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In the ever-evolving realm of cybersecurity, the increasing integration of Metaverse systems with cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, and Cloud Computing presents a host of new opportunities alongside significant challenges. This article employs a methodological approach that combines an extensive literature review with focused case study analyses to examine the changing cybersecurity landscape within these intersecting domains. The emphasis is particularly on the Metaverse, exploring its current state of cybersecurity, potential future developments, and the influential roles of AI, blockchain, and cloud technologies. Our thorough investigation assesses a range of cybersecurity standards and frameworks to determine their effectiveness in managing the risks associated with these emerging technologies. Special focus is directed towards the rapidly evolving digital economy of the Metaverse, investigating how AI and blockchain can enhance its cybersecurity infrastructure whilst acknowledging the complexities introduced by cloud computing. The results highlight significant gaps in existing standards and a clear necessity for regulatory advancements, particularly concerning blockchain's capability for self-governance and the earlystage development of the Metaverse. The article underscores the need for proactive regulatory involvement, stressing the importance of cybersecurity experts and policymakers adapting and preparing for the swift advancement of these technologies. Ultimately, this study offers a comprehensive overview of the current scenario, foresees future challenges, and suggests strategic directions for integrated cybersecurity within Metaverse systems utilising AI, blockchain, and cloud computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study the authors present an innovative approach to resolving scalability and efficiency challenges in blockchain technology through the integration of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). This approach helps to overcome the limitations of traditional blockchain systems, particularly in transaction processing. The classic blockchain has some problems as slow transaction processing and poor scalability. The authors offer Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) as a scalable and energy-efficient alternative. The paper outlines the development of a DAG-based blockchain model, utilizing Python and Flask alongside the Ed25519 cryptographic curve. It conducts a comparative analysis of DAG with traditional consensus mechanisms like Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, underscoring the efficiency and security benefits of employment of DAG. The research methodology includes an extensive literature review and the construction of a practical model to demonstrate DAG's applicability in blockchain networks. Particularly notable is the exploration of DAG's potential in Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, addressing critical issues such as energy inefficiency and network communication challenges in existing consensus algorithms. The authors calculated the performance of the model and compared it with similar models on several evaluation criteria. The simulation results of our proposed model show an improvement in performance and security by minimizing end-to-end delay, time cost, energy consumption, and throughput. The model eliminates the limitations of classic blockchain systems, such as high latency and low scalability. It structures transactions and blocks as a DAG, which provides fast validation and high scalability without compromising security. The research demonstrates the transformative implications of DAG for advancing blockchain technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of the "idealist" intellectual workshops behind the 20th-century liturgical architecture before and after the Second Vatican Council. These workshops established their concepts on the intriguingly historic presumption that, in order to refresh the Catholic liturgy, one must seek and return to the origins of Christianity. In other words, their worldview was characterized by the spirit of ressourcement, which was one of the great motivators of the new liturgical paradigm brought about by 1962. Ressourcement had both monastic and secular aspects to the invocation - or recreation - of the early apostolic communities by means of new spatial and contextual programs in contemporary church architecture. These programs were conceptually compound, and were often guided or implemented by the clergy itself. The study also sheds light on some of the 21th-century interpretations and the survival of the same ideas in today's architectural culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syukoro (Suki) Manabe's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded largely for his early work on one-dimensional models of "radiative–convective equilibrium" (RCE), which produced the first credible estimates of Earth's climate sensitivity. This article reviews that work and tries to identify those aspects that make it so distinctive. We argue that Manabe's model of RCE contained three crucial ingredients. These are (i) a tight convective coupling of the surface to the troposphere, (ii) an assumption of fixed relative humidity rather than fixed absolute humidity, and (iii) a sufficiently realistic representation of greenhouse gas radiative transfer. Previous studies had separately identified these key