Wetlands are integral components of our natural environment since they provide many critical ecosystem services to humanity, such as water purification, climate change mitigation, flood control, and biodiversity. Although wetlands can convey resilience to some degree of changes, they might be vulnerable to climate change. Altered hydrology and rising temperatures can turn the wetland services into

Empirical forgetting curve data have been shown to follow a power function. In contrast, many connectionist models predict either an exponential decay or flat forgetting curves. This paper simulates power function forgetting curves in a Hopfield network modified to incorporate the more biologically realistic assumptions of bounded weights and a distribution of learning rates. The modified model pr

This thesis is a study of the development of the Chinese public accounting profession since China launched the “Reform and Opening-up” policy in 1978. The current, established theoretical representations of accounting professionalisation in China are predominantly underpinned by Gramsci’s (1971) hegemony perspective. Such a hegemony perspective has led to a one-sided understanding of accounting pr

Many industrially relevant emulsification devices are of the high-energy type, where drop deformation and subsequent breakup, take place due to intense turbulent fluid–drop interactions. This includes high-pressure homogenizers as well as rotor-stator mixers (also known as high-shear mixers) of various designs. The stress acting on a drop in a turbulent flow field varies over time, occasionally re

The frequently assumed "freshness" constraint on the source states in multiple authentication schemes is not necessary if one allows the encoding rule to change between subsequent transmissions. In the paper it is shown that the main existing lower bounds on the probabilities of successful attack on multiple authentication schemes also hold for this new setup. Furthermore, Stinson's (1988) bound f

The threat of hardware Trojans has been widely recognized by academia, industry, and government agencies. A Trojan can compromise security of a system in spite of cryptographic protection. The damage caused by a Trojan may not be limited to a business or reputation, but could have a severe impact on public safety, national economy, or national security. An extremely stealthy way of implementing ha

In this paper we consider cipher systems that provide both secrecy and security for a given number of (subsequent) transmissions. We show that there exists a broad class of situations in which we can do better (less key requirement) than just concatenating a perfect secrecy cipher and an authentication code.

As demonstrated by the recent attack on Intel's Ivy Bridge processor, the traditional Logic Built-In Self-Test (LBIST) methods do not provide adequate protection of SoC against malicious modifications known as hardware Trojans. In this paper, we introduce a simple but efficient countermeasure against hardware Trojans which exploits non-zero aliasing probability of LBIST. We propose to generate LBI

The gut microbiome is increasingly recognized for its impact on host fitness, but it remains poorly understood how naturally variable environments influence gut microbiome diversity and composition. We studied changes in the gut microbiome of ten genotypes of water fleas Daphnia magna in submerged mesocosm enclosures in a eutrophic lake over a period of 16 weeks, from early summer to autumn. The m

Semantic Dispositionalism is roughly the view that meaning a certain thing by a word, or possessing a certain concept, consists in being disposed to do something, e.g., infer a certain way. Its main problem is that it seems to have so many and disparate exceptions. People can fail to infer as required due to lack of logical acumen, intoxication, confusion, deviant theories, neural malfunctioning,

The relationship between emotion regulation, social interaction and different types of restricted and repetitive behaviors is poorly understood. In the present study, structural equation modeling based on information about 239 individuals with autism was used to examine whether emotion regulation and social communication were associated with self-injury and stereotyped behaviors. Results showed th

Drones are increasingly becoming a ubiquitous feature of society. They are being used for a multiplicity of applications for military, leisure, economic, and academic purposes. Their application in academia, especially as social science research tools, has seen a sharp uptake in the last decade. This has been possible due, largely, to significant developments in computerization and miniaturization

Human protein HC is a member of the lipocalin superfamily with unique properties since it carries a covalently bound fluorescent chromophore mediating the linkage of the major part of protein HC to several plasma proteins, with IgA as the dominating complex partner. Native protein HC displays characteristic absorption and fluorescence spectra similar to those of glycated proteins with advanced gly

Over decades it has been unclear how individual migratory songbirds cross large ecological barriers such as seas or deserts. By deploying light-level geolocators on four songbird species weighing only about 12 g, we found that these otherwise mainly nocturnal migrants seem to regularly extend their nocturnal flights into the day when crossing the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea. The propor

Urine glycosaminoglycans (GAG) concentrations were measured in 150 patients with primary glomerulonephritides: endocapillary glomerulonephritis, mesangial proliferative glomerulonephritis, IgA nephropathy, membranous glomerulonephritis and minimal change nephropathy, and in 63 healthy controls and 19 patients with diabetes nephropathy. The urine GAG to creatinine ratios (GCR) were significantly re