31,914 research outputs found
Letter to the editor: autoimmune pathogenic mechanisms in Huntington’s disease
Letter to the Editor: Autoimmune pathogenic mechanisms in Huntington's disease
A decision-making approach for investigating the potential effects of near sourcing on supply chain
Purpose - Near sourcing is starting to be regarded as a valid alternative to global sourcing in order to leverage supply chain (SC) responsiveness and economic efficiency. The present work proposes a decision-making approach developed in collaboration with a leading Italian retailer that was willing to turn the global store furniture procurement process into near sourcing. Design/methodology/approach - Action research is employed. The limitations of the traditional SC organisation and purchasing process of the company are first identified. On such basis, an inventory management model is applied to run spreadsheet estimates where different purchasing and SC management strategies are adopted to determine the solution providing the lowest cost performance. Finally, a risk analysis of the selected best SC arrangement is conducted and results are discussed. Findings - Switching from East Asian suppliers to continental vendors enables a SC reengineering that increases flexibility and responsiveness to demand uncertainty which, together with decreased transportation costs, assures economic viability, thus proving the benefits of near sourcing. Research limitations/implications - The decision-making framework provides a methodological roadmap to address the comparison between near and global sourcing policies and to calculate the savings of the former against the latter. The approach could include additional organisational aspects and cost categories impacting on near sourcing and could be adapted to investigate different products, services, and business sectors. Originality/value - The work provides SC researchers and practitioners with a structured approach for understanding what drives companies to adopt near sourcing and for quantitatively assessing its advantage
A dynamical systems approach to the discrimination of the modes of operation of cryptographic systems
Evidence of signatures associated with cryptographic modes of operation is
established. Motivated by some analogies between cryptographic and dynamical
systems, in particular with chaos theory, we propose an algorithm based on
Lyapunov exponents of discrete dynamical systems to estimate the divergence
among ciphertexts as the encryption algorithm is applied iteratively. The
results allow to distinguish among six modes of operation, namely ECB, CBC,
OFB, CFB, CTR and PCBC using DES, IDEA, TEA and XTEA block ciphers of 64 bits,
as well as AES, RC6, Twofish, Seed, Serpent and Camellia block ciphers of 128
bits. Furthermore, the proposed methodology enables a classification of modes
of operation of cryptographic systems according to their strength.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure
Searching for Elko dark matter spinors at the CERN LHC
The aim of this work is to explore the possibility to discover a fermionic
field with mass dimension one, the Elko field, in the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC). Due to its mass dimension, an Elko can only interact either with
Standard Model (SM) spinors and gauge fields at 1-loop order or at tree level
through a quartic interaction with the Higgs field. In this Higgs portal
scenario, the Elko is a viable candidate to a dark matter constituent which has
been shown to be compatible with relic abundance measurements from WMAP and
direct dark matter--nucleon searches. We propose a search strategy for this
dark matter candidate in the channel at
the TeV LHC. We show the LHC potential to discover the Elko
considering a triple Higgs-Elko coupling as small as after 1
pb of integrated luminosity. Some phenomenological consequences of this
new particle and its collider signatures are also discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure
SwSt 1: an O-rich planetary nebula around a C-rich central star
The hydrogen-deficient carbon-rich [WCL] type central star HD167362 and its
oxygen-rich planetary nebula (PN) SwSt~1 are investigated. The nebular
chemistry might indicate a recent origin for the carbon-rich stellar spectrum.
Its stellar and nebular properties might therefore provide further
understanding of the origin of the [WCL] central star class. The UV-IR stellar
spectra are modelled with state of the codes and show ~40kK central star with a
wind and a C/O~3, indicative of efficient third dredge-up. The synthetic
stellar flux distribution is used to model the high density, compact PN, which
has a solar C/O ratio, is still enshrouded by 1200K and 230K dust shells and,
reported here for the first time, in molecular hydrogen. Although it appears
that the change in C/O ratio has been recent, the published spectroscopy since
1895 has been re-examined and no clear spectral change is seen. If an event
occurred that has turned it into a hydrogen-deficient central star, it did not
happen in the last 100 years.Comment: 31 pages, 19 figures (some are gif files), MNRAS in pres
The very faint hard state of the persistent neutron star X-ray binary SLX 1737-282 near the Galactic centre
We report on a detailed study of the spectral and temporal properties of the
neutron star low mass X-ray binary SLX 1737-282, which is located only ~1degr
away from Sgr A. The system is expected to have a short orbital period, even
within the ultra-compact regime, given its persistent nature at low X-ray
luminosities and the long duration thermonuclear burst that it has displayed.
We have analysed a Suzaku (18 ks) observation and an XMM-Newton (39 ks)
observation taken 7 years apart. We infer (0.5-10 keV) X-ray luminosities in
the range 3-6 x10^35erg s-1, in agreement with previous findings. The spectra
are well described by a relatively cool (kTbb = 0.5 keV) black body component
plus a Comptonized emission component with {\Gamma} ~1.5-1.7. These values are
consistent with the source being in a faint hard state, as confirmed by the ~
20 per cent fractional root mean square amplitude of the fast variability (0.1
- 7 Hz) inferred from the XMM-Newton data. The electron temperature of the
corona is >7 keV for the Suzaku observation, but it is measured to be as low as
~2 keV in the XMM-Newton data at higher flux. The latter is significantly lower
than expected for systems in the hard state. We searched for X-ray pulsations
and imposed an upper limit to their semi-amplitude of 2 per cent (0.001 - 7
Hz). Finally, we investigated the origin of the low frequency variability
emission present in the XMM-Newton data and ruled out an absorption dip origin.
This constraint the orbital inclination of the system to 65 degr unless the
orbital period is longer than 11 hr (i.e. the length of the XMM-Newton
observation).Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in MNRA
Swimmers in thin films: from swarming to hydrodynamic instabilities
We investigate theoretically the collective dynamics of a suspension of low
Reynolds number swimmers that are confined to two dimensions by a thin fluid
film. Our model swimmer is characterized by internal degrees of freedom which
locally exert active stresses (force dipoles or quadrupoles) on the fluid. We
find that hydrodynamic interactions mediated by the film can give rise to
spontaneous continuous symmetry breaking (swarming), to states with either
polar or nematic homogeneous order. For dipolar swimmers, the stroke averaged
dynamics are enough to determine the leading contributions to the collective
behaviour. In contrast, for quadrupolar swimmers, our analysis shows that
detailed features of the internal dynamics play an important role in
determining the bulk behaviour. In the broken symmetry phases, we investigate
fluctuations of hydrodynamic variables of the system and find that these
destabilize order. Interestingly, this instability is not generic and depends
on length-scale.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, references added, typos corrected, new
introductio
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