Sharif Digital Repository

A gossip protocol is a procedure for spreading secrets among a group of agents, using a connection graph. The goal is for all agents to get to know all secrets, in which case we call the execution of the protocol successful. We consider distributed and dynamic gossip protocols. In distributed gossip, the agents themselves instead of a global scheduler determine whom to call. In dynamic gossip, not only secrets are exchanged but also telephone numbers (agent identities). This results in increased graph connectivity. We define six such distributed dynamic gossip protocols, and we characterize them in terms of the topology of the graphs on which they are successful, wherein we distinguish... 

A gossip protocol is a procedure for spreading secrets among a group of agents, using a connection graph. In each call between a pair of connected agents, the two agents share all the secrets they have learnt. In dynamic gossip problems, dynamic connection graphs are enabled by permitting agents to spread as well the telephone numbers of other agents they know. This paper characterizes different distributed epistemic protocols in terms of the (largest) class of graphs where each protocol is successful, i.e. where the protocol necessarily ends up with all agents knowing all secrets. © 2016 Elsevier B.V  

Diffuse reflectance near-infrared (NIR) data (908–1676 nm) of chicken breast fillets was recorded in a non-destructive way using a portable miniaturised NIR spectrometer. The NIR data was used to discriminate between fresh and thawed breast fillets and to determine the birds’ growth conditions. NIR data was recorded of 153 commercial supermarket chicken fillet samples by applying the NIR device equipped with the standard issue collar on the samples in three different ways: (i) directly on the meat (ii) through the top foil of the package (i.e. with an air pocket between the foil and the breast fillet), and (iii) through the top foil with the packaging turned bottom up (i.e. no air pocket... 

A previous review concluded that postural sway is increased in patients with low back pain (LBP). However, more detailed analysis of the literature shows that postural deficit may be dependent on experimental conditions in which patients with LBP have been assessed. The research question to be answered in this review was: " Is there any difference in postural sway between subjects with and without LBP across several sensory manipulation conditions?" A literature search in Pubmed, Scopus, Embase and PsychInfo was performed followed by hand search and contact with authors. Studies investigating postural sway during bipedal stance without applying external forces in patients with specific and... 

Human error including driving misbehavior contributes to over 90 percent of road vehicle accidents, and speeding is considered to be risky. Smart technologies, such as Connected Vehicle System (CVS) are among the interesting technical options to improve driving behavior, and Pay-As-You-Speed (PAYS) is an effective economic incentive to reduce speed violations. We investigated the acceptability of CVS with and without the presence of economic incentives, such as PAYS, in the context of a middle-income country: Iran. We used a Zero-Inflated Ordered Probit model (ZIOP) to estimate drivers’ willingness to pay for a CVS, and a hazard-based model for predicting the incentive level needed for... 

The Sun is located inside an enormous local cavity filled with a million degree, ionized hydrogen gas and surrounded by a wall of dense and cold gas, this cavity is known as the Local Bubble (LB). Since the tempreture of Local Bubble is high, the typical singly-ionized atoms or molecules can not survive at this high tempreture. To overcome this problem we should probe the Local Bubble using species which survive under this condition so we have done a whole sky survey in north hemisphere by observing absorptions in the Diffuse Interstellar Bands (DIBs) for sight-lines with distance >300 pc. We have done 30 nights observation and have observed 473 bright stars. We found that the correlations... 

Atomic emission detection (AED) is a sensitive as well as a selective detection technique for gas chromatography (GC) and provides element-specific information. A rapidly increasing number of applications in many different areas illustrates the versatility and analytical power of the technique - especially when complex samples have to be analysed. The complementary use of GC-AED and GC with mass-spectrometric detection often yields the most rewarding results. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved  

This article proposes a control strategy to stabilize the axial-torsional dynamics of a distributed drill-string system. An infinite-dimensional model for the vibrational dynamics of the drill string is used as a basis for controller design. In this article, both the cutting process and frictional contact effects are considered in the bit-rock interaction model. Moreover, models for the top-side boundary conditions regarding axial and torsional actuation are considered. The resulting model is formulated in terms of neutral-type delay differential equations that involve constant state delays, state-dependent state delays, and constant input delays arising from the distributed nature of the... 

We study the thermal transport of a spin-1/2 two leg antiferromagnetic ladder in the direction of legs. The possible effect of spin-orbit coupling and crystalline electric field are investigated in terms of anisotropies in the Heisenberg interactions on both leg and rung couplings. The original spin ladder is mapped to a bosonic model via a bond-operator transformation, where an infinite hard-core repulsion is imposed to constrain one boson occupation per site. The Green's function approach is applied to obtain the energy spectrum of quasi-particle excitations responsible for thermal transport. The thermal conductivity is found to be monotonically decreasing with temperature due to increased... 