ingredients, but none had properly combined them. We then discuss each of these ingredients in turn, highlighting how subsequent research in the intervening decades has only cemented their importance for understanding global climate change. We close by reflecting on the elegance of Manabe's approach and its lasting value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Interest in older employees increases in times of population ageing. Previous research exploring the situation has underlined older employees' struggle with workplace changes. However, it has not explored their master narrative – the socially shared narrative about older employees that steers behaviour. This study explores this narrative and its differences across changing workplaces. It draws on Lyotard's suggestion that master narratives disintegrate in post-modern societies. Design/methodology/approach: This study conducts focus groups among older Finnish employees of an airline, postal service and social care. These groups experienced different kinds of workplace changes, namely mass layoffs, digitalisation and restructuring. The focus groups highlight the individuals' shared narratives, thereby pinpointing the master narrative. Findings: The master narrative describes how simultaneous changes at the workplace and in their health lead older employees to look for ways to exit their jobs. This narrative is largely stable across workplaces, showing no disintegration but some variation. Originality/value: This is the first study on the master narrative of older employees and its disintegration. To the authors' knowledge, it is also the first study to use focus groups to explore a master narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been increasing interest in the study of research communities with the goal of optimizing their outcomes and impact. While current methods can predict future trends, they offer little insight about the causes of the trends. However, causal insight is important for strategic decision making to improve a community. This paper presents a new method to predict the possible causes for inefficiencies in a community by relating them to disconnections between trends, like trends in the number of publications, patents, citations, and so on. The method combines traditional scientometric and webometric metrics and metric predictions with a recent model for trend analysis in a community. The proposed method was used to analyze electronic design automation (EDA) domain. The analysis showed intriguing disconnections between the trends of the number of papers, number of granted patents, and impact of its main publications. The analysis suggests a slightly decreasing impact and visibility of EDA, while having less novel, commonly-accepted knowledge in the area. The gained insight suggests three possible strategic decisions to improve EDA community: avoiding to ignore new ideas, reducing the complexity of framed problems, and keeping a minimal gap between real-life needs and academic solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is an access control mechanism that ensures efficient data sharing among dynamic groups of users by setting up access structures indicating who can access what. However, ABE suffers from expensive computation and privacy issues in resource-constrained environments such as IoT devices. In this paper, we present SHARE-ABE, a novel collaborative approach for preserving privacy that is built on top of Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). Our approach uses Fog computing to outsource the most laborious decryption operations to Fog nodes. The latter collaborate to partially decrypt the data using an original and efficient chained architecture. Additionally, our approach preserves the privacy of the access policy by introducing false attributes. Furthermore, we introduce a new construction of a collaboration attribute that allows users within the same group to combine their attributes while satisfying the access policy. Experiments and analyses of the security properties demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient especially for resource-constrained IoT devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motor imagery-based brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCI) have been proposed as a means for stroke rehabilitation, which combined with virtual reality allows for introducing game-based interactions into rehabilitation. However, the control of the MI-BCI may be difficult to obtain and users may face poor performance which frustrates them and potentially affects their motivation to use the technology. Decreases in motivation could be reduced by increasing the users' sense of agency over the system. The aim of this study was to understand whether embodiment (ownership) of a hand depicted in virtual reality can enhance the sense of agency to reduce frustration in an MI-BCI task. Twenty-two healthy participants participated in a within-subject study where their sense of agency was compared in two different embodiment experiences: 1) avatar hand (with body), or 2) abstract blocks. Both representations closed with a similar motion for spatial congruency and popped a balloon as a result. The hand/blocks were controlled through an online MI-BCI. Each condition consisted of 30 trials of MI-activation of the avatar hand/blocks. After each condition a questionnaire probed the participants' sense of agency, ownership, and frustration. Afterwards, a semi-structured interview was performed