712 research outputs found
Documented international enquiry on solid sedimentary fossil fuels; Coal: definitions, classifications, reserves-resources and energy potential
This paper deals with all solid sedimentary fossil fuels, i.e. coal, the main one for geological reserves and resources, peat,
and oil shales. Definitions of coal ( < 50% ash) and coal seam (thickness and depth limits) are examined in view of an
international agreement regarding new concepts for a common reserves and resources evaluation using the same nomenclature.
The 50% ash limit, already adopted by UN-ECE for coal definition, allows the creation of a new category—the organic
shales (50–75% ash)—comprising energetic materials still valuable for thermal use (coal shales) or to be retorted for oil
production (oil shales).
Geological relations between coals, oil shales, solid bitumen, liquid hydrocarbons, natural gas, and coalbed methane are also
examined together with environmental problems.
As a final synthesis of all topics, the paper discusses the problems related with a modern geological classification of all solid
sedimentary fuels based on: various rank parameters (moisture content, calorific value, reflectance), maceral composition, and
mineral matter content (and washability).
Finally, it should be pointed out that the paper is presented as series of problems, some of them old ones, but never resolved
until now. In order to facilitate the next generation of coal geologists to resolve these problems on the basis of international
agreements, all sections begin with documented introductions for further questions opening an international enquiry. The
authors hope that the answers will be abundant enough and pertinent to permit synthetic international solutions, valuable for the
new millennium, with the help of interested consulted authorities, international pertinent organisations, and regional experts.
D 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
Verifying Safety Properties With the TLA+ Proof System
TLAPS, the TLA+ proof system, is a platform for the development and
mechanical verification of TLA+ proofs written in a declarative style requiring
little background beyond elementary mathematics. The language supports
hierarchical and non-linear proof construction and verification, and it is
independent of any verification tool or strategy. A Proof Manager uses backend
verifiers such as theorem provers, proof assistants, SMT solvers, and decision
procedures to check TLA+ proofs. This paper documents the first public release
of TLAPS, distributed with a BSD-like license. It handles almost all the
non-temporal part of TLA+ as well as the temporal reasoning needed to prove
standard safety properties, in particular invariance and step simulation, but
not liveness properties
LNCS
We introduce the monitoring of trace properties under assumptions. An assumption limits the space of possible traces that the monitor may encounter. An assumption may result from knowledge about the system that is being monitored, about the environment, or about another, connected monitor. We define monitorability under assumptions and study its theoretical properties. In particular, we show that for every assumption A, the boolean combinations of properties that are safe or co-safe relative to A are monitorable under A. We give several examples and constructions on how an assumption can make a non-monitorable property monitorable, and how an assumption can make a monitorable property monitorable with fewer resources, such as integer registers
Grouping based feature attribution in metacontrast masking
The visibility of a target can be strongly suppressed by metacontrast masking.
Still, some features of the target can be perceived within the mask. Usually,
these rare cases of feature mis-localizations are assumed to reflect errors of
the visual system. To the contrary, I will show that feature
"mis-localizations" in metacontrast masking follow rules of
motion grouping and, hence, should be viewed as part of a systematic feature
attribution process
In search of the elusive long-wave fundamental
Action spectra for threshold detection of flicker (30 Hz) were obtained on 11 deuteranopes under carefully controlled adaptation conditions. Individual differences were large, so that each one of the long-wave fundamentals proposed by different theorists finds reasonable justification in the spectrum measured on at least one deuteranope. Some deuteranopes' spectra are not described by any one of these "fundamentals". To a first approximation at least, trichromats' spectra show the property of linear additivity. One such trichromat's spectrum agreed well with that of a deuteranope with whom he shares a common erythrolabe, and appears to be uninfluenced by his chlorolabe-filled cones.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/24130/1/0000387.pd
Encrypt-to-self:Securely outsourcing storage
We put forward a symmetric encryption primitive tailored towards a specific application: outsourced storage. The setting assumes a memory-bounded computing device that inflates the amount of volatile or permanent memory available to it by letting other (untrusted) devices hold encryptions of information that they return on request. For instance, web servers typically hold for each of the client connections they manage a multitude of data, ranging from user preferences to technical information like database credentials. If the amount of data per session is considerable, busy servers sooner or later run out of memory. One admissible solution to this is to let the server encrypt the session data to itself and to let the client store the ciphertext, with the agreement that the client reproduce the ciphertext in each subsequent request (e.g., via a cookie) so that the session data can be recovered when required. In this article we develop the cryptographic mechanism that should be used to achieve confidential and authentic data storage in the encrypt-to-self setting, i.e., where encryptor and decryptor coincide and constitute the only entity holding keys. We argue that standard authenticated encryption represents only a suboptimal solution for preserving confidentiality, as much as message authentication codes are suboptimal for preserving authenticity. The crucial observation is that such schemes instantaneously give up on all security promises the moment the key is compromised. In contrast, data protected with our new primitive remains fully integrity protected and unmalleable. In the course of this paper we develop a formal model for encrypt-to-self systems, show that it solves the outsourced storage problem, propose surprisingly efficient provably secure constructions, and report on our implementations
Fast Two-Robot Disk Evacuation with Wireless Communication
In the fast evacuation problem, we study the path planning problem for two
robots who want to minimize the worst-case evacuation time on the unit disk.
