Median filters and rank-order filters are generally considered to be more time consuming than, e.g., averaging filters. With the new algorithm presented in this report the opposite turns out to be true. The median (or any other rank-order value) is obtained by examining the bits of the arguments columnwise starting with the most significant bits. Hardware implementations suitable for parallel p...

Background Brazil is a country of Portuguese colonization with massive numbers of immigrants and Portuguese descendants (25 millions). At least half of all Brazilian Y chromosomes are from Portuguese origin. Nevertheless, this population suffered miscegenation with native Indians and African descendants. African descendants Brazilians have 48% of non-African genes, probably from Portuguese asce...

Electrophilic triethylsilylation of diphenylketene leads to exclusive C-silylation giving the diphenyl(triethylsilyl)acetyl cation in the solution phase even though density functional theory calculations at the B3LYP/6-311+G* level indicate that the O-silylation of diphenylketene is preferred over C-silylation by 5.4 kcal/mol in the gas phase. On the other hand, in the case of the parent ketene...

Humans like some colours and dislike others, but which particular colours and why remains to be understood. Empirical studies on colour preferences generally targeted most preferred colours, but rarely least preferred (disliked) colours. In addition, findings are often based on general colour preferences leaving open the question whether results generalise to specific objects. Here, 88 particip...

The PROMETHEE is a significant method for evaluating alternatives with respect to criteria in multi-criteria decision-making problems. It is characterized by many types of preference functions that are used for assigning the differences between alternatives in judgements. This paper proposes a preference of green suppliers using the PROMETHEE under the usual criterion preference functions. Comp...

We discuss the effect on finite machine implementation of chaotic system on randomness. We show that the most significant bit even for fully developed chaotic systems implemented with high precision (using 1000-bit arithmetics) is not random. We propose chaos-based pseudo-random bit generators and discuss their efficient software implementation.

The delay and dispersion of the packet train have been widely used in most network measurement tools. The timestamp of the packet is critical for the measurement accuracy. However, timestamping performed either in the application or the kernel layer would be easily affected by the source and destination hosts especially in high-speed network. Therefore, to evaluate the impact of the timestamp p...

The present study is an experimental analysis of music preference as a factor of music distraction measured by the Stroop tests. Significant differences were found amoung groups given, most preferred music, least preferred music, and no music (quiet). Each group of 10 subjects were randomly chosen from 42 screened subjects. Performance was better without music and better with most preferred tha...

• Appreciation of a coalition depends respectively on the most preferred and least preferred subcoalition(s). ‣ Preferences satisfy top responsiveness if the following conditions hold: i) each coalition contains a unique most preferred subcoalition (called a choice set); ii) appreciation of a coalition depends on the choice set; iii) if two coalitions have the same choice set, then the smaller ...