where the participants elaborated on their ratings. Both conditions supported similar levels of MI-BCI performance. A significant correlation between ownership and agency was observed (r = 0.47, p = 0.001). As intended, the avatar hand yielded much higher ownership than the blocks. When controlling for performance, ownership increased sense of agency. In conclusion, designers of BCI-based rehabilitation applications can draw on anthropomorphic avatars for the visual mapping of the trained limb to improve ownership. While not While not reducing frustration ownership can improve perceived agency given sufficient BCI performance. In future studies the findings should be validated in stroke patients since they may perceive agency and ownership differently than able-bodied users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to detect and correct node localization anomalies in wireless sensor networks, a hierarchical nonuniform clustering algorithm is proposed. This paper designs a centroid iterative maximum likelihood estimation location algorithm based on nonuniformity analysis, selects the nonuniformity analysis algorithm, gives the flowchart of node location algorithm, and simulates the distribution of nodes with MATLAB. Firstly, the algorithm divides the nodes in the network into different network levels according to the number of hops required to reach the sink node. According to the average residual energy of nodes in each layer, the sink node selects the nodes with higher residual energy in each layer of the network as candidate cluster heads and selects a certain number of nodes with lower residual energy as additional candidate cluster heads. Then, at each level, the candidate cluster heads are elected to produce the final cluster heads. Finally, by controlling the communication range between cluster head and cluster members, clusters of different sizes are formed, and clusters at the level closer to the sink node have a smaller scale. By simulating the improved centroid iterative algorithm, the values of the optimal iteration parameters α and η are obtained. Based on the analysis of the positioning errors of the improved centroid iterative algorithm and the maximum likelihood estimation algorithm, the value of the algorithm conversion factor is selected. Aiming at the problem of abnormal nodes that may occur in the process of ranging, a hybrid node location algorithm is further proposed. The algorithm uses the ℓ 2 , 1 norm to smooth the structured anomalies in the ranging information and realizes accurate positioning while detecting node anomalies. Experimental results show that the algorithm can accurately determine the uniformity of distribution, achieve good positioning effect in complex environment, and detect abnormal nodes well. In this paper, the hybrid node location algorithm is extended to the node location problem in large-scale scenes, and a good location effect is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

His I Getting to Zero i contains nuggets, including this: "The exceptionally eloquent personal statement by General George Lee Butler, former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Strategic Command and a member of the Canberra Commission, to the State of the World Forum in October 1996, in which he explains how his 30-year career with U.S. nuclear forces - first implementing this country's nuclear weapon policies and later helping shape and defend them - led him finally to the conclusion that those policies must be abandoned and the nuclear weapons themselves abolished."[48] In fact, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted by the United Nations on July 7, 2017, just came into force on January 22, 2021, with the number of signatory states reaching 86.[49],[50] It remains largely symbolic, however, since none of the nuclear weapon states and none of the NATO members with the exception of the Netherlands are signatories to this treaty. The treaty allows nuclear-weapons states, those that had built and tested atomic weapons before January 1967, to continue to retain the nuclear weapon, in return for which they will share information on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy to the non-nuclear-weapon states. B. Derosa and A. Nicolas, "The President and Nuclear Weapons: Authorities, Limits, and Process", I NTI i (2019), http://www.nti.org 45 D. French, "We Have Enough Checks on the President's Power to Order a Nuclear Strike", I National Review i (2017), https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-have-enough-checks-presidents-power-order-nuclear-strike 46 E. Eaves, "Why Is America Getting a New $100 Billion Nuclear Weapon?". [Extracted from the article]

