Reading Dingo Stories

A short review of Deborah Bird Rose's Wild Dog Dreaming (2011) University of Virginia Pres

Who Spoke What? A Latent Variable Framework for the Joint Decoding of Multiple Speakers and their Keywords

In this paper, we present a latent variable (LV) framework to identify all the speakers and their keywords given a multi-speaker mixture signal. We introduce two separate LVs to denote active speakers and the keywords uttered. The dependency of a spoken keyword on the speaker is modeled through a conditional probability mass function. The distribution of the mixture signal is expressed in terms of the LV mass functions and speaker-specific-keyword models. The proposed framework admits stochastic models, representing the probability density function of the observation vectors given that a particular speaker uttered a specific keyword, as speaker-specific-keyword models. The LV mass functions are estimated in a Maximum Likelihood framework using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The active speakers and their keywords are detected as modes of the joint distribution of the two LVs. In mixture signals, containing two speakers uttering the keywords simultaneously, the proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 82% for detecting both the speakers and their respective keywords, using Student's-t mixture models as speaker-specific-keyword models.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures Submitted to : IEEE Signal Processing Letter

Validation Of A Custom-made Microarray To Study Human Intestinal Microflora

Intestinal microflora refers to all the different species of bacteria that reside in the human gut and is an important organ of the human body because almost all the digestive reactions of the host occur in the intestine. The bacteria of the intestine play a key role in this process by supplementing the intestine with various enzymes and proteins that are required for the digestive process. At the same time, these bacteria were shown to be implicated in a variety of gastrointestinal disorders like Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Inflammatory Bowel Disorder and Gastrointestinal Cancer, but with the current knowledge about the microflora it is difficult to determine which exact species is responsible for a particular disease caused. The knowledge about the composition of the typical intestinal microflora is very limited, the cause at large being the lack of properculture techniques to isolate and study the microfloral species in artificial media. Majority of the species of the microflora are obligate anaerobes and selective culturing techniques provide very limited knowledge about the composition of such complex microflora. Phylogenetic microarrays are one such approach to study various members of the microflora because they contain probes for numerous species of bacteria on a single glass slide and are also known to provide robust and high throughput analysis. ENTREZ nucleotide database was used to compile a list of 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) sequences of bacterial species isolated from the human intestine and they were grouped into various phylo-species. Representative sequences for each phylo-species were extracted and the probes on the microarray were designed based on these representative sequences. 16 different bacterial species were used for validation experiments, which represented bacteria from various groups. The results showed that the microarray correctly identified 15 of a total 16 bacterial species. The detection sensitivity of the microarray was at least 1pg. As a test, fecal samples from adults and children were analyzed by the microarray. Clostridia were the dominant group of the microflora followed by Bacteroidetes in both adults and children. The analysis of the fecal samples showed clear differences between the microflora composition of adults and children

Bodies against modernity: politics of slum rehabilitations in India

India continues to modernize, and the legacy of political modernity rooted in the European Enlightenment continues to reify itself in India through the performative practices of the body politic. The body politic is a totalized conceptualization of a society imagined in the form of a body, with real exclusionary effects on those without citizenship rights. This body politic is made real through performances of popular sovereignty, bureaucratic state practices and liberal democratic electoral procedures performed during urban development processes. Ethnographic accounts of politics of slum rehabilitations in Pune show that the modern body politic is indeed performatively practised, and reshaped, by the very bodies that are expected to be alienated for the making of the body politic. Bodies meet one another in different spaces and times and generate the possibility of reshaping the liberal body politic into relational and affective bodily politics. Together, bodies become both the site and the means through which political modernity is reshaped in India

A Study on Controlling Power Supply Ramp-Up Time in SRAM PUFs

With growing connectivity in the modern era, the risk of encrypted data stored in hardware being exposed to third-party adversaries is higher than ever. The security of encrypted data depends on the secrecy of the stored key. Conventional methods of storing keys in Non-Volatile Memory have been shown to be susceptible to physical attacks. Physically Unclonable Functions provide a unique alternative to conventional key storage. SRAM PUFs utilize inherent process variation caused during manufacturing to derive secret keys from the power-up values of SRAM memory cells. This thesis analyzes the effect of supply ramp-up times on the reliability of SRAM PUFs. We use SPICE simulations as the platform to observe the effect of supply ramp times at the circuit level using carefully controlled supply voltages during power-up. We also measure the effect of supply ramp times on commercially available SRAM ICs by performing reliability and uniqueness measurements on two commercial SRAM models. Finally, a hardware implementation is proposed in a commercial 16nm FinFET technology to establish the design flow for taping out a custom SRAM IC with separated peripheral and core power supplies that would allow for experimental evaluation of sequenced power supplies on the SRAM PUF

High Pressure Micro-Scale Studies of Fast-Hydropyrolysis and Catalytic Hydrogenation of Biomass and Related Model Compounds

Biomass is a major source of renewable carbon which can be converted to hydrocarbon fuel with the aim of reducing the dependence on fossil based sources. Fast pyrolysis of biomass followed by catalytic hydrodeoxygenation of bio-oil is considered a promising biomass conversion route to produce drop in hydrocarbon fuels. The H2Bioil process was proposed as an integrated high pressure fast hydropyrolysis and catalytic vapor phase hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) pathway for utilizing biomass to produce high energy density fuel. During fast hydropyrolysis biomass is rapidly heated to generate a complex mixture of compounds with high oxygen content (35-40 wt %). In the H2Bioil process, hydropyrolysis vapors are immediately upgraded via a downstream catalytic reactor to reduce the oxygen content and produce a high energy density bio-oil