A Novel Approach for Data Encryption Depending on User Location

The wide spread of WLAN and the popularity of mobile devices increases the frequency of data transmission between information system and mobile user. However, most of the data encryption technology is location-independent. An encrypted data can be decrypted anywhere. The encryption technology cannot restrict the location of data decryption. In order to meet the demand of data transmission in the future, a location-dependent approach, called location-dependent data encryption algorithm (LDEA), is proposed in this paper. A target latitude/longitude coordinate is determined firstly. The coordinate is incorporated with a random key for data encryption. The receiver can only decrypt the ciphertext when the coordinate acquired from GPS receiver match with the target coordinate. However, current GPS receiver is inaccuracy and inconsistent. The location of a mobile user is difficult to exactly match with the target coordinate. A toleration distance (TD) is also designed in LDEA to increase its practicality. The security analysis shows that the probability to break LDEA is almost impossible since the length of the random key is adjustable. A prototype is also implemented for experimental study. The results show that the ciphertext can only be decrypted under the restriction of TD. It illustrates that LDEA is effective and practical for data transmission to mobile users

A New Seamless Bitstream Switching Scheme for H.264 Video Adaptation with Enhanced Coding Performance

[[abstract]]In this paper, we propose a new seamless bitstream switching scheme to improve the coding performance of H.264 SP-frames for rate adaptation. Our method removes one of the two re-quantization blocks in the SP-frame encoders so as to significantly improve coding performance. The seamless switching property of SP-frames is retained by properly restructuring the primary and secondary switching frame codecs. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme achieves close coding performance to that of regular H.264 P-frames and significantly better performance than that of SP-frames. The proposed method also provides the advantage of using a single secondary switching bitstream for both switching-up and switching-down processes[[fileno]]2030144030014[[department]]電機工程學

Multi-Operator Fairness in Transparent RAN Sharing by Soft-Partition With Blocking and Dropping Mechanism

Radio access network (RAN) sharing has attracted significant attention from telecom operators as a means of accommodating data surges. However, current mechanisms for RAN sharing ignore the fairness issue among operators, and hence the RAN may be under- or over-utilized. Furthermore, the fairness among different operators cannot be guaranteed, since the RAN resources are distributed on a first come, first served basis. Accordingly, the present study proposes a “soft-partition with blocking and dropping” (SBD) mechanism that offers inter-operator fairness using a “soft-partition” approach. In particular, the operator subscribers are permitted to overuse the resources specified in the predefined service-level-agreement when the shared RAN is under-utilized, but are blocked (or even dropped) when the RAN is over-utilized. The simulation results show that SBD achieves an inter-operator fairness of 0.997, which is higher than that of both a hard-partition approach (0.98) and a no-partition approach (0.6) while maintaining a shared RAN utilization rate of 98%. Furthermore, SBD reduces the blocking rate from 35% (hard partition approach) to almost 0%, whereas controlling the dropping rate at 5%. Notably, the dropping rate can be reduced to almost 0% using a newly proposed bandwidth scale down procedure.This work was supported in part by H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL under Grant 761586, and in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan under Contract MOST 106-2218- E-009-018

The feedback consistency effect in Chinese character recognition:evidence from a psycholinguistic norm

Researchers have demonstrated the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g. -ean is always pronounced /in/, as in lean, dean, and bean). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g. /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that, with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop, and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason for this is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3,423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors, and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition

Effects of orthographic consistency and homophone density on Chinese spoken word recognition

Studies of alphabetic language have shown that orthographic knowledge influences phonological processing during spoken word recognition. This study utilized the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to differentiate two types of phonology-to-orthography (P-to-O) mapping consistencies in Chinese, namely homophone density and orthographic consistency. The ERP data revealed an orthographic consistency effect in the frontal-centrally distributed N400, and a homophone density effect in central-posteriorly distributed late positive component (LPC). Further source analyses using the standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) demonstrated that the orthographic effect was not only localized in the frontal and temporal-parietal regions for phonological processing, but also in the posterior visual cortex for orthographic processing, while the homophone density effect was found in middle temporal gyrus for lexical-semantic selection, and in the temporal-occipital junction for orthographic processing. These results suggest that orthographic information not only shapes the nature of phonological representations, but may also be activated during on-line spoken word recognition

catena-Poly[[tetraaquanickel(II)]-μ3-benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxylato-3′:1:2-κ4 O 1:O 3,O 3′:O 5-[tetraaquanickel(II)]-μ2-benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxylato-2:3κ2 O 1:O 3-[tetraaquanickel(II)]]