The introduction of cloud computing systems brought with itself a solution for the dynamic scaling of computing resources leveraging various approaches for providing computing power, networking, and storage. On the other hand, it helped decrease the human resource cost by delegating the maintenance cost of infrastructures and platforms to the cloud providers. Nevertheless, the security risks of utilizing shared resources are recognized as one of the major concerns in using cloud computing environments. To be more specific, an intruder can attack a virtual machine and consequently extend his/her attack to other virtual machines that are co-located on the same physical machine. The worst situation is when the hypervisor is compromised in which all the virtual machines assigned to the physical node will be under security risk. To address these issues, we have proposed a security-aware virtual machine placement scheme to reduce the risk of co-location for vulnerable virtual machines. Four attributes are introduced to reduce the aforementioned risk including the vulnerability level of a virtual machine, the importance level of a virtual machine in the given context, the cumulative vulnerability level of a physical machine, and the capacity of a physical machine for the allocation of new virtual machines. Nevertheless, the evaluation of security risks, due to the various vulnerabilities' nature as well as the different properties of deployment environments is not quite accurate. To manage the precision of security evaluations, it is vital to consider hesitancy factors regarding security evaluations. To consider hesitancy in the proposed method, hesitant fuzzy sets are used. In the proposed method, the priorities of the cloud provider for the allocation of virtual machines are also considered. This will allow the model to assign more weights to attributes that have higher importance for the cloud provider. Eventually, the simulation results for the devised scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the overall security risk of the given cloud data center. The results show that the proposed approach can reduce the risk of attacks caused by the co-location of virtual machines up to 41% compared to the existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing represents the latest technology that has revolutionized the world of business. It is a promising solution giving companies the possibility of remotely storing their data and accessing services whenever they are needed and at a lower cost. However, outsourcing IT resources also brings risks, especially for sensitive information in terms of security and privacy, since all data and resources stored in the cloud are managed and controlled by cloud service providers. On the other hand, cloud users would like cloud service providers not to know what services being accessed and how often they are using them. Therefore, designing mechanisms to protect privacy is a major challenge. One promising research area is via authentication mechanisms, which has attracted many researchers in this delicate subject. For this, several solutions have been devised and published recently to tackle this problem. Nevertheless, these solutions often suffer from different types of attacks, high computing and communication costs, and the use of complex key management schemes. To address these shortcomings, we propose an approach that ensures the optimal preservation of the privacy of cloud users to protect their personal data including identities. The suggested approach gives the cloud user the ability to access and use the services provided by cloud service providers anonymously without the providers of those services knowing their identity. We demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over several anonymous authentication solutions in terms of computation and communication costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) allows individuals to control an external device by controlling their own brain activity, without requiring bodily or muscle movements. Performing voluntary movements is associated with the experience of agency ("sense of agency") over those movements and their outcomes. When people voluntarily control a BMI, they should likewise experience a sense of agency. However, using a BMI to act presents several differences compared to normal movements. In particular, BMIs lack sensorimotor feedback, afford lower controllability and are associated with increased cognitive fatigue. Here, we explored how these different factors influence the sense of agency across two studies in which participants learned to control a robotic hand through motor imagery decoded online through electroencephalography. We observed that the lack of sensorimotor information when using a BMI did not appear to influence the sense of agency. We further observed that experiencing lower control over the BMI reduced the sense of agency. Finally, we observed that the better participants controlled the BMI, the greater was the appropriation of the robotic hand, as measured by body-ownership and agency scores. Results are discussed based on existing theories on the sense of agency in light of the importance of BMI technology for patients using prosthetic limbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel approach utilising the emerging memristor technology is introduced for realising a 2-input primitive XNOR gate. This gate enables in-memory computing and is used as a building block of multi-input XNOR gates. The XNOR gate is realised with eight memristors of two crossbar arrays. The average power consumption of an 8-input XNOR gate is calculated and compared with its counterpart realised with CMOS technology – the XNOR gate consumes less power. ESOP realisation can be directly implemented with XNOR gates. Our simulation results and comparisons show the benefit of the proposed XNOR gate in terms of delay, area, and power. Volistor logic XNOR gate. (a) Circuit diagram of two-input volistor logic XNOR gate. Input voltages are applied to memristors S1 and S2 through horizontal wires Win1 and Win2, and the output which is logical AND of states S1 and S2 is calculated by applying VREAD to vertical wire WXNOR. (b) Block diagram of two-input volistor logic gate. (c) A multi-input volistor logic XNOR gate can be implemented