increase in carcinogenic risk reduces the average rent by 0.0007%. The distance at which residents perceive the risk arising from such facilities is less than in previous studies. This suggests that the risk perception recognized in previous studies may capture the other externalities in addition to the chemical risk because the risk is measured by the distance.

A frequency adaptive single-phase Phase-Locked Loop with harmonic rejection

An improved Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) for extracting phase and frequency of the fundamental component of a highly distorted grid voltage is presented. The structure of the single-phase PLL is based on the Synchronous Reference Frame (SRF) PLL and uses an All Pass Filter (APF) to generate the quadrature component from the single phase input voltage. In order to filter the harmonic content, a Moving Average Filter (MAF) is used, and performance is improved by designing a lead compensator and also a feed-forward compensator. The simulation results are compared to show the improved performance with feed-forward. In addition, the frequency dependency of MAF is dealt with by a proposed method for adaption to the frequency. This method changes the window size based on the frequency on a sample-by-sample basis. By using this method, the speed of resizing can be reduced in order to decrease the output ripples caused by window size variations.

A random key genetic algorithm for live migration of multiple virtual machines in data centers

Live migration of multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) has become an integral management activity in data centers for power saving, load balancing and system maintenance. While state-of-the-art live migration techniques focus on the improvement of migration performance of an independent single VM, only a little has been investigated to the case of live migration of multiple interacting VMs. Live migration is mostly influenced by the network bandwidth and arbitrarily migrating a VM which has data inter-dependencies with other VMs may increase the bandwidth consumption and adversely affect the performances of subsequent migrations. In this paper, we propose a Random Key Genetic Algorithm (RKGA) that efficiently schedules the migration of a given set of VMs accounting both inter-VM dependency and data center communication network. The experimental results show that the RKGA can schedule the migration of multiple VMs with significantly shorter total migration time and total downtime compared to a heuristic algorithm.

Nilotinib and MEK inhibitors induce synthetic lethality through paradoxical activation of RAF in drug-resistant chronic myeloid leukemia

We show that imatinib, nilotinib, and dasatinib possess weak off-target activity against RAF and, therefore, drive paradoxical activation of BRAF and CRAF in a RAS-dependent manner. Critically, because RAS is activated by BCR-ABL, in drug-resistant chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) cells, RAS activity persists in the presence of these drugs, driving paradoxical activation of BRAF, CRAF, MEK, and ERK, and leading to an unexpected dependency on the pathway. Consequently, nilotinib synergizes with MEK inhibitors to kill drug-resistant CML cells and block tumor growth in mice. Thus, we show that imatinib, nilotinib, and dasatinib drive paradoxical RAF/MEK/ERK pathway activation and have uncovered a synthetic lethal interaction that can be used to kill drug-resistant CML cells in vitro and in vivo.

Occurrence of urinary tract tumors in miners highly exposed to dinitrotoluene

Between 1984 and 1997, six cases of urothelial cancer and 14 cases of renal cell cancer occurred in a group of 500 underground mining workers in the copper-mining industry of the former German Democratic Republic, with high exposures to explosives containing technical dinitrotoluene. Exposure durations ranged from 7 to 37 years, and latency periods ranged from 21 to 46 years. The incidences of both urothelial and renal cell tumors in this group were much higher than anticipated on the basis of the cancer registers of the German Democratic Republic by factors of 4.5 and 14.3, respectively. The cancer cases and a representative group of 183 formerly dinitrotoluene- exposed miners of this local industry were interviewed for their working history and grouped into four exposure categories. This categorization of the 14 renal cell tumor cases revealed no dose-dependency concerning explosives in any of the four exposure categories and was similar to that of the representative group of employees, whereas the urothelial tumor cases were predominantly confined to the high-exposure categories. Furthermore, all identified tumor patients were genotyped by polymerase chain reaction, using lymphocyte DNA, regarding their genetic status of the polymorphic xenobiotic metabolizing enzymes, including the N-acetyltransferase 2 and the glutathione-S-transferases M1 and T1. This genotyping revealed remarkable distributions only for the urothelial tumor cases, who were exclusively identified as 'slow acetylators.' This points to the possibility of human carcinogenicity of dinitrotoluene, with regard to the urothelium as the target tissue.

