Pairwise string alignment (PSA) is an important general technique for obtaining a measure of similarity between two strings, used e.g., in dialectology, historical linguistics, transliteration, and in evaluating name distinctiveness. The current study focuses on evaluating different PSA methods at the alignment level instead of via the distances it induces. About 3.5 million pairwise alignments...

A large body of research has shown spatial distortions in the perception of tactile distances on the skin. For example, perceived tactile distance is increased on sensitive compared to less sensitive skin regions, and larger for stimuli oriented along the medio-lateral axis than the proximo-distal axis of the limbs. In this study we aimed to investigate the spatial coherence of these distortion...

Land transformation (ha of surface disturbance/MW) associated with wind facilities shows wide variation in its reported values. In addition, no studies have attempted to explain the variation across facilities. We digitized land transformation at 39 wind facilities using high resolution aerial imagery. We then modeled the effects of turbine size, configuration, land cover, and topography on the...

We measured thresholds for detecting the direction of curvature in slightly bent stimuli such as arcs and sinusoidal lines, and the direction of bend in chevrons and trapezoids in an initial experiment. Stimulus length varied over a wide range from 8.3 to 267 min arc. For sufficiently long stimuli, the angle between the stimulus and its chord was constant at 0.2-0.3 deg at detection threshold. ...

In this paper, highly purified and stable gold nanoparticle (AuNP) dimers connected at the two ends of DNA linkage were prepared by a versatile method. A nanostructured, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) switching sensor system was fabricated based on the controlled organization of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) by a DNA nanomachine through the controlled formation/deformation of SERS "hotsp...

Beta diversity, the spatial or temporal variability of species composition, is a key concept in community ecology. However, our ability to predict the relative importance of the main drivers of beta diversity (e.g., environmental heterogeneity, dispersal limitation, and environmental productivity) remains limited. Using a comprehensive data set on stream invertebrate assemblages across the cont...

The distribution of currents and potentials in a circular conducting medium surrounding two eccentric dipoles was studied to establish how much information on the number, location, and orientation of the dipoles could be deduced from measurements of potential in the medium at various distances from the generators. When a single, eccentric dipole was active, the curve illustrating the distributi...

This paper proposes a palmprint based verification system using low-order Zernike moments of palmprint sub-images. The Zernike moments of corresponding sub-images of live and enrolled palmprint are matched using Euclidean distance for verification. An efficient weighted fusion technique to fuse matching scores of the sub-images is proposed. The palmprint is extracted from the hand image acquire...

A surface plasmon resonance (SPR) scheme is proposed in which the local phase modulations of the coupled plasmons can interfere and yield phase-sensitive intensity modulations in the measured signal. The result is an increased traceability of the SPR shifts for biosensing applications. The main system limitation is the propagation distance of the coupled plasmon modes. This aspect is therefore ...

Surface plasmon modes at terahertz-infrared waveband in subwavelength graphene wedge and groove waveguides are investigated, which can be categorized into perfect electric conductor and perfect magnetic conductor symmetric modes with different propagation characteristics. The electromagnetic near-fields are localized strongly in different regions for these two kinds of modes. Moreover, these mo...