by connecting two XNOR gates though CMOS switches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assumption that enterprise workloads are steady-state could make their resource provisioning ineffective. The current study aims to address this challenge by performing a non-linear analysis on a set of synthetic bursty workloads. The research involves building resource-provisioning models using non-linear metrics, namely hurst exponent and sample entropy. Performance of the proposed approach was compared with baseline reactive approach and the index of dispersion approach using the NASA dataset. The proposed approach had a sensitivity of 70% and specificity of 90%. The reactive approach had a sensitivity and specificity of 55% and 84%, respectively while the index of dispersion had a sensitivity of 61% and specificity of 82%. The current study also displayed a 71% reduction in error-count compared to the baseline reactive approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a gamified motor imagery brain-computer interface (MI-BCI) training in immersive virtual reality. The aim of the proposed training method is to increase engagement, attention, and motivation in co-adaptive event-driven MI-BCI training. This was achieved using gamification, progressive increase of the training pace, and virtual reality design reinforcing body ownership transfer (embodiment) into the avatar. From the 20 healthy participants performing 6 runs of 2-class MI-BCI training (left/right hand), 19 were trained for a basic level of MI-BCI operation, with average peak accuracy in the session = 75.84%. This confirms the proposed training method succeeded in improvement of the MI-BCI skills; moreover, participants were leaving the session in high positive affect. Although the performance was not directly correlated to the degree of embodiment, subjective magnitude of the body ownership transfer illusion correlated with the ability to modulate the sensorimotor rhythm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connecting human minds to various technological devices and applications through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) affords intriguingly novel ways for humans to engage and interact with the world. Not only do BCIs play an important role in restorative medicine, they are also increasingly used outside of medical or therapeutic contexts (e.g., gaming or mental state monitoring). A striking peculiarity of BCI technology is that the kind of actions it enables seems to differ from paradigmatic human actions, because, effects in the world are brought about by devices such as robotic arms, prosthesis, or other machines, and their execution runs through a computer directed by brain signals. In contrast to usual forms of action, the sequence does not need to involve bodily or muscle movements at all. A motionless body, the epitome of inaction, might be acting. How do theories of action relate to such BCI-mediated forms of changing the world? We wish to explore this question through the lenses of three perspectives on agency: subjective experience of agency, philosophical action theory, and legal concepts of action. Our analysis pursues three aims: First, we shall discuss whether and which BCI-mediated events qualify as actions, according to the main concepts of action in philosophy and law. Secondly, en passant, we wish to highlight the ten most interesting novelties or peculiarities of BCI-mediated movements. Thirdly, we seek to explore whether these novel forms of movement may have consequences for concepts of agency. More concretely, we think that convincing assessments of BCI-movements require more fine-grained accounts of agency and a distinction between various forms of control during movements. In addition, we show that the disembodied nature of BCI-mediated events causes troubles for the standard legal account of actions as bodily movements. In an exchange with views from philosophy, we wish to propose that the law ought to reform its concept of action to include some, but not all, BCI-mediated events and sketch some of the wider implications this may have, especially for the venerable legal idea of the right to freedom of thought. In this regard, BCIs are an example of the way in which technological access to yet largely sealed-off domains of the person may necessitate adjusting normative boundaries between the personal and the social sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart grid addresses traditional electricity generation issues by integrating ambient intelligence in actions of connected devices and production processing units. The grid infrastructure uses sensory IoT devices such as smart meter that records electric energy consumption and production information into the end units and stores sensor data through semantic technology in the central grid repository. The grid uses sensor data for various analytics such as production analysis of distribution units and health checkup of involved IoT devices and also observes functional profile of IoT equipment that includes service time, remaining lifespan, power consumption along with its functional error percentile. In a typical grid infrastructure, AMI meters process continuous streaming of data with Nand flash memory that stores dataset in the form of charges such as 0 and 1 in memory cell. Although, a flash memory is tested through rigorous testing profile but the grid environment impacts its cell endurance capacity diversely. Thus, a cell gets stuck-at fault before the