A direct-sequence spread-spectrum communication system for integrated sensor microsystems

Some of the most important challenges in health-care technologies have been identified to be development of noninvasive systems and miniaturization. In developing the core technologies, progress is required in pushing the limits of miniaturization, minimizing the costs and power consumption of microsystems components, developing mobile/wireless communication infrastructures and computing technologies that are reliable. The implementation of such miniaturized systems has become feasible by the advent of system-on-chip technology, which enables us to integrate most of the components of a system on to a single chip. One of the most important tasks in such a system is to convey information reliably on a multiple-access-based environment. When considering the design of telecommunication system for such a network, the receiver is the key performance critical block. The paper describes the application environment, the choice of the communication protocol, the implementation of the transmitter and receiver circuitry, and research work carried out on studying the impact of input data characteristics and internal data path complexity on area and power performance of the receiver. We provide results using a test data recorded from a pH sensor. The results demonstrate satisfying functionality, area, and power constraints even when a degree of programmability is incorporated in the system

ATMOSPHERIC EFFECTS ON RTK NETWORK IN FLORIDA

Commonly used real time kinematic (RTK) network (RTK Network) techniques, i.e., MAX, I-MAX, FKP and VRS, are tested by taking monthly measurements for a year in Florida. Additionally, RTCM message versions 2 and 3 are used with I-MAX and VRS measurements. The results revealed that mostly, horizontal coordinates vary a few centimeters and generally changes in vertical coordinates are less than two decimeters. In terms of horizontal coordinates, the best results are produced by I-MAX3 method and FKP yielded the worst results. In terms of vertical coordinates, almost all results look alike; however, the best results are produced by VRS3 method. It appears that I-MAX3 performed better than I-MAX2 and VRS3 performed better than VRS2. Yet, MAX did not stand out among other techniques

Effects of sewage sludge on heavy metal accumulation in soil and plants and on crop productivity in Aleppo governorate

Sewage sludgeHeavy metalsCrop productionCropsOrganic matterSoil

Improvement of the Wastewater Biodegradability by Means of Photocatalytic and Wet Oxidation Processes in the Presence of Hydrogen Peroxide

In this study, the effectiveness of photocatalytic oxidation (PO) and wet oxidation (WO) processes as a pre-treatment step on improvement of biodegradability and colour removal of mixture of raw domestic and pre-treated industrial wastewaters, have been evaluated. More oxygen was obtained by H2O2 (as an oxidant in WO and PO processes) than stoichiometric demand. PO of the wastewater was carried out by illumination of the wastewater with UV lamp (at room temperature, atmospheric pressure, 16.5 h reaction time) and WO of the wastewater was carried out by means of thermal oxidation at autoclave conditions (at 118–120 oC, 1.9–2 bar, 3 h reaction time). 1 g L–1 TiO2 in PO process and 0.2 mg L–1 Cu++ in WO process were used as catalyst. The results obtained from experiments were not compared with each other due to the difference between the quality and quantity of the used catalyst and the consumed energy. Colour removal efficiency was 33 % for WO process and 77.6 % for PO process. By applying WO process, 72.7 % increase in the reaction rate coefficient describing the degradability of organic compounds in wastewater was obtained, but this value was 34.5 % in PO process

A fast algorithm for the constrained multiple sequence alignment problem

Given n strings S1, S2, ..., Sn, and a pattern string P, the constrained multiple sequence alignment (CMSA) problem is to find an optimal multiple alignment of S1, S2, ..., Sn such that the alignment contains P, i.e. in the alignment matrix there exists a sequence of columns each entirely composed of symbol P[k] for every k, where P[k] is the kth symbol in P, 1 ≤ k ≤ |P|, and in the sequence, a column containing P[i] appears before the column containing P[j] for all i,j, i < j. The problem is motivated from the problem of comparing multiple sequences that share a common structure, or sequence pattern. There are O(2ns1s2...snr)-time dynamic programming algorithms for the problem, where s1,s2, ...,sn and r are, respectively, the lengths of the input strings and the pattern string. Feasibility of these algorithms in practice is limited when the number of sequences is large, or the sequences are long because of the impractically long time required by these algorithms. We present a new algorithm with worst-case time complexity also O(2ns1s2...snr), but the algorithm avoids redundant computations in existing dynamic programming solutions. Experiments on both randomly generated strings and real data show that this algorithm is much faster than the existing algorithms. We present an analysis that explains the speed-up obtained in our experiments by our algorithm over the naive dynamic programming algorithm for constrained multiple sequence alignment of protein sequences. The speed-up is more significant when pattern is long, or n is large. For example in the case of constrained pairwise sequence alignment (the CMSA problem with n=2) when the pattern is sufficiently long for strings S1 and S2, the asymptotic time complexity is observed to be O(s1s2) instead of O(s1s2r). Main ideas in our algorithm can also be used in other constrained sequence alignment problems

Effects of different planting dates on improving yield of Fritillaria imperialis L. and Fritillaria persica L. bulbs damaged by small narcissus fly (Eumerus strigatus Fallen)

Fritillaria imperialis and F. persica were planted during April 2003 and May 2004 growing seasons on the basis of split block design with three replications to investigate the effects of planting dates on various plant parameters and extent of recovery by planting 25% damaged bulbs. The results showed significant effects of planting dates on plant height, number of bulbs per plant and infected bulb ratio. A comparison of the two species showed that F. persica gave more bulblets than F. imperialis. A generalcomparison of the two species also showed that damaged bulbs of F. imperialis produced lesser yield compared to F. persica. Furthermore, both species gave more number of bulblets from early and mid September plantings compared to early and mid October plantings. The most suitable date of planting was determined as September 1st and 15th