Polynomials have played a fundamental role in the construction of objects with interesting combinatorial properties, such as error correcting codes, pseudorandom generators and randomness extractors. Somewhat strikingly, polynomials have also been found to be a powerful tool in the analysis of combinatorial parameters of objects that have some algebraic structure. This method of analysis has fo...

Many novel functional structures are now fabricated by controlled deposition as a maskless, bottom-up fabrication technique. These applications require rapid and precise deposition of minute amounts of solutions/suspensions or their ultimate particle products in predefined patterns. The electrospray is a promising alternative to the commonly used inkjet printing because it can easily handle hig...

Pacemaker lead extractors must become familiar with transfemoral approaches for lead extraction as a bail-out procedure for a failed superior approach. We presented a "tetra-axial" system for transfemoral lead extraction. This system would be more widely applicable in cases with difficulties in extraction, resulting in more procedural success.

Dose-response analysis can be carried out using multi-purpose commercial statistical software, but except for a few special cases the analysis easily becomes cumbersome as relevant, non-standard output requires manual programming. The extension package drc for the statistical environment R provides a flexible and versatile infrastructure for dose-response analyses in general. The present versio...

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficiency porous ceramic cup extractors, associated with ion meters, for determination nutrients availability bell pepper and melon crops in substrate. Substrate solution acquired using aqueous extract 1:1.5 (v/v) also extractor. Electrical conductivity (EC), pH macronutrient contents were determined substrate through analytical method. concen...

We construct an efficient 3-source extractor that requires one of the sources to be significantly shorter than the min-entropy of the other two sources. Our extractors work even when the longer, n-bit sources have min-entropy n and the shorter source has min-entropy log n. Previous constructions for independent sources with min-entropy n required Θ(1/γ) sources [Rao06]. Our construction relies ...

We propose an authentication scheme using fingerprint biometrics, protected by a construct called a Fuzzy Extractor. We look at a new way of quantizing and digitally representing the minutiae measurements so that a construct called PinSketch can be applied to the minutiae. This is converted to a Fuzzy Extractor by tying some random information to the minutiae measurements. We run a matching alg...

An (n, k)-bit-fixing source is a distribution on n bit strings, that is fixed on n − k of the coordinates, and jointly uniform on the remaining k bits. Explicit constructions of bit-fixing extractors by Gabizon, Raz and Shaltiel [SICOMP 2006] and Rao [CCC 2009], extract (1 − o(1)) · k bits for k = poly log n, almost matching the probabilistic argument. Intriguingly, unlike other well-studied so...

Intuitively, a pseudorandom generator (PRG) is a procedure that generates a pseudorandom distribution. A PRG shares the parameters of the underlying pseudorandom distribution: the class A of algorithms to which the generated distribution looks random, and a bound on how different the pseudorandom distribution can look from the uniform one for algorithms from A. Definition 1 (Pseudorandom genera...