We present new high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) observations of the diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) in the Local Bubble and its surroundings. We observed 432 sightlines and obtain the equivalent widths of the λ5780 and λ5797 Å DIBs up to a distance of ∼200 pc. All of the observations were carried out using the Intermediate Dispersion Spectrograph on the 2.5 m Isaac Newton Telescope, during three years, to reach a minimum S/N of ∼2000. All of the λ5780 and λ5797 absorptions are presented in this paper and we tabulate the observed values of the interstellar parameters, λ5780, λ5797, Na ID1, and Na ID2, including the uncertainties  

The soil water retention curve (SWRC) provides information for a wide range of geoenvironmental problems, such as analyses of transient two-phase flow, the bearing capacity and shear strength of unsaturated soils. Many past studies have shown experimentally the effects of stress on the SWRC. Unfortunately, direct stress-dependent water retention measurements are relatively time-consuming and generally require special equipment and a certain level of expertise. This study primarily aimed to develop a novel predictive framework within the context of soft computing to capture the dependency of the SWRC on several variables, with an emphasis on stress and soil type. To achieve this, the three... 

The Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) is under construction in the Netherlands and in several surrounding European countries. In this contribution, we describe the layout and design of the telescope, with particular emphasis on the imaging characteristics of the array when used in its 'standard imaging' mode. After briefly reviewing the calibration and imaging software used for LOFAR image processing, we show some recent results from the ongoing imaging commissioning efforts. We conclude by summarizing future prospects for the use of LOFAR in observing the little-explored low-frequency Universe  

Absorption of carbon dioxide (CO2) in aqueous solutions can be improved by the addition of other compounds. However, this requires a large amount of equilibrium data for solubility estimation in a wide ranges of temperature, pressure and concentration. In this paper, a model based on an artificial neural network (ANN) was proposed and developed with mixtures containing monoethanolamine (MEA), diethanolamine (DEA), methyldiethanolamine (MDEA), 2-amino-2-methyl-1-propanol (AMP), methanol, triethanolamine (TEA), piperazine (PZ), diisopropanolamine (DIPA) and tetramethylensulfone (TMS) to predict solubility of CO2 in mixed aqueous solution (especially in binary and ternary mixtures) over wide... 

Despite a diverse range of active pharmaceutical agents currently at our disposal, high morbidity rate diseases continue to pose a major health crisis globally. One of the important parameters in this regard is the controlled cargo delivery at desired sites. Among a variety of synthetic and natural macromolecular systems, chitosan, an abundant biopolymer, offers a platform for tailored architectures that could have high loading capacity of cargo, target and deliver. Stimuli directed accumulation of vehicles and drug release is an area of direct relevance to biomedical applications. In this review, we highlight essential characteristics of modified chitosan that present themselves for... 

NGC 5128 (Cen A) is the nearest giant elliptical galaxy and one of the brightest extragalactic radio sources in the sky, boasting a prominent dust lane and jets emanating from its nuclear supermassive black hole. In this paper, we construct the star formation history (SFH) of two small fields in the halo of NGC 5128: a northeastern field (Field 1) at a projected distance of ∼18.8 kpc from the center, and a southern field (Field 2) ∼9.9 kpc from the center. Our method is based on identifying long-period variable (LPV) stars that trace their sibling stellar population and hence historical star formation due to their high luminosity and strong variability; we identified 395 LPV stars in Field 1... 

A search for excited quarks decaying into the γ + jet final state is presented. The analysis is based on data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb-1 collected by the CMS experiment in proton-proton collisions at √s=8TeV at the LHC. Events with photons and jets with high transverse momenta are selected and the γ + jet invariant mass distribution is studied to search for a resonance peak. The 95% confidence level upper limits on the product of cross section and branching fraction are evaluated as a function of the excited quark mass. Limits on excited quarks are presented as a function of their mass and coupling strength; masses below 3.5 TeV are excluded at 95% confidence... 

A search for supersymmetry through the direct pair production of top squarks, with Higgs (H) or Z bosons in the decay chain, is performed using a data sample of proton-proton collisions at s=8 TeV collected in 2012 with the CMS detector at the LHC. The sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 fb-1. The search is performed using a selection of events containing leptons and bottom-quark jets. No evidence for a significant excess of events over the standard model background prediction is observed. The results are interpreted in the context of simplified supersymmetric models with pair production of a heavier top-squark mass eigenstate t~2 decaying to a lighter top-squark mass... 

The ratio of the top-quark branching fractions R=B(t→Wb)/B(t→Wq), where the denominator includes the sum over all down-type quarks (q = b, s, d), is measured in the tt- dilepton final state with proton-proton collision data at s=8 TeV from an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb-1, collected with the CMS detector. In order to quantify the purity of the signal sample, the cross section is measured by fitting the observed jet multiplicity, thereby constraining the signal and background contributions. By counting the number of b jets per event, an unconstrained value of R=1.014±0.003(stat.)±0.032(syst.) is measured, in a good agreement with current precision measurements in electroweak and flavour... 

Constraints are presented on the total width of the recently discovered Higgs boson, ΓH, using its relative on-shell and off-shell production and decay rates to a pair of Z bosons, where one Z boson decays to an electron or muon pair, and the other to an electron, muon, or neutrino pair. The analysis is based on the data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2011 and 2012, corresponding to integrated luminosities of 5.1fb -1 at a center-of-mass energy s=7TeV and 19.7fb -1 at s=8TeV. A simultaneous maximum likelihood fit to the measured kinematic distributions near the resonance peak and above the Z-boson pair production threshold leads to an upper limit on the Higgs boson width of ΓH...