Reverse Logistics: Mattress Recycling

This study investigates U.S. manufacturing industries that can utilize raw materials obtained from mattress recycling as an input. To achieve this, a material analysis is conducted to determined the types of raw materials that can be obtained from a variety of mattresses. This research also focuses on the utilization of bed coils and wood as decorative parts while elaborating on their sales via online platforms

A Hardware Security Solution against Scan-Based Attacks

Scan based Design for Test (DfT) schemes have been widely used to achieve high fault coverage for integrated circuits. The scan technique provides full access to the internal nodes of the device-under-test to control them or observe their response to input test vectors. While such comprehensive access is highly desirable for testing, it is not acceptable for secure chips as it is subject to exploitation by various attacks. In this work, new methods are presented to protect the security of critical information against scan-based attacks. In the proposed methods, access to the circuit containing secret information via the scan chain has been severely limited in order to reduce the risk of a security breach. To ensure the testability of the circuit, a built-in self-test which utilizes an LFSR as the test pattern generator (TPG) is proposed. The proposed schemes can be used as a countermeasure against side channel attacks with a low area overhead as compared to the existing solutions in literature

Simplifying and Understanding State Space Models with Diagonal Linear RNNs

Sequence models based on linear state spaces (SSMs) have recently emerged as a promising choice of architecture for modeling long range dependencies across various modalities. However, they invariably rely on discretization of a continuous state space, which complicates their presentation and understanding. In this work, we dispose of the discretization step, and propose a model based on vanilla Diagonal Linear RNNs ($\mathrm{DLR}$). We empirically show that, despite being conceptually much simpler, $\mathrm{DLR}$ is as performant as previously-proposed SSMs on a variety of tasks and benchmarks including Long Range Arena and raw speech classification. Moreover, we characterize the expressivity of SSMs (including $\mathrm{DLR}$) and attention-based models via a suite of $13$ synthetic sequence-to-sequence tasks involving interactions over tens of thousands of tokens, ranging from simple operations, such as shifting an input sequence, to detecting co-dependent visual features over long spatial ranges in flattened images. We find that while SSMs report near-perfect performance on tasks that can be modeled via $\textit{few}$ convolutional kernels, they struggle on tasks requiring $\textit{many}$ such kernels and especially when the desired sequence manipulation is $\textit{context-dependent}$. Despite these limitations, $\mathrm{DLR}$ reaches high performance on two higher-order reasoning tasks $\mathrm{ListOpsSubTrees}$ and $\mathrm{PathfinderSegmentation}\text{-}\mathrm{256}$ with input lengths $8K$ and $65K$ respectively, and gives encouraging performance on $\mathrm{PathfinderSegmentation}\text{-}\mathrm{512}$ with input length $262K$ for which attention is not a viable choice.Comment: added Long Range Arena, language modeling with mixture of expert

Influence of laser spot size at diffuser plane on the longitudinal spatial coherence function of optical coherence microscopy system

Coherence properties and wavelength of light sources are indispensable for optical coherence microscopy/tomography as they greatly influence the signal to noise ratio, axial resolution, and penetration depth of the system. In the present letter, we investigated the longitudinal spatial coherence properties of the pseudo-thermal light source (PTS) as a function of spot size at the diffuser plane, which is controlled by translating microscope objective lens towards or away from the diffuser plane. The axial resolution of PTS is found to be maximum ~ 13 microns for the beam spot size of 3.5 mm at the diffuser plane. The change in the axial resolution of the system as the spot size is increased at the diffuser plane is further confirmed by performing experiments on standard gauge blocks of height difference of 15 microns. Thus, by appropriately choosing the beam spot size at the diffuser plane, any monochromatic laser light source depending on the biological window can be utilized to obtain high axial-resolution with large penetration depth and speckle-free tomographic images of multilayered biological specimens irrespective of the source temporal coherence length. In addition, PTS could be an attractive alternative light source for achieving high axial-resolution without needing chromatic aberration corrected optics and dispersion-compensation mechanism, unlike conventional setups.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1810.0199

