On roughness measurement by angular speckle correlation

In this work, the influence of both characteristics of the lens and misalignment of the incident beams on roughness measurement is presented. To investigate how the focal length and diameter affect the degree of correlation between the speckle patterns, a set of experiments with different lenses is performed. On the other hand, the roughness when the beams separated by an amount are non-coincident at the same point on the sample is measured. To conclude the study, the uncertainty of the method is calculated

ZeroLender: Trustless Peer-to-Peer Bitcoin Lending Platform

Since its inception a decade ago, Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology have been garnering interest from a large spectrum of financial institutions. Although it encompasses a currency, a payment method, and a ledger, Bitcoin as it currently stands does not support bitcoins lending. In this paper, we present a platform called ZeroLender for peer-to-peer lending in Bitcoin. Our protocol utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to achieve unlinkability between lenders and borrowers while securing payments in both directions against potential malicious behaviour of the ZeroLender as well as the lenders, and prove by simulation that our protocol is privacy-preserving. Based on our experiments, we show that the runtime and transcript size of our protocol scale linearly with respect to the number of lenders and repayments

Untersuchungen zur Entwicklung eines chemischen Reaktionsmodells atmosphaerischer Spurengas-Umsetzungen Jahresbericht 1980

TIB: AC 8746 (1980)+MF / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Detecting Staphylococcus aureus virulence and resistance genes: A comparison of whole-genome sequencing and DNA microarray technology

Staphylococcus aureus is a major bacterial pathogen causing a variety of diseases ranging from wound infections to severe bacteremia or intoxications. Besides host factors, the course and severity of disease is also widely dependent on the genotype of the bacterium. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS), followed by bioinformatic sequence analysis, is currently the most extensive genotyping method available. To identify clinically relevant staphylococcal virulence and resistance genes in WGS data, we developed an in silico typing scheme for the software SeqSphere(+) (Ridom GmbH, Munster, Germany). The implemented target genes (n = 182) correspond to those queried by the Identibac S. aureus Genotyping DNA microarray (Alere Technologies, Jena, Germany). The in silico scheme was evaluated by comparing the typing results of microarray and of WGS for 154 human S. aureus isolates. A total of 96.8% (n = 27,119) of all typing results were equally identified with microarray and WGS (40.6% present and 56.2% absent). Discrepancies (3.2% in total) were caused by WGS errors (1.7%), microarray hybridization failures (1.3%), wrong prediction of ambiguous microarray results (0.1%), or unknown causes (0.1%). Superior to the microarray, WGS enabled the distinction of allelic variants, which may be essential for the prediction of bacterial virulence and resistance phenotypes. Multilocus sequence typing clonal complexes and staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec element types inferred from microarray hybridization patterns were equally determined by WGS. In conclusion, WGS may substitute array-based methods due to its universal methodology, open and expandable nature, and rapid parallel analysis capacity for different characteristics in once-generated sequences