Helium and multiple stellar populations in the massive outer-halo globular cluster NGC 2419.

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On-line Certification for All: The PINVOX Algorithm

A protoype algorithm: PINVOX ("Personal Identification Number by Voice") for on-line certification is introduced to guarantee that scholars have followed, i.e., listened and watched, a complete recorded lecture with the option of earning a certificate or diploma of completion after remotely attending courses. It is based on the injection of unique, randomly selected and pre-recorded integer numbers (or single letters or words) within the audio trace of a video stream at places where silence is automatically detected. The certificate of completion or "virtual attendance" is generated on-the-fly after the successful identification of the embedded PINVOX code by a video viewer student

TV White Spaces: A Pragmatic Approach

190 pages The editors and publisher have taken due care in preparation of this book, but make no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of the use of the information contained herein. Links to websites imply neither responsibility for, nor approval of, the information contained in those other web sites on the part of ICTP. No intellectual property rights are transferred to ICTP via this book, and the authors/readers will be free to use the given material for educational purposes.  e ICTP will not transfer rights to other organizations, nor will it be used for any commercial purposes. ICTP is not to endorse or sponsor any particular commercial product, service or activity mentioned in this book. This book is released under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives ¦.þ International license. For more details regarding your rights to use and redistribute this work, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Energy-efficient Internet of Things monitoring with low-capacity devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows users to gather data from the physical environment. While sensors in public spaces are already widely used, users are reluctant to deploy sensors for shared data at their homes. The deployment of IoT nodes at the users premises presents privacy issues regarding who can access to their data once it is sent to the Cloud which the users cannot control. In this paper we present an energy-efficient and low cost solution for environmental monitoring at the users home. Our system is built completely with open source components and is easy to reproduce. We leverage the infrastructure and trust of a community network to store and control the access to the monitored data. We tested our solution during several months on different low-capacity single board computers (SBC) and it showed to be stable. Our results suggest that this solution could become a permanently running service in SBCs at the users homes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Distributing synchronous systems with modular structure

Abstract—Synchronous programs were introduced to sim-plify the development of reactive systems hiding the complexity and indeterminism of the interleaving while taking full ad-vantage of possible concurrency. The introduction of commu-nication networks enabled the creation of distributed systems presenting the programmer with a new burden of interleaving and non determinism due to the asynchronous communication medium. Again this complexity should be hidden from the user while taking full advantage of the possible concurrency to improve performance. Many algorithms for the automatic distributions of synchronous programs have been proposed so far, but they are not suitable for large scale system because they do not preserve the compositionality of the original code: the modularity of the synchronous program is lost. As a result the subsystems are not re-usable and a small local change results in the recompilation and re-distribution of the overall system. This solution is cumbersome and unpractical in many real-world applications. In this paper we introduce an algorithm for the distribution of synchronous programs that preserves the modularity and allows separate compilation and subsystem re-use. I

A Mobile Science Index for Development

A simple Mobile Science Potentiality Index (mSPI) is introduced as a barometer reflecting a new signal of world development through the capacity for a interconnected community to participate collectively in, and carry out, scientific studies using mobile devices. The mSP Index could be a new signal for world development

CAPTCHA using Word Relationships

CAPTCHAs are challenge questions employed by websites to prevent access by automated programs (bots) while allowing access to human users. The effectiveness of a CAPTCHA in distinguishing between humans and bots is sometimes reduced, because as bots get more powerful, they are able to solve certain types of challenge questions almost as well as humans. This disclosure describes CAPTCHAs based upon word relationships. Solving the CAPTCHAs requires demonstrating natural language understanding. Automated programs are not yet comparable to humans in their ability to understand natural language. CAPTCHAs of this disclosure provide useful techniques to distinguish human users from bots

A Low Cost Implementation of an Existing Hands-on Laboratory Experiment in Electronic Engineering

In engineering the pedagogical content of most formative programmes includes a significant amount of practical laboratory hands-on activity designed to deliver knowledge acquisition from actual experience alongside traditional face-to-face classroom based lectures and tutorials; this hands-on aspect is not always adequately addressed by current e-learning platforms. An innovative approach to e-learning in engineering, named computer aided engineering education (CAEE) is about the use of computer aids for the enhanced, interactive delivery of educational materials in different fields of engineering through two separate but related components; one for classroom and another for practical hands-on laboratory work. The component for hands-on laboratory practical work focuses on the use of mixed reality (video-based augmented reality) tools on mobile devices/platforms. This paper presents the computer aided engineering education (CAEE) implementation of a laboratory experiment in micro-electronics that highlights some features such as the ability to closely implement an existing laboratory based hands-on experiment with lower associated costs and the ability to conduct the experiment off-line while maintaining existing pedagogical contents and standards