The Olivetti Research Laboratory has developed an experimental system based on intelligent peripherals connected directly to an ATM network. As well as multimedia modules (e.g. audio and video) the system also includes a directly connected RAID-3 storage server called the “Disc Brick”. This paper describes the architecture of the Disc Brick, and discusses some of the hardware and software issue...

Brick industry in India is the second largest brick producer in the world after China. The industry is one of the largest employment generating industries employing millions of people. The present study focuses on the brick industries located in North Karnataka, India, where about 1500 brick kilns are operating employing thousands of workers. The main aim of this study is to investigate the sel...

Chinese Fuzhuan brick-tea is a unique microbial fermented tea characterized by a period of fungal growth during its manufacturing process. The aim of the present study was to characterize, both physicochemically and microbiologically, traditional industrial production processes of Fuzhuan brick-tea. Fermenting tea samples were collected from the largest manufacturer. Physicochemical analyses sh...

This paper presents a novel background model for video surveillance—Spatio-Temporal Patch based Background Modeling (STPBM). We use spatio-temporal patches, called bricks, to characterize both the appearance and motion information. Our method is based on the observation that all the background bricks at a given location under all possible lighting conditions lie in a low dimensional background ...

We report a small advance on a question raised by Robertson, Schweitzer, andWagon in [RSW02]. They constructed a genus-13 polyhedron built from bricks without corners, and asked whether every genus-0 such polyhedron must have a corner. A brick is a parallelopiped, and a corner is a brick of degree three or less in the brick graph. We describe a genus-3 polyhedron built from bricks with no corne...

An Euler brick is a cuboid with integer side dimensions such that the face diagonals are integers. Already in 1740, families of Euler bricks have been found. Euler himself constructed more families. If the space diagonal of an Euler brick is an integer too, an Euler brick is called a perfect Euler brick. Nobody has found one. There might be none. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining sport to go ...

We describe an improvisational companion based on the concept of harmonic bricks, as articulated by Cork and others. Our companion is software that can play background for, and trade melodies with, a human soloist. While exhibiting creativity itself, its greater purpose is to improve creativity of its user. Bricks, originally intended for memorization of chord progressions, are used here as a s...