Physical mechanism of the compressive response of F-actin networks : significance of crosslinker unbinding events

A model of crosslinker unbinding is implemented in a highly coarsegrained granular model of F-actin cytoskeleton. We employ this specific granular model to study the mechanisms of the compressive responses of F-actin networks. It is found that the compressive response of F-actin cytoskeleton has dependency on the strain rate. The evolution of deformation energy in the network indicates that crosslinker unbinding events can induce the remodelling of F-actin cytoskeleton in response to external loadings. The internal stress in F-actin cytoskeleton can efficiently dissipate with the help of crosslinker unbinding, which could lead to the spontaneous relaxation of living cells.

Separating resource rents from intra-marginal rents in fisheries economics survey data

Economic surveys of fisheries are undertaken in several countries as a means of assessing the economic performance of their fisheries. The level of economic profits accruing in the fishery can be estimated from the average economic profits of the boats surveyed. Economic profits consist of two components—resource rent and intra-marginal rent. From a fisheries management perspective, the key indicator of performance is the level of resource rent being generated in the fishery. Consequently, these different components need to be separated out. In this paper, a means of separating out the rent components is identified for a heterogeneous fishery. This is applied to the multi-purpose fleet operating in the English Channel. The paper demonstrates that failing to separate out these two components may result in a misrepresentation of the economic performance of the fishery.

Alliances in the shadow of conflict

Victorious alliances often fight about the spoils of war. This article presents an experiment on the determinants of whether alliances break up and fight internally after having defeated a joint enemy. First, if peaceful sharing yields an asymmetric rent distribution, this increases the likelihood of fighting. In turn, anticipation of the higher likelihood of internal fight reduces the alliance’s ability to succeed against the outside enemy. Second, the option to make nonbinding nonaggression declarations between alliance members does not make peaceful settlement within the alliance more likely. Third, higher differences in the alliance players’ contributions to alliance effort lead to more internal conflict and more intense fighting.

Identifying product families using data mining techniques in manufacturing paradigm

Identifying product families has been considered as an effective way to accommodate the increasing product varieties across the diverse market niches. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to identifying product families by using a similarity measure for a common product design data BOM (Bill of Materials) based on data mining techniques such as frequent mining and clus-tering. For calculating the similarity between BOMs, a novel Extended Augmented Adjacency Matrix (EAAM) representation is introduced that consists of information not only of the content and topology but also of the fre-quent structural dependency among the various parts of a product design. These EAAM representations of BOMs are compared to calculate the similarity between products and used as a clustering input to group the product fami-lies. When applied on a real-life manufacturing data, the proposed framework outperforms a current baseline that uses orthogonal Procrustes for grouping product families.

Transformerless PV inverters - recent test results and a discussion of DC current injection and safety issues

With the variety of PV inverter types and the number of transformerless PV inverters on the Australian market increasing, we revisit some of the issues associated with these topologies. A recent electric shock incident in Queensland (luckily without serious outcome) associated with a transformerless PV system, highlights the need for earthing PV array structures and PV module frames to prevent capacitive leakage currents causing electric shock. The presented test results of the relevant voltages associated with leakage currents of five transformerless PV inverters stress this requirement, which is currently being addressed by both the Clean Energy Council and Standards Australia. DC current injection tests were performed on the same five inverters and were used to develop preliminary recommendations for a more meaningful DC current test procedure for AS4777 Part 2. The test circuit, methodology and results are presented and discussed. A notable temperature dependency of DC current injections with three of the five inverters suggests that DC current injection should be tested at high and low internal inverter temperatures whereas the power dependency noted only for one inverter does not seem to justify recommendations for a (rather involved) standard test procedure at different power levels.

A systematic review of prescribing criteria to evaluate appropriateness of medications in frail older people

This study systematically reviews the published literature regarding inappropriate prescribing in frail individuals aged at least 65 years. Twenty-five of 466 identified studies met the inclusion criteria. All papers measured some surrogate indicators of frailty, such as performance-based tests, cognitive function and functional dependency. Beers criteria were used in 20 studies (74%) to evaluate inappropriate medication use and 36% (9/25) studies used more than one criterion. The prevalence of inappropriate medications ranged widely from 11 to 92%. Only a few studies reported the relationship between potentially inappropriate medication use and surrogate measures of frailty. These diverse findings indicate the need for a standardized measure for assessing appropriateness of medication in frail older individuals. Prescribing tools should address both medication and patient-related factors such as life expectancy and functional status to minimize inappropriate prescribing in frail individuals.