Applying Brain Computer Interface Technology for Playing Games

Brain Computer Interfaces are specialized systems that allows users to control computer applications using their brain waves. Initially, BCI were mostly used in medical field. But after some research and thanks to consumer-grade electroencephalography (EEG) devices, many applications and research opportunities were opened outside of the medical field. One particular area that is gaining more evidence due to the arrival consumer-grade devices is that of computer games, as it allows more user-friendly applications of BCI technology for the general public. In this report, we are going to talk about one of those games, Maze game. It will be a 2D maze, path known to the user. Using the EEG device named Neurosky Brain Wave Kit user will be able to move the avatar in order to reach the goal from the starting position

Characterization of color cross-talk of CCD detectors and its influence in multispectral quantitative phase imaging

Multi-spectral quantitative phase imaging (QPI) is an emerging imaging modality for wavelength dependent studies of several biological and industrial specimens. Simultaneous multi-spectral QPI is generally performed with color CCD cameras. However, color CCD cameras are suffered from the color crosstalk issue, which needed to be explored. Here, we present a new approach for accurately measuring the color crosstalk of 2D area detectors, without needing prior information about camera specifications. Color crosstalk of two different cameras commonly used in QPI, single chip CCD (1-CCD) and three chip CCD (3-CCD), is systematically studied and compared using compact interference microscopy. The influence of color crosstalk on the fringe width and the visibility of the monochromatic constituents corresponding to three color channels of white light interferogram are studied both through simulations and experiments. It is observed that presence of color crosstalk changes the fringe width and visibility over the imaging field of view. This leads to an unwanted non-uniform background error in the multi-spectral phase imaging of the specimens. It is demonstrated that the color crosstalk of the detector is the key limiting factor for phase measurement accuracy of simultaneous multi-spectral QPI systems.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Prevalence of hepatitis B and C among patients admitted in respiratory medicine ward of a tertiary care hospital in Mullana, Ambala, Haryana, India

Background: Viral Hepatitis B and C have become a major public health problem. Hepatitis B affects approximately 30% of world population or about 2 billion people have serological evidence of either current or past infection. Hepatitis C virus infects approximately 3% of world population placing about 170 million people at risk of liver disease. In India, HBsAg prevalence rates among general population ranges from 0.1% to 11.7%, being 2% to 8% in most studies and seroprevalence for Hepatitis C ranges from 0.1% to 8% among general population.Methods: The study was conducted in the respiratory medicine Ward, MMIMSR in the month of August 2016. 200 patients were taken up for the study after clinical examination, necessary investigation and proper consent. Patients were tested for HBsAg antigen and HCV Tridot. Patients were put through a carefully designed questionnaire to look for possible cause of infection. Patients who came out to be positive for either Hepatitis B or C were counselled about further investigations and treatment options.Results: The prevalence rate for Hepatitis B came out to be 9% and for Hepatitis C was 5.5%. Hepatitis has become a major public health issue in India particularly in the rural areas. High prevalence rates among patients with respiratory diseases can be attributed to unsafe therapeutic injections and use of shared needles.Conclusions: There is a need to carry out larger studies to better elucidate the epidemiology of Hepatitis B and C and to identify high prevalence areas and simultaneously focus on improving public health measures to prevent disease transmission and decrease the burden of disease

Two broken pieces make a whole: adductor canal block

Total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is expounded to intense postoperative pain with a desire for early ambulation and reduce postoperative complications. Adductor canal blockade (ACB) blocks primarily the pain sensation while preserving the quadriceps strength facilitating early rehabilitation after knee surgery. ACB has been gaining popularity over femoral nerve block (FNB), continuous epidural analgesia (CEA), and psoas compartment block (PCB). Studies show that use of ultrasound alone reduced the possibilities of vascular and multiple skin punctures. Though there's emerging evidence proving the efficacy of ACB, there's limited literature on safe use of continuous ACB catheters. We report 2 cases of catheter fracture with USG guided ACB employed in TKA