Factors affecting the tendency to marital infidelity: A grounded theory study

Marital infidelity is one of the most severe problems in families and investigating the reasons for the tendency to marital infidelity can have an effective role in reducing it. Methods: This study was conducted based on the grounded theory (GT). To this end, two types of sampling techniques were used: The multistage random cluster sampling was employed to interview 28 teachers (male and female) and the purposeful sampling was used to interview 14 experts. Results: Based on the concepts and categories derived from the coding of the interviews, the five main individual, marital, family, spiritual, and social factors were found to be the underlying factors for the tendency to marital infidelity. Besides, 53 concepts and 14 subcategories were identified. Based on the selective coding, individual factors were identified as the central core of the study. Conclusion: According to our findings, marital infidelity is an individual, marital, family, spiritual and social problem. Therefore, therapists are advised to consider personal, spiritual, and social causes in addition to examining family and marital factors in dealing with infidelity

High-field THz source centered at 2.7 THz

We demonstrate a table-top high-field terahertz (THz) source based on optical rectification of a collimated near-infrared pulse in gallium phosphide (GaP) to produce peak fields exceeding 130 kV/cm with a spectrum centered at 2.7 THz. The experimental configuration, based on tilted-pulse-front phase matching, is implemented with a phase grating etched directly onto the front surface of the GaP crystal. Although the THz generation efficiency starts showing a saturation onset as the near-infrared pulse energy reaches 0.57 mJ, we can expect our configuration to yield THz peak fields up to 400 kV/cm when a 5 mJ generation NIR pulse is used. This work paves the way towards broadband, high-field THz sources able to access a new class of THz coherent control and nonlinear phenomena driven at frequencies above 2 THz.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Scalable Fabrication of Nanogratings on GaP for Efficient Diffraction of Near-Infrared Pulses and Enhanced Terahertz Generation by Optical Rectification

We present a process flow for wafer-scale fabrication of a surface phase grating with sub-micron feature sizes from a single semiconductor material. We demonstrate this technique using a 110-oriented GaP semiconductor wafer with second-order nonlinearity to obtain a nanostructured device (800 nm lateral feature size and a 245 nm height modulation) with applications relevant to near-infrared optical diffraction and time-resolved terahertz (THz) technologies. The fabrication process involves a plasma-enhanced chemical deposition of a SiO2 layer on the wafer followed by contact photolithography and inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching (ICP-RIE). We discuss the required radiation dosage, exposure times, temperatures and other key parameters to achieve high-quality nanogratings in terms of filling ratio, edge profile, and overall shape. The phase-grating properties, such as the pitch, spatial homogeneity, and phase retardation, are characterized with an atomic force microscope, scanning electron microscope and a non-invasive optical evaluation of the optical diffraction efficiency into different orders. We demonstrate an application of this device in a time-domain THz spectroscopy scheme, where an enhanced THz spectral bandwidth is achieved by optical rectification of near-infrared laser pulses incident on the grating and efficiently diffracted into the first orders. Finally, the reported process flow has the potential to be applied to various materials by considering only slight adjustments to the ICP-RIE etching steps, paving the way to scalable fabrication of sub-micron patterns on a large range of substrates

An Improved Digital Signature Protocol to Multi-User Broadcast Authentication Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), users can use broadcast authentication mechanisms to connect to the target network and disseminate their messages within the network. Since data transfer for sensor networks is wireless, as a result, attackers can easily eavesdrop deployed sensor nodes and the data sent between them or modify the content of eavesdropped data and inject false data into the sensor network. Hence, the implementation of the message authentication mechanisms (in order to avoid changes and injecting messages into the network) of wireless sensor networks is essential. In this paper, we present an improved protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to accelerate authentication of multi-user message broadcasting. In comparison with previous ECC-based schemes, complexity and computational overhead of proposed scheme is significantly decreased. Also, the proposed scheme supports user anonymity, which is an important property in broadcast authentication schemes for WSNs to preserve user privacy and user untracking

Infrared thin film photodetector performance improvement using plasmonic nanostructure and ring shape lens

