Hasil untuk "Art"

Woretaw Sisay Zewdu, Mulugeta Molla Zeleke, Yared Andargie Ferede et al.

IntroductionDespite the fact that antiretroviral therapy (ART) has reduced HIV/AIDS-related morbidity and mortality, pediatrics treatment failure remains a global concern. As a result, this study set out prudently to determine the prevalence of virologic failure and its predictors among children and adolescents on a Dolutegravir (DTG)-based antiretroviral regimen.MethodsA hospital-based retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted on children and adolescents on ART at Debre Tabor Comprehensive Specialized Hospital in Northwest Ethiopia from February-2017 to September-2023. Study participants were selected purposively. Data was collected using a semi-structured questionnaire and a data abstraction tool. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were fitted to determine the linked factors. A p-value less than 0.05 was deemed to indicate a statistically significant association.ResultsAmong the 359 children and adolescents included in this study, 38 (10.58%) had developed virological failure. The odds of virological failure among children and adolescents were found to be increased by the age of the child <10 years (AOR = 4.41; 95% CI: 2.60–7.47), the care taker being a guardian or neighbor of patient (AOR = 2.03; 95% CI: 1.15–4.73), both parents passing away (AOR = 1.29; 95% CI: 0.12–2.68), CD4 counts ≤200 cells/µL (AOR = 4.3; 95% CI: 1.32–5.9), being infected with OIs (AOR = 2.03; 95% CI: 1.38–3.55), poor adherence status (AOR = 1.37: 95% CI: 1.12–3.11), adverse drug reaction (AOR = 1.75: 95% CI: 1.02–4.97), and anemic (AOR = 1.70: 95% CI: 1.03–5.15.04).ConclusionDespite potent DTG-based ARTs being introduced, virologic failure remains a concern in the study area. Special consideration should be directed towards children under the age of 10 years who are in the care of a guardian or neighbors, have lost both parents, are infected with opportunistic infections, have a poor adherence status, are experiencing adverse drug reactions, and anemic.

Albanë Mehmetaj, Kosovar Berisha

This paper examines Ibrahim Rugova’s philosophical and theoretical contributions to literary studies, focusing on three central categories that define his aesthetics: objectification, the strategy of meaning, and aesthetic refusal. Through the reworking of phenomenological and ontological concepts, Rugova reformulates objectification as the process by which the inner world of personality becomes externalized in the literary work, thereby affirming the autonomy of art as a mode of being. His notion of the strategy of meaning, developed in dialogue with semiotics and structuralism, explains how literature generates both denotative meanings internal to the work and connotative meanings arising from interpretation. Finally, the concept of aesthetic refusal highlights the tension between literature and politics, showing how literature resists ideological and institutional pressures by affirming its autonomy. The study seeks to analyze and synthesize these concepts by examining Rugova’s theoretical–philosophical works, such as <i>Kah teoria Strategjia e kuptimit</i>, and <i>Refuzimi estetik</i>. <i>letrare</i>, through an interdisciplinary methodology that combines philosophical analysis, literary theory, and cultural critique. Taken together, the categories under discussion form a coherent ontology of the literary work that situates Rugova within multiple intellectual traditions that influenced him—including phenomenology, hermeneutics, information theory, structuralism, and dialectical philosophy—while simultaneously underscoring his originality in adapting these ideas to the Albanian intellectual context. The paper concludes that Rugova’s theoretical legacy, often overshadowed by his political role, offers a significant contribution to modern literary theory by defending the autonomy of literature and reaffirming its function as a distinctive mode of truth and human realization.

Rasha A. Moyassar, Mohammed A. M. Abdullah

Electromyography (EMG) classification using machine learning techniques has gained significant attention in recent years due to its applications in various aspects such as prosthetic control, gesture recognition and muscle health monitoring. In this study, we explore the applications of both Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques for the classification of EMG signals. In this work, a new CNN and DFNN models is proposed for this purpose achieving high accuracy with low computation time. Additionally, several machine learning algorithms are evaluated for EMG classification, including Random Forest, KNN, AdaBoost, Decision Tree with and without cross-validation were employed. Moreover, we investigate the impact of class balance on the performance of these models. Model selection and hyperparameter tuning are conducted to optimize the performance. The models are assessed based on accuracy, precision, recall and [Formula: see text]-score. The best results are obtained using random forest with an accuracy of 99.81% while the proposed CNN model achieved an accuracy of 99.61%. Experimental results proved the efficiency of the proposed work compared to other state-of-the-art works.

