Before an election, two candidates choose policies which are lotteries over electionday distributive positions. I find conditions under which there exist mixed-strategy probabilistic-voting equilibria which are independent, treating voter groups independently. When voter efforts determine the quality of their signals regarding candidate positions, voters can have strong incentives regarding the...

One of the indispensable aspects of digital image processing is the requirement of varied image resolutions. To achieve varied resolution, scaling comes into picture. Two important applications of scaling is good pictorial quality for human interpretation and processing of digital images for storage, transmission and for representation of autonomous machine perception. This paper focuses on the...

Pseudorandom function families are a powerful cryptographic primitive, yielding, in particular, simple solutions for the main problems in private key cryptography. Their existence based on general assumptions (namely, the existence of one-way functions) has been established. In this work we investigate new ways of designing pseudorandom function families. The goal is to find constructions that ...

The use of cryptographic hash functions like MD5 or SHA for message authentication has become a standard approach in many Internet applications and protocols. Though very easy to implement, these mechanisms are usually based on ad hoc techniques that lack a sound security analysis. We present new constructions of message authentication schemes based on a cryptographic hash function. Our schemes...

Nickel (Ni) is one of the essential micronutrients for higher plants and its known function is being the metal component of urease. The effects of various Ni levels on urease activity in maize (Zea maize L.) plants grown in two nutrient media containing urea or ammonium nitrate as two separate nitrogen sources were investigated. The experiments were performed as completely randomized blocks wit...

The authors analyzed 704 transthoracic echocardiographic (TTE) examinations, performed routinely to all admitted patients to a general 16-bed Intensive Care Unit (ICU) during an 18-month period. Data acquisition and prevalence of abnormalities of cardiac structures and function were assessed, as well as the new, previously unknown severe diagnoses. A TTE was performed within the first 24 h of a...