The public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, includ...

The flag of registry and classification society are an integral part of the target factors used by Port State Control authorities (PSC) when deciding on vessels to select for inspection. A shipowner may then have an interest in changing the flag of registry (flag-hopping) and classification society (class-hopping) to avoid future controls. Using data on PSCs collected over 6 years from 7,500 ve...

In recent years, the widespread use of social media has facilitated the propagation of messages after disasters. Unfortunately, because the veracity of messages is often difficult to determine in a disaster situation, social media also facilitates the rapid diffusion of rumors. Current studies have examined why individuals post or transmit rumors on social media. However, investigating factors ...

1. Abstract Communication subsystems generally consume the majority of power and a significant fraction of mass and volume for picosatellites, and thus their design is critical to the overall satellite and mission plans. The available data bandwidth defines the types of payloads that can be accommodated. Until now, most CubeSat designs have used the 2m (145MHz) and 70cm (437MHz) bands. We prese...

Spread Spectrum (SPSP) Communication is the theoretical basis of Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) transceiver technology. Spreading code, modulation, demodulation, carrier synchronization and code synchronization in SPSP communications are the core parts of DSSS transceivers. This paper focuses on the code synchronization problem in SPSP communications. A novel code synchronization algori...

Image watermarking is a mapping from watermark message to a set of image counterparts, where every version conveys the same meaning with the original image. Since textures that present single perceptual meaning have certain diversity, an intuitive idea of watermarking is to replace the texture region of an image with a similar-looking synthetic texture containing the watermark. We propose a spr...

Unlicensed operation has become a viable alternative for building wireless access infrastructures. In the future unlicensed operation may be an important part of the infrastructure. However even if many problems can be solved there are many challenges involved as well. This paper studies how two operators interact when they have two networks in the same geographical area. Data traffic (packets)...

We consider a hybrid direct-sequence frequency-hopped (DS/FH) code division multiple access (CDMA) communication system, where the transmission power and data rate are adapted relative to the channel variation. Instead of random frequency hopping, hopping pattern is adaptively adjusted to obtain the maximum channel gain among available frequency slots. Transmission power and/or data rate are al...

temporal and spatial variations of fire behavior can be predicted using one of the semi-physical or empirical models developed over recent years. this article investigates the effect of different fuel moisture conditions on fire spread and behavior in national golestan park in july 2011 using farsite, flammap simulation systems, and previous ignition history. landscape data contains the topogra...