Keyan Abdul-Aziz Mutlaq, Vincent Omollo Nyangaresi, Mohd Adib Omar et al.

The incorporation of information and communication technologies in the power grids has greatly enhanced efficiency in the management of demand-responses. In addition, smart grids have seen considerable minimization in energy consumption and enhancement in power supply quality. However, the transmission of control and consumption information over open public communication channels renders the transmitted messages vulnerable to numerous security and privacy violations. Although many authentication and key agreement protocols have been developed to counter these issues, the achievement of ideal security and privacy levels at optimal performance still remains an uphill task. In this paper, we leverage on Hamming distance, elliptic curve cryptography, smart cards and biometrics to develop an authentication protocol. It is formally analyzed using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, which shows strong mutual authentication and session key negotiation. Its semantic security analysis demonstrates its robustness under all the assumptions of the Dolev-Yao (DY) and Canetti- Krawczyk (CK) threat models. From the performance perspective, it is shown to incur communication, storage and computation complexities compared with other related state of the art protocols.

Prof. Duha Mustafa Al-Demerdash, Lecturer / Kariman Ali Beck Abdul Rahman, Demonstrator / Nihal Nabil Youssef

The purpose of this study is to make a contribution to the development of creative fashion culture through the expansion of creative fields in the fashion design area and also the combination of fashion and art techniques, by classifying the cases of Trompe Loeil expressed in modern fashion, and also analyzing its aesthetic characteristics. Conducting the qualitative research through the literature study and the analysis of design cases, The results are as follows: First, based on the preceding research, the types of Trompe Loeil expressed in modern fashion were shown as realistic expression of clothing, movement of daily objects, double images, and application of human body. Second, the aesthetic characteristics of Trompe Loeil based on its expression types were deconstruction, avant-garde, and amusements. The deconstruction was expressed in the expression type of Trompe Loeil such as freedom of materials using digital printing technique, change in the position of clothes, and movement of daily items using collage technique by collecting objets like daily items or waste. The avant-garde was expressed by switching/overlapping in and out of clothes, intentionally exposing some body parts like breast or torso, displacing body parts, and moving daily items. The amusements was shown by realistically expressing accessories or details of clothes using digital printing technique, or moving daily items such as book and fork.

Faisal Mehmood, Shabir Ahmad, Taeg Keun Whangbo

Deep learning is a sub-branch of artificial intelligence that acquires knowledge by training a neural network. It has many applications in the field of banking, automobile industry, agriculture, and healthcare industry. Deep learning has played a significant role in solving complex tasks related to computer vision, such as image classification, natural language processing, and object detection. On the other hand, optimizers also play an intrinsic role in training the deep learning model. Recent studies have proposed many deep learning models, such as VGG, ResNet, DenseNet, and ImageNet. In addition, there are many optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD), Adam, AdaDelta, Adabelief, and AdaMax. In this study, we have selected those models that require lower hardware requirements and shorter training times, which facilitates the overall training process. We have modified the Adam based optimizers and minimized the cyclic path. We have removed an additional hyper-parameter from RMSProp and observed that the optimizer works with various models. The learning rate is set to minimum and constant. The initial weights are updated after each epoch, which helps to improve the accuracy of the model. We also changed the position of the epsilon in the default Adam optimizer. By changing the position of the epsilon, it accumulates the updating process. We used various models with SGD, Adam, RMSProp, and the proposed optimization technique. The results indicate that the proposed method is effective in achieving the accuracy and works well with the state-of-the-art architectures.

Lorella Viola

This article offers a conceptual and methodological contribution to linguistics by exploring the potential value of using sentiment analysis (SA) for research in this field. Firstly, it discusses the limitations and advantages of using SA for linguistics research including the wider epistemological implications of its application outside of its original conception as a product reviews analysis tool. Methodologically, it tests its applicability against an established linguistic case: the correlation between subjective attitudes such as surprise, irritation and discontent and the use of the progressive. The language example is Italian for which this function of the progressive form has not been analyzed yet. The analysis applies FEEL-IT, a state-of-the-art transformer-based machine learning model for emotion and sentiment classification in Italian on language samples from various sources as collected in Evalita-2014 (238,556 words). The results show statistically significant correlations between negative subjective attitudes and the use of the progressive in line with previous accounts in other languages. The article concludes with a few additional propositions for practitioners and researchers using SA.

