This work proposes a new video buffer framework (VBF) to acquire a favorable quality of experience (QoE) for video streaming in cellular networks. The proposed framework consists of three main parts: client selection algorithm, categorization method, and distribution mechanism. The client selection algorithm was named independent client selection algorithm (ICSA), which is proposed to select the best clients who have less interfering effects on video quality and recognize the clients’ urgency based on buffer occupancy level. In the categorization method, each frame in the video buffer is given a specific number for better estimation of the playout outage probability, so it can efficiently handle so many frames from different video

The cyanobacterial neurotoxinβ-N-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) is considered to be an “excitotoxin,” and its suggested mechanism of action is killing neurons. Long-term exposure to L-BMAA is believed to lead to neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Objectives of this study were to determine the presumptive median lethal dose (LD₅₀), the Lowest-Observed-Adverse-Effect Level (LOAEL), and histopathologic lesions caused by the naturally occurring BMAA isomer, L-BMAA, in mice. Seventy NIH Swiss Outbred mice (35 male and 35 female) were used. Treatment group mice

      Restoration is the main process in many applications. Restoring an original image from a damaged image is the foundation of the restoring operation, either blind or non-blind. One of the main challenges in the restoration process is to estimate the degradation parameters. The degradation parameters include Blurring Function (Point Spread Function, PSF) and Noise Function. The most common causes of image degradation are errors in transmission channels, defects in the optical system, inhomogeneous medium, relative motion between object and camera, etc. In our research, a novel algorithm was adopted based on Circular Hough Transform used to estimate the width (radius, sigma) of the Point Spread Function. This algorithm is based o

Background: Nursing interventions tailored to the smoking triggers in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases are essential. However, these interventions are scant due to the nature of factors associated with smoking cessation and the poor understanding of the effect of nurse-led intervention in Iraq.Purpose: This study aimed to determine the dominant smoking triggers and examine the effects of a tailored nursing intervention on smoking behavior in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases.Methods: Convenience samples of 128 patients with non-communicable chronic diseases, male and female patients, who were 18-70 years old, were recruited in this quasi-experimental, randomized comparative trial in the outpatient clinic

            Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs) are automatic inverse Turing tests, which are intended to differentiate between people and malicious computer programs. The mission of making good HIP system is a challenging issue, since the resultant HIP must be secure against attacks and in the same time it must be practical for humans. Text-based HIPs is one of the most popular HIPs types. It exploits the capability of humans to recite text images more than Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but the current text-based HIPs are not well-matched with rapid development of computer vision techniques, since they are either vey simply passed or very hard to resolve, thus this motivate that

A multivariate multisite hydrological data forecasting model was derived and checked using a case study. The philosophy is to use simultaneously the cross-variable correlations, cross-site correlations and the time lag correlations. The case study is of two variables, three sites, the variables are the monthly rainfall and evaporation; the sites are Sulaimania, Dokan, and Darbandikhan.. The model form is similar to the first order auto regressive model, but in matrices form. A matrix for the different relative correlations mentioned above and another for their relative residuals were derived and used as the model parameters. A mathematical filter was used for both matrices to obtain the elements. The application of this model indicates i

Photonic crystal fiber interferometers are used in many sensing applications. In this work, an in-reflection photonic crystal fiber (PCF) based on Mach-Zehnder (micro-holes collapsing) (MZ) interferometer, which exhibits high sensitivity to different volatile organic compounds (VOCs), without the needing of any permeable material. The interferometer is robust, compact, and consists of a stub photonic crystal fiber of large-mode area, photonic crystal fiber spliced to standard single mode fiber (SMF) (corning-28), this splicing occurs with optimized splice loss 0.19 dB In the splice regions the voids of the holey fiber are completely collapsed, which allows the excitation and recombination of core and cladding modes. The device reflection

Extractive multi-document text summarization – a summarization with the aim of removing redundant information in a document collection while preserving its salient sentences – has recently enjoyed a large interest in proposing automatic models. This paper proposes an extractive multi-document text summarization model based on genetic algorithm (GA). First, the problem is modeled as a discrete optimization problem and a specific fitness function is designed to effectively cope with the proposed model. Then, a binary-encoded representation together with a heuristic mutation and a local repair operators are proposed to characterize the adopted GA. Experiments are applied to ten topics from Document Understanding Conference DUC2002 datas