BACKGROUND Few studies have explored the microbial contamination of glove boxes in clinical settings. The objective of this observational study was to investigate whether a new glove packaging system in which single gloves are dispensed vertically, cuff end first, has lower levels of contamination on the gloves and on the surface around the box aperture compared with conventional glove boxes. ...

In this paper, we present how to construct DES-like S-boxes based on Boolean functions satisfying the Strict Avalanche Criterion and compare their cryptographic properties with those of DES S-boxes in various points of view. We found that our designed DES-like S-boxes exhibit better cryptographical properties than those of DES S-boxes.

Substitution boxes with thorough cryptographic strengths are essential for the development of strong encryption systems. They are the only portions capable of inducing nonlinearity in symmetric encryption systems. Bijective substitution boxes having both high nonlinearities and high algebraic complexities are the most desirable to thwart linear, differential and algebraic attacks. In this paper...

Nesting cavities are often a limited resource that multiple species use. There is an ongoing discussion on whether invasive cavity nesting birds restrict the availability of this key limited resource. While the answer to this question has important conservation implications, little experimental work has been done to examine it. Here, we aimed to experimentally test whether alien cavity nesting ...

Dots-And-Boxes is a well-known and widely-played combinatorial game. While the rules of play are very simple, the state space for even very small games is extremely large, and finding the outcome under optimal play is correspondingly hard. In this paper we introduce a Dots-And-Boxes solver which is significantly faster than the current state-of-the-art: over an order-of-magnitude faster on seve...

The BOXES algorithm of Michie and Chambers (1968) has proved to be an effective and flexible method for learning to control dynamic systems. The algorithm, in its original form has been used a benchmark for many experiments in control tasks such as pole balancing. Recent work in our laboratory has shown that the BOXES algorithm can be improved to yield very good learning rates. We describe expe...

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Exponentiation in finite fields of characteristic 2 is proposed to construct large bijective S-boxes of block ciphers. We obtain some properties of the exponential Sboxes that are related to differential, higher order differential, and linear cryptanalysis methods.

Girard's original deenition of proof nets for linear logic involves boxes. The box is the unit for erasing and duplicating fragments of proof nets. It imposes synchronization, limits sharing, and impedes a completely local view of computation. Here we describe an implementation of proof nets without boxes. Proof nets are translated into graphs of the sort used in optimal calculus implementation...