BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The sheer volume of electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) has presently been generated in Vietnam, posing a growing concern regarding its impact can have on the environment and human health. Therefore, the need for developing policies and regulations towards the environmentally sound management of e-waste is becoming crucial. Although the municipa...

Prepaid energy meters have been widely adopted by utilities in different countries across the world as an innovative solution to the problem of affordability and consumption management. However, the present smart card based systems have some inherent problems like added cost, low availability and lack of security. In the future Smart Grid paradigm, use of smart meters can completely overhaul th...

We study the physics of spontaneously broken family symmetries acting on the third generation. Massless familons φ associated with such broken symmetries are motivated especially by cosmological scenarios with decaying tau neutrinos. We first note that, in marked contrast with the case for the first two generations, constraints on third generation familon couplings are poor, and are, in fact, n...

mPGES-1 (microsomal prostaglandin E synthase-1) is a newly recognized target for the treatment of inflammatory diseases. As the terminal enzyme of the prostaglandin production pathway, mPGES-1 inhibition may have a low risk of side effects. Inhibitors of mPGES-1 have attracted considerable attention as next-generation anti-inflammatory drugs. However, as mPGES-1 is a membrane protein, its enzym...

The E-164 experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is the third in a series investigating Plasma Wakefield Acceleration where the wake is driven by electron bunches. A collaboration between SLAC, UCLA and USC, E-164 has up to 2x10 electrons at 28.5GeV in 100 micron long bunches. These bunches enter a 30cm long Lithium plasma with density of 6x10 electrons/cm, where the transfer of e...

Security services become crucial to many applications such as e-commerce payment protocols, electronic contract signing, and certified e-mail delivery, with the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks. For these applications fair exchange must be assured. A fair protocol allows two parties to exchange digital signatures over the Internet in a fair way, so that either each party gets...

We present new protocols for two parties to exchange documents with fairness, i.e., such that no party can gain an advantage by quitting prematurely or otherwise misbehaving. We use a third party that is L‘semi-trusted”, in the sense that it may misbehave on its own but will not conspire with either of the main parties. In our solutions, disruption by any one of the three parties will not allow...

A fair contract-signing protocol allows two potentially mistrusted parities to exchange their commitments (i.e., digital signatures) to an agreed contract over the Internet in a fair way, so that either each of them obtains the other’s signature, or neither party does. Based on the RSA signature scheme, a new digital contract-signing protocol is proposed in this paper. Like the existing RSA-bas...