The robots are initially placed at the center of the disk. In order to
evacuate, they need to reach an unknown point, the exit, on the boundary of the
disk. Once one of the robots finds the exit, it will instantaneously notify the
other agent, who will make a beeline to it.
The problem has been studied for robots with the same speed~\cite{s1}. We
study a more general case where one robot has speed and the other has speed
. We provide optimal evacuation strategies in the case that by showing matching upper and lower bounds on the
worst-case evacuation time. For , we show (non-matching)
upper and lower bounds on the evacuation time with a ratio less than .
Moreover, we demonstrate that a generalization of the two-robot search strategy
from~\cite{s1} is outperformed by our proposed strategies for any .Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure
Almost optimal asynchronous rendezvous in infinite multidimensional grids
Two anonymous mobile agents (robots) moving in an asynchronous manner have to meet in an infinite grid of dimension δ> 0, starting from two arbitrary positions at distance at most d. Since the problem is clearly infeasible in such general setting, we assume that the grid is embedded in a δ-dimensional Euclidean space and that each agent knows the Cartesian coordinates of its own initial position (but not the one of the other agent). We design an algorithm permitting the agents to meet after traversing a trajectory of length O(d δ polylog d). This bound for the case of 2d-grids subsumes the main result of [12]. The algorithm is almost optimal, since the Ω(d δ) lower bound is straightforward. Further, we apply our rendezvous method to the following network design problem. The ports of the δ-dimensional grid have to be set such that two anonymous agents starting at distance at most d from each other will always meet, moving in an asynchronous manner, after traversing a O(d δ polylog d) length trajectory. We can also apply our method to a version of the geometric rendezvous problem. Two anonymous agents move asynchronously in the δ-dimensional Euclidean space. The agents have the radii of visibility of r1 and r2, respectively. Each agent knows only its own initial position and its own radius of visibility. The agents meet when one agent is visible to the other one. We propose an algorithm designing the trajectory of each agent, so that they always meet after traveling a total distance of O( ( d)), where r = min(r1, r2) and for r ≥ 1. r)δpolylog ( d r
Power of Randomization in Automata on Infinite Strings
Probabilistic B\"uchi Automata (PBA) are randomized, finite state automata
that process input strings of infinite length. Based on the threshold chosen
for the acceptance probability, different classes of languages can be defined.
In this paper, we present a number of results that clarify the power of such
machines and properties of the languages they define. The broad themes we focus
on are as follows. We present results on the decidability and precise
complexity of the emptiness, universality and language containment problems for
such machines, thus answering questions central to the use of these models in
formal verification. Next, we characterize the languages recognized by PBAs
topologically, demonstrating that though general PBAs can recognize languages
that are not regular, topologically the languages are as simple as
\omega-regular languages. Finally, we introduce Hierarchical PBAs, which are
syntactically restricted forms of PBAs that are tractable and capture exactly
the class of \omega-regular languages
- …