Jesper Duemose Nielsen, Oula Puonti, Rong Xue et al.

Generating realistic volume conductor models for forward calculations in electroencephalography (EEG) is not trivial and several factors contribute to the accuracy of such models, two of which are its anatomical accuracy and the accuracy with which electrode positions are known. Here, we investigate effects of anatomical accuracy by comparing forward solutions from SimNIBS, a tool which allows state-of-the-art anatomical modeling, with well-established pipelines in MNE-Python and FieldTrip. We also compare different ways of specifying electrode locations when digitized positions are not available such as transformation of measured positions from standard space and transformation of a manufacturer layout.Substantial effects of anatomical accuracy were seen throughout the entire brain both in terms of field topography and magnitude with SimNIBS generally being more accurate than the pipelines in MNE-Python and FieldTrip. Topographic and magnitude effects were particularly pronounced for MNE-Python which uses a three-layer boundary element method (BEM) model. We attribute these mainly to the coarse representation of the anatomy used in this model, in particular differences in skull and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Effects of electrode specification method were evident in occipital and posterior areas when using a transformed manufacturer layout whereas transforming measured positions from standard space generally resulted in smaller errors.We suggest modeling the anatomy of the volume conductor as accurately possible and we hope to facilitate this by making it easy to export simulations from SimNIBS to MNE-Python and FieldTrip for further analysis. Likewise, if digitized electrode positions are not available, a set of measured positions on a standard head template may be preferable to those specified by the manufacturer.

Paolo Pegolo, Stefano Baroni, Federico Grasselli

Abstract Despite governing heat management in any realistic device, the microscopic mechanisms of heat transport in all-solid-state electrolytes are poorly known: existing calculations, all based on simplistic semi-empirical models, are unreliable for superionic conductors and largely overestimate their thermal conductivity. In this work, we deploy a combination of state-of-the-art methods to calculate the thermal conductivity of a prototypical Li-ion conductor, the Li3ClO antiperovskite. By leveraging ab initio, machine learning, and force-field descriptions of interatomic forces, we are able to reveal the massive role of anharmonic interactions and diffusive defects on the thermal conductivity and its temperature dependence, and to eventually embed their effects into a simple rationale which is likely applicable to a wide class of ionic conductors.

Nezahat Turfan

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of 10 mM silicon (Si) application on salt stress (50, 100, and 200 mM NaCl) tolerance in Hungarian vetch seedlings (Ege Beyazi-79) based on growth parameters (shoot length and fresh weight, organic dry matter, and moisture), bioactive compounds as chlorophyll, carotenoid, proline, protein, nitrate, and nutrient status. Silicon was applied to the seedlings from the leaves and NaCl from the salt soil, both of which were dissolved in Hoagland solution. The results revealed that the highest shoot length Si+100 mM NaCl was recorded and the highest fresh and dry weight was recorded with length Si+50 mM NaCl. The highest dry matter was obtained from Si and 200 mM NaCl. The highest chlorophyll, carotenoid, proline, protein, and nitrate were obtained from 100 mM NaCl+Si, while the lowest chlorophyll, carotenoid, and nitrate were obtained from 200 mm NaCl and the lowest proline and protein from 100 mM NaCl, respectively. The amount of K, Mg, and S were low in NaCl doses but high in Si and Si + NaCl doses, and P was higher in all groups compared to the control. The content of Na, Co, and Se were high in all groups except Cl 50 NaCl, while Mn, Zn, and Ni were higher in Si and Si + NaCl doses. Silicon content of samples was high at higher NaCl + Si doses. The results provided by this investigating indicated that silicate concentrations positively affected the parameters examined in Hungarian seedlings, and increased the tolerance of seedlings to salt stress.

Katja Andrina Kravanja, Matjaž Finšgar, Željko Knez et al.

The development of drug-eluting bioactive coatings for orthopedic implants has gained increased interest in recent years with an intent to reduce postoperative complications and improve tissue regeneration at the implant interface. Due to the remarkable benefits of natural polyphenolic components, such as antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer and bioactive activity, and their ubiquitous availability in nature, they are promising candidates for incorporation into bioactive coatings of advanced medical devices in future clinical applications. However, further research is needed to address all challenges. This review aims to highlight the prosperity of natural compounds widely available in nature loaded in implantable devices, summarize the “state of the art” in this field, identify the challenges, and accordingly suggest the optimal preparation methods and characterization.

