The creation of a special environment for the enhancement of plant growth, outside the normal growing season, dates back to 500 B.C. The Gardens of Adonis, in ancient Greece, saw the first application of covering and protective materials to foster the growth and propagation of ornamental flowers. Another historical milestone occurred when Tiberius Caesar instructed his gardeners to provide a su...

Declaration All sentences or passages quoted in this dissertation from other people's work have been specifically acknowledged by clear cross-referencing to author, work and page(s). Any illustrations which are not the work of the author of this dissertation have been used with the explicit permission of the originator and are specifically acknowledged. I understand that failure to do this amou...

In FSE 2014, an authenticated encryption mode COBRA [4], based on pseudorandom permutation (PRP) blockcipher, and POET [3], based on Almost XOR-Universal (AXU) hash and strong pseudorandom permutation (SPRP), were proposed. Few weeks later, COBRA mode and a simple variant of the original proposal of POET (due to a forging attack [13] on the original proposal) with AES as an underlying blockciph...

CAESAR and the REACH legislation REACH is the new European legislation for the safe use of chemicals [1]. It is an enormous initiative, which requires information for all chemicals which are currently on the market in Europe in quantities above one tonne per year. A huge amount of data on each compound is required, and alternative methods to direct experimentation such as in silico models are l...

Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems provide key capabilities to the Joint Forces/Combined Joint Task Force Commander (JFC/CJTF) for intelligence collection and battle management. ISR systems cover the full range of joint operations, supporting multiple commanders simultaneously with planned and dynamic collection and exploitation requirements. Because ISR systems are limi...

Where exactly is the human waist? How do definitions work for women who deviate from the conventional body shape? Does the measuring instrument matter? Waist is conventionally understood to be a measurable zone within the abdominal region of the torso, a zone of considerable importance. There needs to be a good consistent waist definition, one accurate and valid for everyone. Incorrect definiti...

This report summarizes our results from security analysis covering all 57 CAESAR first round candidates and over 210 implementations. We have manually identified security issues with three candidates, two of which are more serious, and these ciphers been withdrawn from the competition. We have developed a testing framework, BRUTUS, to facilitate automatic detection of simple security lapses and...

This article presents models to predict mutagenicity, carcinogenicity, developmental toxicity, and skin sensitisation for a set of 27 conazoles. The predictions were performed with the program package CAESAR, which is available on the Internet. The CAESAR programs were developed to support the European Community Regulation on chemicals and their safe use (REACH) and follow the OECD principles f...

The statistical analysis of large corpora of human body scans requires that these scans be in alignment, either for a small set of key landmarks or densely for all the vertices in the scan. Existing techniques tend to rely on hand-placed landmarks or algorithms that extract landmarks from scans. The former is time consuming and subjective while the latter is error prone. Here we show that a mod...

This paper presents a new combined symmetric key cryptographic technique, which is generally an amalgamation of Bit Manipulation, generalized Modified Vernam Cipher, Single Bit Manipulation and Modified Caesar Cipher. The technique proposed here is basically an advanced and upgraded module of SD-AREE cryptographic method, which is based on Modified Caesar Cipher along with Bit Manipulation and ...