2,797 research outputs found
A stepwise based fuzzy regression procedure for developing customer preference models in new product development
Fuzzy regression methods have commonly been used to develop consumer preferences models which correlate the engineering characteristics with consumer preferences regarding a new product; the consumer preference models provide a platform whereby product developers can decide the engineering characteristics in order to satisfy consumer preferences prior to developing the products. Recent research shows that these fuzzy regression methods are commonly used to model customer preferences. However, these approaches have a common limitation in that they do not investigate the appropriate polynomial structure which includes significant regressors with only significant engineering characteristics; also, they cannot generate interaction or high-order regressors in the models. The inclusion of insignificant regressors is not an effective approach when developing the models. Exclusion of significant regressors may affect the generalization capability of the consumer preference models. In this paper, a novel fuzzy modelling method is proposed, namely fuzzy stepwise regression (F-SR), in order to develop a customer preference model which is structured with an appropriate polynomial which includes only significant regressors.Based on the appropriate polynomial structure, the fuzzy coefficients are determined using the fuzzy least square regression. The developed fuzzy regression model attempts to obtain a better generalization capability using a smaller number of regressors. The effectiveness of the F-SR is evaluated based on two design problems, namely a tea maker design and a solder paste dispenser design. Results show that better generalization capabilities can be obtained compared with the fuzzy regression methods commonly-used for new product development. Also, smaller-scale consumer preference models with fewer engineering characteristics can be obtained. Hence, a simpler and more effective product development platform can be provided
Path ORAM: An Extremely Simple Oblivious RAM Protocol
We present Path ORAM, an extremely simple Oblivious RAM protocol with a small
amount of client storage. Partly due to its simplicity, Path ORAM is the most
practical ORAM scheme known to date with small client storage. We formally
prove that Path ORAM has a O(log N) bandwidth cost for blocks of size B =
Omega(log^2 N) bits. For such block sizes, Path ORAM is asymptotically better
than the best known ORAM schemes with small client storage. Due to its
practicality, Path ORAM has been adopted in the design of secure processors
since its proposal
Trust as a mediator in the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and IL-6 level in adulthood
Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) has been shown to predict the coupling of depression and inflammation in adulthood. Trust within intimate relationships, a core element in marital relations, has been shown to predict positive physical and mental health outcomes, but the mediating role of trust in partners in the association between CSA and inflammation in adulthood requires further study. The present study aimed to examine the impact of CSA on inflammatory biomarkers (IL-6 and IL-1β) in adults with depression and the mediating role of trust. A cross-sectional survey data set of adults presenting with mood and sleep disturbance was used in the analysis. CSA demonstrated a significant negative correlation with IL-6 level (r = -0.28, p<0. 01) in adults with clinically significant depression, while trust showed a significant positive correlation with IL-6 level (r = 0.36, p < .01). Sobel test and bootstrapping revealed a significant mediating role for trust between CSA and IL-6 level. CSA and trust in partners were revealed to have significant associations with IL-6 level in adulthood. Counterintuitively, the directions of association were not those expected. Trust played a mediating role between CSA and adulthood levels of IL-6. Plausible explanations for these counterintuitive findings are discussed
Locality-Preserving Oblivious RAM
Oblivious RAMs, introduced by Goldreich and Ostrovsky [JACM\u2796], compile any RAM program into one that is ``memory oblivious\u27\u27, i.e., the access pattern to the memory is independent of the input. All previous ORAM schemes, however, completely break the locality of data accesses (for instance, by shuffling the data to pseudorandom positions in memory).
In this work, we initiate the study of locality-preserving ORAMs --- ORAMs that preserve locality of the accessed memory regions, while leaking only the lengths of contiguous memory regions accessed. Our main results demonstrate the existence of a locality-preserving ORAM with poly-logarithmic overhead both in terms of bandwidth and locality. We also study the tradeoff between locality, bandwidth and leakage, and show that any scheme that preserves locality and does not leak the lengths of the contiguous memory regions accessed, suffers from prohibitive bandwidth.
To the best of our knowledge, before our work, the only works combining locality and obliviousness were for symmetric searchable encryption [e.g., Cash and Tessaro (EUROCRYPT\u2714), Asharov et al. (STOC\u2716)].
Symmetric search encryption ensures obliviousness if each keyword is searched only once, whereas ORAM provides obliviousness to any input program. Thus, our work generalizes that line of work to the much more challenging task of preserving locality in ORAMs
Modelling of rheological behaviour of pummelo juice concentrates using master-curve
The rheological behaviour of freeze-dried-concentrated pummelo juice was modelled to investigate the effects of temperature and concentration on its fluid type and viscosity using a rotational viscometer at shear rates ranging from 1 to 400 s-1. The effect of concentration measured by its total soluble solids content resulted in the juice concentrates behaving towards shear thinning or pseudoplastic behaviour with flow behaviour index values, n0.98
Area Spectrum of Kerr and extremal Kerr Black Holes from Quasinormal Modes
Motivated by the recent interest in quantization of black hole area spectrum,
we consider the area spectrum of Kerr and extremal Kerr black holes. Based on
the proposal by Bekenstein and others that the black hole area spectrum is
discrete and equally spaced, we implement Kunstatter's method to derive the
area spectrum for the Kerr and extremal Kerr black holes. The real part of the
quasinormal frequencies of Kerr black hole used for this computation is of the
form where is the angular velocity of the black hole
horizon. The resulting spectrum is discrete but not as expected uniformly
spaced. Thus, we infer that the function describing the real part of
quasinormal frequencies of Kerr black hole is not the correct one. This
conclusion is in agreement with the numerical results for the highly damped
quasinormal modes of Kerr black hole recently presented by Berti, Cardoso and
Yoshida. On the contrary, extremal Kerr black hole is shown to have a discrete
area spectrum which in addition is evenly spaced. The area spacing derived in
our analysis for the extremal Kerr black hole area spectrum is not proportional
to . Therefore, it does not give support to Hod's statement that the
area spectrum should be valid for a generic
Kerr-Newman black hole.Comment: 10 pages, no figure, LaTeX; v2: 12 pages, clarifying comments and an
Appendix are added, version to appear in Mod. Phys. Lett.
The covid-19 pandemic situation in Malaysia: lessons learned from the perspective of population density
This paper attempts to ascertain the impacts of population density on the spread and severity of COVID-19 in Malaysia. Besides describing the spatio-temporal contagion risk of the virus, ultimately, it seeks to test the hypothesis that higher population density results in exacerbated COVID-19 virulence in the community. The population density of 143 districts in Malaysia, as per data from Malaysia’s 2010 population census, was plotted against cumulative COVID-19 cases and infection rates of COVID-19 cases, which were obtained from Malaysia’s Ministry of Health official website. The data of these three variables were collected between 19 January 2020 and 31 December 2020. Based on the observations, districts that have high population densities and are highly inter-connected with neighbouring districts, whether geographically, socio-economically, or infrastructurally, tend to experience spikes in COVID-19 cases within weeks of each other. Using a parametric approach of the Pearson correlation, population density was found to have a moderately strong relationship to cumulative COVID-19 cases (p-value of 0.000 and R2 of 0.415) and a weak relationship to COVID-19 infection rates (p-value of 0.005 and R2 of 0.047). Consequently, we provide several non-pharmaceutical lessons, including urban planning strategies, as passive containment measures that may better support disease interventions against future contagious diseases
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