In this paper we investigate the optimal supply function for a generator who sells electricity into a wholesale electricity spot market and whose profit function is not smooth. In previous work in this area, the generator’s profit function has usually been assumed to be continuously differentiable. However in some interesting instances, this assumption is not satisfied. These include the case w...

We discuss the physical interpretation of unparticles and review the constraints from cosmology. Unparticles may be understood in terms of confined states of a strongly-coupled scale-invariant theory, where scale-invariance implies that the confined states have continuous masses. This picture is consistent with the observation that unparticle operators can be represented in terms of continuous ...

We propose the idea of building a secure hash using quadratic or higher degree multivariate polynomials over a finite field as the compression function. We analyze some security properties and potential feasibility, where the compression functions are randomly chosen highdegree polynomials, and show that under some plausible assumptions, high-degree polynomials as compression functions has good...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of rule changes on game-related statistics in men’s water polo matches. A total of 856 men’s matches played in all Olympic Games and World Championship since 1936 was analysed. The game-related statistics considered were: total goals, winners’ goals, losers’ goals, goals per minute, goals difference, relationship difference goals and total go...

Salazar, Dunn and Graham in [15] presented an improved Feng-Rao bound for the minimum distance of dual codes. In this work we take the improvement a step further. Both the original bound by Salazar et. al., as well as our improvement are lifted so that they deal with generalized Hamming weights. We also demonstrate the advantage of working with one-way well-behaving pairs rather than weakly wel...

This paper considers the problem of efficiently generating a sequence of secrets with the special property that the knowledge of one or several secrets does not help an adversary to find the other ones. This is achieved through one-way cross-trees, which may be seen as a multidimensional extension of the so-called one-way chains. In a dual way, some applications require the release of one or se...

We present high probability differential trails on 2 and 3 rounds of BLAKE-32. Using the trails we are able to launch boomerang attacks on up to 8 round-reduced keyed permutation of BLAKE-32. Also, we show that boomerangs can be used as distinguishers for hash/compression functions and present such distinguishers for the compression function of BLAKE-32 reduced to 7 rounds. Since our distinguis...

We present a simple scheme that makes guessing passwords based on one-way functions 100 to 1000 times harder. The scheme is easy to program and easy to incrementally add to existing schemes. In particular, there is no need to switch to it all at the same time. Old passwords will still work and have the same security as before (one will not be able to distinguish them from new passwords); newly-...

The study mainly investigates the students’ attitudes toward mathematic learning and web-based mathematic competition in different learning stages in Taiwan. This study was to conduct an online survey, which is driven by three issues: (1) What are the differences in mathematical learning attitudes with the web-based mathematics competition in the different learning stages (2) Is there any signi...