end of endurance and can not be used to override a new tuple into it. In this paper, we perform a knowledge-based analytics to observe these stuck-at faults by detecting the abnormal variation among stored data tuples and predicts the going-to-be stuck-at cells of AMI meter. The simulation results show that the proposed approach rigorously maintain a knowledge-based track of AMI devices' data production with an average error percentile of 0.06% in scanning blocks and performed prediction analytics according to the scanning percentile functional health and presents a work-flow to balance the load among healthy and unhealthy IoT devices in smart grid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces new implementations for volistors (voltageresistor gates) and programmable mDiode (memristive Diode) gates in crossbar arrays of rectifying memristors. Volistors use voltage as input and resistance as output and rely on the diode behavior of rectifying memristors. The design constraints of volistors are explained. These constraints determine the size of the crossbar arrays and the voltage levels for logic functions implementations. This paper shows how volistors can be cascaded in crossbar arrays with other memristive gates such as programmable mDiode gates. An implementation example of AND-NOR PLA (Programmable Logic Array) based on hybrid programmable mDiode gates and volistors in crossbar arrays is described. This PLA circuit reduces both size and delay when compared to other memristive PLAs (mPLAs) realized with stateful gates, CRS (complementary resistive switches) based gates, and Boolean gates. The outcomes show the benefit of the new memristive circuits approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a set of technologies that are of increasing interest to researchers. BCI has been proposed as assistive technology for individuals who are non-communicative or paralyzed, such as those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or spinal cord injury. The technology has also been suggested for enhancement and entertainment uses, and there are companies currently marketing BCI devices for those purposes (e.g., gaming) as well as health-related purposes (e.g., communication). The unprecedented direct connection created by BCI between human brains and computer hardware raises various ethical, social, and legal challenges that merit further examination and discussion.Methods: To identify and characterize the key issues associated with BCI use, we performed a scoping review of biomedical ethics literature, analyzing the ethics concerns cited across multiple disciplines, including philosophy and medicine.Results: Based on this investigation, we report that BCI research and its potential translation to therapeutic intervention generate significant ethical, legal, and social concerns, notably with regards to personhood, stigma, autonomy, privacy, research ethics, safety, responsibility, and justice. Our review of the literature determined, furthermore, that while these issues have been enumerated extensively, few concrete recommendations have been expressed.Conclusions: We conclude that future research should focus on remedying a lack of practical solutions to the ethical challenges of BCI, alongside the collection of empirical data on the perspectives of the public, BCI users, and BCI researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of computer science, problems with digital products piracy and copyright dispute become more serious; therefore, it is an urgent task to find solutions for these problems. In this study, the authors' develop a digital watermarking algorithm based on a fractal encoding method and the discrete cosine transform (DCT). The proposed method combines fractal encoding method and DCT method for double encryptions to improve traditional DCT method. The image is encoded by fractal encoding as the first encryption, and then encoded parameters are used in DCT method as the second encryption. First, the fractal encoding method is adopted to encode a private image with private scales. Encoding parameters are applied as digital watermarking. Then, digital watermarking is added to the original image to reversibly using DCT, which means the authors can extract the private image from the carrier image with private encoding scales. Finally, attacking experiments are carried out on the carrier image by using several attacking methods. Experimental results show that the presented method has higher performance characteristics such as robustness and peak signal to noise ratio than classical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observations of peak and average currents are important for designed circuits, as faulty circuits have abnormal peaks and average currents. Using current bounds to detect faulty chips is a comparatively innovative idea, and many advanced schemes without them use it as a component in statistical outlier analysis. However, these previous research works have focused on the discussion of the testing impact without a proposed method to define reference current bounds to find faulty chips. A software framework is proposed to synthesize high-performance, power-performance optimized, noise-immune, and low-power circuits with current-bound estimations for testing. This framework offers a rapid methodology to quickly screen potential faulty chips by using the peak and average current bounds for different purposed circuits. The proposed estimation technique generates suitable reference current