Гупта, Панкадж

Изучая древние цивилизации, мы видим, что первобытный человек жил в гармонии с природой и уважал ее творения. Живопись, скульптура, архитектурные элементы и все изощренные формы искусства черпают вдохновение из природы, воплощают любовь к ней, восхищение ею и этику ее сохранения. Экодуховность возникает из осознания космичности мира, и ее популярность сегодня растет в связи с необходимостью пересмотреть отношения человека с природой, которая деградирует в ходе нарастающего экологического кризиса, изменения климата, глобального потепления. Буддизм, одна из древнейших мировых религий, подчеркивал ценность не только живых существ, но и их жизненного пространства. Картины танка используются для продвижения и усвоения идей буддизма среди учеников и монахов для описания исторических событий, иллюстрирования мифов, связанных с божествами, и описания полезных этно-биологических аспектов лекарственных растений и животных. Экодуховные элементы постоянно присутствовали в картинах танка и широко использовались в них, чтобы привить мысль о сохранении природы. На танка мы видим деревья, лианы, кусты, травы множество животных, таких как лошади, олени, слоны, львы, тигры, павлины и т. д. Все это демонстрирует глубокие связи между человеком и всеми творениями природы, и поэтому новое прочтение танка может помочь в выявлении пробелов современной человеческой цивилизации. В данной статье рассматривается экодуховная символика в картинах танка.

A.A. Sosimi, T. Adegbola, O.A. Fakinlede

Most state-of-the-art large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems employ context dependent (CD) phone units, however, the CD phone units are not efficient in capturing long-term spectral dependencies of tone in most tone languages. The Standard Yorùbá (SY) is a language composed of syllable with tones and requires different method for the acoustic modeling. In this paper, a context dependent tone acoustic model was developed. Tone unit is assumed as syllables, amplitude magnified difference function (AMDF) was used to derive the utterance wide F contour, followed by automatic syllabification and tri-syllable forced alignment with speech phonetization alignment and syllabification SPPAS tool. For classification of the context dependent (CD) tone, slope and intercept of F values were extracted from each segmented unit. Supervised clustering scheme was utilized to partition CD tri-tone based on category and normalized based on some statistics to derive the acoustic feature vectors. Multi-class support vector machine (MSVM) was used for tri-tone training. From the experimental results, it was observed that the word recognition accuracy obtained from the MSVM tri-tone system based on dynamic programming tone embedded features was comparable with phone features. A best parameter tuning was obtained for 10-fold cross validation and overall accuracy was 97.5678%. In term of word error rate (WER), the MSVM CD tri-tone system outperforms the hidden Markov model tri-phone system with WER of 44.47%. Keywords: Syllabification, Standard Yorùbá, Context Dependent Tone, Tri-tone Recognition

Akshita Rana, Erik Westein, Be'eri Niego et al.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the number one cause of morbidity and death worldwide. As estimated by the WHO, the global death rate from CVD is 31% wherein, a staggering 85% results from stroke and myocardial infarction. Platelets, one of the key components of thrombi, have been well-investigated over decades for their pivotal role in thrombus development in healthy as well as diseased blood vessels. In hemostasis, when a vascular injury occurs, circulating platelets are arrested at the site of damage, where they are activated and aggregate to form hemostatic thrombi, thus preventing further bleeding. However, in thrombosis, pathological activation of platelets occurs, leading to uncontrolled growth of a thrombus, which in turn can occlude the blood vessel or embolize, causing downstream ischemic events. The molecular processes causing pathological thrombus development are in large similar to the processes controlling physiological thrombus formation. The biggest challenge of anti-thrombotics and anti-platelet therapeutics has been to decouple the pathological platelet response from the physiological one. Currently, marketed anti-platelet drugs are associated with major bleeding complications for this exact reason; they are not effective in targeting pathological thrombi without interfering with normal hemostasis. Recent studies have emphasized the importance of shear forces generated from blood flow, that primarily drive platelet activation and aggregation in thrombosis. Local shear stresses in obstructed blood vessels can be higher by up to two orders of magnitude as compared to healthy vessels. Leveraging abnormal shear forces in the thrombus microenvironment may allow to differentiate between thrombosis and hemostasis and develop shear-selective anti-platelet therapies. In this review, we discuss the influence of shear forces on thrombosis and the underlying mechanisms of shear-induced platelet activation. Later, we summarize the therapeutic approaches to target shear-sensitive platelet activation and pathological thrombus growth, with a particular focus on the shear-sensitive protein von Willebrand Factor (VWF). Inhibition of shear-specific platelet aggregation and targeted drug delivery may prove to be much safer and efficacious approaches over current state-of-the-art antithrombotic drugs in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases.

