Search results for "serial"
showing 10 items of 150 documents
Evaluation of a Real-Time PCR Assay for the Detection and Quantification of Group Spores in Food
2010
A procedure based on quantitative real-time PCR was evaluated for the detection and quantification of Bacillus cereus spores. Several methods for DNA isolation, such as various heat treatments and germination solutions, were evaluated on spore suspensions of representative strains of the B. cereus group. Overall, the commercially available DNeasy tissue kit yielded the maximum amount of DNA. The procedure also was used to construct calibration curves for different food matrices, with a wide spore quantification range of 5 log units using serial dilutions of spore suspensions of B. cereus CECT 148T. The detection limit for B. cereus in artificially contaminated liquid egg and reconstituted i…
On the size of transducers for bidirectional decoding of prefix codes
2012
In a previous paper [L. Giambruno and S. Mantaci, Theoret. Comput. Sci. 411 (2010) 1785–1792] a bideterministic transducer is defined for the bidirectional deciphering of words by the method introduced by Girod [ IEEE Commun. Lett. 3 (1999) 245–247]. Such a method is defined using prefix codes. Moreover a coding method, inspired by the Girod’s one, is introduced, and a transducer that allows both right-to-left and left-to-right decoding by this method is defined. It is proved also that this transducer is minimal. Here we consider the number of states of such a transducer, related to some features of the considered prefix code X . We find some bounds of such a number of states in relation wi…
Letter Position Coding Across Modalities: The Case of Braille Readers
2012
BackgroundThe question of how the brain encodes letter position in written words has attracted increasing attention in recent years. A number of models have recently been proposed to accommodate the fact that transposed-letter stimuli like jugde or caniso are perceptually very close to their base words.MethodologyHere we examined how letter position coding is attained in the tactile modality via Braille reading. The idea is that Braille word recognition may provide more serial processing than the visual modality, and this may produce differences in the input coding schemes employed to encode letters in written words. To that end, we conducted a lexical decision experiment with adult Braille…
Lesion load may predict long-term cognitive dysfunction in multiple sclerosis patients
2015
Background: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques provided evidences into the understanding of cognitive impairment (CIm) in Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Objectives: To investigate the role of white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) in predicting long-term CIm in a cohort of MS patients. Methods: 303 out of 597 patients participating in a previous multicenter clinical-MRI study were enrolled (49.4% were lost at follow-up). The following MRI parameters, expressed as fraction (f) of intracranial volume, were evaluated: cerebrospinal fluid (CSF-f), WM-f, GM-f and abnormal WM (AWM-f), a measure of lesion load. Nine years later, cognitive status was assessed in 241 patients using the Symbol Dig…
An AER handshake-less modular infrastructure PCB with x8 2.5Gbps LVDS serial links
2014
Nowadays spike-based brain processing emulation is taking off. Several EU and others worldwide projects are demonstrating this, like SpiNNaker, BrainScaleS, FACETS, or NeuroGrid. The larger the brain process emulation on silicon is, the higher the communication performance of the hosting platforms has to be. Many times the bottleneck of these system implementations is not on the performance inside a chip or a board, but in the communication between boards. This paper describes a novel modular Address-Event-Representation (AER) FPGA-based (Spartan6) infrastructure PCB (the AER-Node board) with 2.5Gbps LVDS high speed serial links over SATA cables that offers a peak performance of 32-bit 62.5…
Block Bootstrap Methods and the Choice of Stocks for the Long Run
2011
Financial advisors commonly recommend that the investment horizon should be rather long in order to benefit from the "time diversification". In this case, in order to choose the optimal portfolio, it is necessary to estimate the risk and reward of several alternative portfolios over a long-run given a sample of observations over a short-run. Two interrelated obstacles in these estimations are lack of sufficient data and the uncertainty in the nature of the return generating process. To overcome these obstacles researchers rely heavily on block bootstrap methods. In this paper we demonstrate that the estimates provided by a block bootstrap method are generally biased and we propose two metho…
Nanoseconds Timing System Based on IEEE 1588 FPGA Implementation
2019
Clock synchronization procedures are mandatory in most physical experiments where event fragments are readout by spatially dislocated sensors and must be glued together to reconstruct key parameters (e.g. energy, interaction vertex etc.) of the process under investigation. These distributed data readout topologies rely on an accurate time information available at the frontend, where raw data are acquired and tagged with a precise timestamp prior to data buffering and central data collecting. This makes the network complexity and latency, between frontend and backend electronics, negligible within upper bounds imposed by the frontend data buffer capability. The proposed research work describ…
Chemical and spectroscopic characteristics of the wood of Vitis vinifera cv. Sangiovese affected by esca disease.
2009
Chemical and spectroscopic analyses ((13)C cross-polarization-magic angle spinning NMR and attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopies) were carried out on the wood of Vitis vinifera cv. Sangiovese with brown-red discoloration and black streaks caused by esca disease. The analyses of the brown-red wood revealed the destruction of hemicelluloses and noncrystalline cellulose as well as modifications in the pectic and ligninic wood fractions. The pectic fraction consisted of carbohydrates associated with polyphenols. The lignin fraction exhibited only a few changes in the aromatic systems and a partial demethylation, and it appeared to be associated with condensed phe…
DSP Implementation for Measuring the Loop Gain Frequency Response of Digitally Controlled Power Converters
2012
This paper presents a method for measuring the loop gain frequency response of digitally controlled power converters, without the need of any expensive measurement equipment such as frequency response analyzers (FRA). The method is based on the traditional perturbation and measurement scheme. The perturbation is internally synthesized by the DSP and applied as pulse-width modulation to the converter. The loop input and output data are sent to a PC via universal serial bus, which performs online the DFT of sent data. The perturbation amplitude is varied with frequency to improve signal-to-noise ratio of measurements. The number of cycles used to perform discrete Fourier transform calculation…
Modelling the insect Mushroom Bodies: Application to sequence learning
2015
Learning and reproducing temporal sequences is a fundamental ability used by living beings to adapt behaviour repertoire to environmental constraints. This paper is focused on the description of a model based on spiking neurons, able to learn and autonomously generate a sequence of events. The neural architecture is inspired by the insect Mushroom Bodies (MBs) that are a crucial centre for multimodal sensory integration and behaviour modulation. The sequence learning capability coexists, within the insect brain computational model, with all the other features already addressed like attention, expectation, learning classification and others. This is a clear example that a unique neural struc…