Currently, infrared photodetectors have attracted lots of attentions due to the wide range of industrial and non-industrial application. In this paper, a new hubrid metal-semiconductor-metal thin film infrared photodetector based on plasmonic nanostructure and ring shape optical lens has been proposed that leads to higher optical absorption. The finite difference time domain method (FDTD) is used to thoroughly investigate the interaction of proposed structure with near infrared incident wave (1.1-1.7 µm). Optical lens concentrate the incoming light on gold nanodisk array and increases the electric field magnitude on the nanodisk array. Gold nanodisk array with optimized geometrical structure leads to excitation of surface plasmon polariton and results in very high local field point inside the indium gallium arsenide layer. So, the photocarrier generation rate enhances and the structure shows higher photocurrent. According to the simulation results, proposed structure indicates 105% absorption enhancement and 140% photocurrent enhancement compared to simple photodetector strcuture

Speech Emotion Recognition Based on Power Normalized Cepstral Coefficients in Noisy Conditions

Automatic recognition of speech emotional states in noisy conditions has become an important research topic in the emotional speech recognition area, in recent years. This paper considers the recognition of emotional states via speech in real environments. For this task, we employ the power normalized cepstral coefficients (PNCC) in a speech emotion recognition system. We investigate its performance in emotion recognition using clean and noisy speech materials and compare it with the performances of the well-known MFCC, LPCC, RASTA-PLP, and also TEMFCC features. Speech samples are extracted from the Berlin emotional speech database (Emo DB) and Persian emotional speech database (Persian ESD) which are corrupted with 4 different noise types under various SNR levels. The experiments are conducted in clean train/noisy test scenarios to simulate practical conditions with noise sources. Simulation results show that higher recognition rates are achieved for PNCC as compared with the conventional features under noisy conditions

Robust emotional speech recognition based on binaural model and emotional auditory mask in noisy environments

Abstract The performance of automatic speech recognition systems degrades in the presence of emotional states and in adverse environments (e.g., noisy conditions). This greatly limits the deployment of speech recognition application in realistic environments. Previous studies in the emotion-affected speech recognition field focus on improving emotional speech recognition using clean speech data recorded in a quiet environment (i.e., controlled studio settings). The goal of this research is to increase the robustness of speech recognition systems for emotional speech in noisy conditions. The proposed binaural emotional speech recognition system is based on the analysis of binaural input signal and an estimated emotional auditory mask corresponding to the recognized emotion. Whereas the binaural signal analyzer has the task of segregating speech from noise and constructing speech mask in a noisy environment, the estimated emotional mask identifies and removes the most emotionally affected spectro-temporal regions of the segregated target speech. In other words, our proposed system combines the two estimated masks (binary mask and emotion-specific mask) of noise and emotion, as a way to decrease the word error rate for noisy emotional speech. The performance of the proposed binaural system is evaluated in clean neutral train/noisy emotional test scenarios for different noise types, signal-to-noise ratios, and spatial configurations of sources. Speech utterances of the Persian emotional speech database are used for the experimental purposes. Simulation results show that the proposed system achieves higher performance, as compared with automatic speech recognition systems chosen as baseline trained with neutral utterances

Factors affecting the tendency to marital infidelity: A grounded theory study

Introduction: Marital infidelity is one of the most severe problems in families and investigating the reasons for the tendency to marital infidelity can have an effective role in reducing it. Methods: This study was conducted based on the grounded theory (GT). To this end, two types of sampling techniques were used: The multistage random cluster sampling was employed to interview 28 teachers (male and female) and the purposeful sampling was used to interview 14 experts. Results: Based on the concepts and categories derived from the coding of the interviews, the five main individual, marital, family, spiritual, and social factors were found to be the underlying factors for the tendency to marital infidelity. Besides, 53 concepts and 14 subcategories were identified. Based on the selective coding, individual factors were identified as the central core of the study. Conclusion: According to our findings, marital infidelity is an individual, marital, family, spiritual and social problem. Therefore, therapists are advised to consider personal, spiritual, and social causes in addition to examining family and marital factors in dealing with infidelity