Leila Galehdaran, Reza Pourzarrin

In pre-Islamic Iran, narration (Naqqali) was considered as one of the varieties of storytelling, sometime accompanied by music. After Islam's dominance in Iran, narration was one of the few artistic and performative genres that were left out of religious restrictions, and as the only performance form for which ban there was no reason, it managed to combine all playing methods of its time. Picture narration is in the category of traditional plays and is a combination of various arts such as play, poetry-literature, music, singing and painting. This art was performed in two ways: a closed courtyard (coffee house, in banquet narration: mansions); the method by which the screen was hanged or installed on the wall, and open air (squares, passages, fields, etc.) in which scroll screen opened up to the audience slowly, or the second screen of the so-called covering was removed from the preinstalled screen. The images presented in most of these works are imaginary and poetic spatial visualization. This state gives mysterious expression to the natural elements of an image. Although the natural elements in these images are not always symbolic, the depth of these works cannot be realized without familiarizing with literary setting, as well as paying attention to the ancient traditions of the image in Iranian painting. Given the performance’s function, these images have their own effects, not a narrative-related component that has the task of facilitating the comprehension of the text for the audience, but the narration’s subject has been a means for the artist to speak with the linguistic image to the audience. The painter always tries to reveal objects in accordance with his sense of imagination and draws loyal to the original style of dimension processing in Iranian art. In most of these images, the perspective has been created in accordance with the importance and dignity of the individuals; in such a way that the painter, regardless of the temporal and spatial dimension may create events. In the field picture narration, the visual environment and the physical environment are consistent; picture narrator chooses the physical environment according to the environment, hence the two spaces become indivisible. The picture narrator, by masking some of the imprinted forms on the screen, and by placing himself as one of the visual forms against the central narrative forms, changes the proportion of the visual elements of the screen according to his narration. Thus, the spectator's viewing angles, escaping point and horizon line are challenged, and the visual quality of the spectator interacts with the infinite moving objects in the constant screen. Picture narrator combines the role of the profile on the screen with the actual image of the environment in an improvised manner. In this way of narration, the screen is no longer merely the screen of the original painting, but a visionary screen in which perspective, that screen, narrator and spectator are included. This paper examines the action and interaction of the visual and performative elements of field picture narrating, which covers all visual and performative elements, the environment, and in particular, the audience as a perspective, and creates an integrated universe in the making of a world. This space separates the environmental elements from their everyday function and interacts with the visual elements of the screen as well as the performative elements. The creation of this multidimensional space is not merely based on a naturalistic illusion about the actual distances between the represented elements, but it also depends on the dimension, the role (image), the scale of the narration and the performance’s dimension in the environment, and a large number of linkages which place the spectator as the other dimension in it. In this way, this method brings brilliant results and has created a unique way of performing the picture narrating. This article seeks to answer the following questions: what relationship exists between the narrator and the audience with the painting’s screen? how is the screen's relationship with the environment and how can the pre-painted screen be different in each performance? Therefore, using the descriptive-analytical method and with library sources and documentary information gathering techniques, we will study the samples. The result of the research shows that the narrator, with skill in improvisation, identifies the role of the profile on the screen with the actual image in the environment. This is not a mere scroll of the original painting, but his screen is a perspective that includes the screen, the narrator and the spectator.

N. Psarros, G. Papaschinopoulos, C. J. Schinas

In this paper we prove the stability of the zero equilibria of two systems of difference equations of exponential type, which are some extensions of an one-dimensional biological model. The stability of these systems is investigated in the special case when one of the eigenvalues is equal to -1 and the other eigenvalue has absolute value less than 1, using centre manifold theory. In addition, we study the existence and uniqueness of positive equilibria, the attractivity and the global asymptotic stability of these equilibria of some related systems of difference equations.

Nan Xu, Yanqing Guo, Jiujun Wang et al.