bounds from transistor threshold voltage and size adjustments. The SPICE-level simulation leads to the most accurate estimations. However, such simulations are not feasible for a large digital circuit. Hence, this work proposes constructing a feasible gate-level software framework for large digital circuits that will serve all of simulation purposes. In comparison with transistor-level Nanosim simulations, the proposed gate-level simulation framework has a margin of error of less than 2% in the peak current, and the computation time is 334 times faster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer and information security has become increasingly important on college and university campuses. Incidents of information security attacks, breaches, and threats and the costs associated with these incidents continue to be on the rise. The focus of this study was to examine the computer and information technology security training practices of colleges and universities in order to provide information that may help administrators reduce or eliminate potential information security attacks, breaches, and threats and provide a foundation for future research into these critical issues from the perspectives of IT personnel within institutions of higher education. Data were collected from 12 separate and distinct colleges and universities within the state of North Carolina. The findings offer insights to administrators and other interested persons regarding the training practices of computer and information security for faculty, staff, and students. The overall aim and intention of this article is to add to the existing knowledge of computer and information security training but more specifically dealing with institutions of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the ethical issues in brain-to-brain interfacing. Topics discussed include ethical issues that arise in neural interfacing and recent BBI experiments; the implications BBIs may have on the individual at the CBI side of the brainto- brain interfaces (BBI); and functional links between the brain of a human volunteer and the brain of a rat.

This study presents a systematic defect diagnosis to identify 'culprit physical features' that are potentially responsible for yield loss. A 'single location in‐a‐cluster' technique is proposed to diagnose multiple defects that may not be diagnosed by traditional 'single location at‐a‐time' technique. A statistics technique, 'analysis of variance', is conducted to reduce noise from random defects. Simulations on five ISCAS'89 circuit demonstrate the effectiveness of the authors' techniques. An experiment on an industrial design manufactured in 55 nm technology discovered a suspected culprit physical feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work extends to the switch level the verification and testing techniques based upon boolean satisfiability (SAT), so that SAT-based methodologies can be applied to circuits that cannot be well described at the gate level. The main achieved goal was to define a boolean model describing switch-level circuit operations as a SAT problem instance, to be applied to combinational equivalence checking and bridging-fault test generation. Results are provided for a set of combinational CMOS circuits, showing the feasibility of SAT-based verification and testing of switch-level circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring of 1862, the Army of the Potomac deployed a unique regiment, Colonel Hiram Berdan's 1st U.S. Sharpshooters. The previous winter, Berdan had recruited the Union's best volunteer marksmen hoping their long-range skills could vitally aid the Union cause. Some U.S. Army officers doubted Berdan's experiment. Pessimistically, they guessed that northern sharpshooters could neither hit targets at extreme range nor could they provide any tactical worth on the battlefield. Contrary to expectations, Berdan's U.S. Sharpshooters performed splendidly during their first major campaign, helping the Army of the Potomac break the Confederate hold on Yorktown. Glowing reports from northern newspaper reporters inflated tales of the sharpshooters' skills, but the combination of unexpected talent and encouraging media coverage transformed sharpshooting from a despised craft into a permanent army tactic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) aims at directly capturing brain activity in order to enable a user to drive an application such as a wheelchair without using peripheral neural or motor systems. Low signal to noise ratio's, low processing speed, and huge intra- and inter-subject variability currently call for the addition of intelligence to the applications, in order to compensate for errors in the production and/or the decoding of brain signals. However, the combination of minds and machines through BCI's and intelligent devices (IDs) can affect a user's sense of agency. Particularly confusing cases can arise when the behavioral control switches implicitly from user to ID. I will suggest that in such situations users may be insecure about the extent to which the resulting behavior, whether successful or unsuccessful, is genuinely their own. Hence, while performing an action, a user of a BCI-ID may be uncertain about being the agent of the act. Several cases will be examined and some implications for (legal) responsibility (e.g. establishing the presence of a 'guilty mind') are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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