The microwave solvothermal reaction of nickel nitrate with trimesic acid provided the title compound, [Ni3(BTC)2(H2O)12]n (BTC = benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxyl­ate anion, C9H3O6), which is a metal coordination polymer composed of one-dimensional zigzag chains. The crystal under investigation was ramecically twinned with an approximate twin domain ratio of 1:1. In the asymmetric unit, there are two types of Ni atoms. One of the NiO6 groups (2 symmetry) is coordinated to only one carboxyl­ate group and thus terminal, the other is bridging, forming the coordination polymer. The extended chains are connected by the organic BTC anions via μ 2-linkages. O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds and π–π inter­actions between the chains [centroid–centroid distance 3.58 (1) Å] induce the complex to mimic a three-dimensional structure

miRTar: an integrated system for identifying miRNA-target interactions in human

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNA molecules that are ~22-nt-long sequences capable of suppressing protein synthesis. Previous research has suggested that miRNAs regulate 30% or more of the human protein-coding genes. The aim of this work is to consider various analyzing scenarios in the identification of miRNA-target interactions, as well as to provide an integrated system that will aid in facilitating investigation on the influence of miRNA targets by alternative splicing and the biological function of miRNAs in biological pathways.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This work presents an integrated system, miRTar, which adopts various analyzing scenarios to identify putative miRNA target sites of the gene transcripts and elucidates the biological functions of miRNAs toward their targets in biological pathways. The system has three major features. First, the prediction system is able to consider various analyzing scenarios (1 miRNA:1 gene, 1:N, N:1, N:M, all miRNAs:N genes, and N miRNAs: genes involved in a pathway) to easily identify the regulatory relationships between interesting miRNAs and their targets, in 3'UTR, 5'UTR and coding regions. Second, miRTar can analyze and highlight a group of miRNA-regulated genes that participate in particular KEGG pathways to elucidate the biological roles of miRNAs in biological pathways. Third, miRTar can provide further information for elucidating the miRNA regulation, i.e., miRNA-target interactions, affected by alternative splicing.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In this work, we developed an integrated resource, miRTar, to enable biologists to easily identify the biological functions and regulatory relationships between a group of known/putative miRNAs and protein coding genes. miRTar is now available at <url>http://miRTar.mbc.nctu.edu.tw/</url>.</p

Postchemoradiotherapy Pathologic Stage Classified by the American Joint Committee on the Cancer Staging System Predicts Prognosis of Patients with Locally Advanced Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

IntroductionTo determine whether the postchemoradiotherapy (post-CRT) pathologic stage predicts the outcomes of patients with locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) undergoing preoperative CRT followed by surgery.MethodsFrom three phase II trials of preoperative CRT for locally advanced ESCC, 140 patients were included. Preoperative CRT comprised twice weekly paclitaxel and cisplatin-based regimens and 40-Gy radiotherapy in 20 fractions. The post-CRT pathologic stage was classified according to the American Joint Committee on Cancer, 7th edition staging system. The prognostic effects of clinicopathologic factors were analyzed using Cox regression.ResultsWith a median follow-up of 61.9 months, the median progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) of the entire cohort were 24.5 and 30.9 months, respectively. The post-CRT pathologic stage was 0 in 34.5%, I in 12.9%, II in 29.3%, III in 13.6%, and ypT0N1-2 in 6.4% of the patients. The median PFS was 47.2, 25.9, 16.0, 9.4, and 15.1 months, and the median OS was 57.4, 34.1, 26.2, 14.1, and 17.6 months for patients with post-CRT pathologic stage 0, I, II, III, and ypT0N1-2, respectively. In multivariate analysis, performance status (p < 0.001), tumor location (p = 0.016), and extranodal extension (p = 0.024) were independent prognostic factors for PFS, whereas performance status (p < 0.001) and post-CRT pathologic stage (p = 0.027) were independent prognostic factors for OS.ConclusionsThe post-CRT pathologic stage classified by American Joint Committee on Cancer, 7th edition staging system predicted the survival of locally advanced ESCC patients who underwent preoperative paclitaxel and cisplatin-based CRT followed by esophagectomy