Due to the existence of multiple views in many real-world data sets, multi-view clustering is increasingly popular. Many approaches have been investigated, among which the subspace clustering methods finding the underlying subspaces of data have been developed recently. Although the subspace-based multi-view methods can achieve promising performance, the shared subspace information has not been fully utilized. To address this problem, a novel multi-view clustering model by simultaneously learning shared subspace and affinity matrix is proposed. In our method, a shared subspace is learned to preserve the effective consensus information of all views. Then, a subspace-based affinity matrix with adaptive neighbors is learned to assign the most suitable cluster to each data point. An iterative strategy is developed for solving this problem. Moreover, experiments on four benchmark data sets demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Gwendoline L’Her, Myriam Servières, Daniel Siret

If urban data production and management strategies has generated the smartcities movement, digital technology devices are anchored in territories and modify the ordinary practices of inhabitants. They participate as tools in the urban transformation process. We will more particularly attempt to show to what extent does the introduction of ICT devices in citizen participation moments change the political « dispositif ». As perspective, we will present initiatives, which are inspired by citizen sciences and where « participate by doing » means to produce a common knowledge. This article is a state of art which suggests a reflection on the interactions between inhabitants, techniques, and urban public action using the notion of « citizen as sensor ».

O. Schnick, W. Mathis

In den letzten Jahren hat die Entwicklung von Klasse-D Verstärkern für Audio-Anwendungen ein vermehrtes Interesse auf sich gezogen. Eine Motivation hierfür liegt in der mit dieser Technik extrem hohen erzielbaren Effizienz von über 90%. Die Signale, die Klasse-D Verstärker steuern, sind binär. Immer mehr Audio-Signale werden entweder digital gespeichert (CD, DVD, MP3) oder digital übermittelt (Internet, DRM, DAB, DVB-T, DVB-S, GMS, UMTS), weshalb eine direkte Umsetzung dieser Daten in ein binäres Steuersignal ohne vorherige konventionelle D/A-Wandlung erstrebenswert erscheint. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt; Die klassischen Pulsweitenmodulationsverfahren führen zu Aliasing-Komponenten im Audio-Basisband. Diese Verzerrungen können nur durch eine sehr hohe Schaltfrequenz auf ein akzeptables Maß reduziert werden. Durch das von der Forschungsgruppe um Prof. Mathis vorgestellte SB-ZePoC Verfahren (Zero Position Coding with Separated Baseband) wird diese Art der Signalverzerrung durch Generierung eines separierten Basisbands verhindert. Deshalb können auch niedrige Schaltfrequenzen gewählt werden. Dadurch werden nicht nur die Schaltverluste, sondern auch Timing-Verzerrungen verringert, die durch die nichtideale Schaltendstufe verursacht werden. Diese tragen einen großen Anteil zu den gesamten Verzerrungen eines Klasse-D Verstärkers bei. Mit dem SB-ZePoC Verfahren lassen sich verzerrungsarme Open-Loop Klasse-D Audio-Verstärker realisieren, die ohne aufwändige Gegenkopplungsschleifen auskommen. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt; Class-D amplifiers are suiteble for amplification of audio signals. One argument is their high efficiency of 90% and more. Today most of the audio signals are stored or transmitted in digital form. A digitally controlled Class-D amplifier can be directly driven with coded (modulated) data. No separate D/A conversion is needed. Classical modulation schemes like Pulse-Width-Modulation (PWM) cause aliasing. So a very high switching rate is required to minimize the aliasing component within the signal band. This paper shows a first implementation of the new SB-ZePoC modulation scheme (Zero Position Coding with Separated Baseband), which allows the generation of a binary signal with separated baseband. Therefore Class-D amplifiers using SB-ZePoC can be run with very low switching rates. Some benefits and problems in the design process because of low switching rates will be discussed. Measurements of a realtime implementation will be presented.

Antonio Alves Dias, José Luiz Miotto

Preservation of timber structures is a reason for constant concern because their deterioration often involves compromising the historical patrimony, besides endangering the safety of the structure, and consequently, of their users. Many are the examples of churches, residences or other constructions where this manifestation is a fact. The technique of reinforcing structurally endangered pieces with the addition of natural or synthetic fibers, is an alternative that has been researched. In the group of synthetic fibers, fiberglass, carbon and aramid ones are included. On the other hand, it has been frequent in the restoration of old buildings, especially in Europe, the employment of materials that were not available in the past, aiming to achieve structural, acoustic and aesthetic benefits. On an existing timber structure floor, a concrete slab has been carried out, with an appropriate connection system among the parts, constituting the composite timber-concrete structures. This alternative has been considered as extraordinarily viable, because it gathers a series of convenience related with the durability and it presents better mechanic performance than conventional timber structures. In this work, the state-of-the-art of the use of fibers as structural reinforcement and of the timber-concrete composite structures, is presented.