Sharif Digital Repository

Management and treatment of subjective tinnitus is an ongoing focus of research activities. One of the most viable assessments of such treatment is the evaluation of brain activity in addition to patient response and clinical assessment. This study focuses on sound therapy and evaluation of patients’ electroencephalogram (EEG) in order to verify the potency of this approach. Broadband sound therapy was applied to nineteen participants aging from 25 to 64 and suffering from chronic subjective tinnitus to study the difference of brain activity, a) before fake treatment, b) after fake treatment and c) after the main treatment, using EEG and Visual Analog Scale (VAS) for evaluating Residual... 

Tinnitus is the perception of sound without the occurrence of an acoustic event. The deficit in auditory sensory or echoic memory may be the cause of the perception of tinnitus. This study considered the mismatch negativity (MMN) to investigate the potential difference between and within groups of persons with normal hearing (NH) and tinnitus. Using an auditory multi-feature paradigm to elicit the MMN, this study considered the MMN peak amplitude at two central frequencies for two MMN subcomponents. These central frequencies were 1 and 5 kHz, which the latter was closer to the perceived tinnitus frequency in the group with tinnitus. The deviants were higher frequency, lower frequency, higher... 

The giant Kerr nonlinearity with reduced linear and nonlinear absorption in a four-level quantum dot by employing the tunnel coupling is investigated. It is shown that by enhancement of tunnel coupling value the Kerr nonlinearity increases and at the same time linear and nonlinear absorption reduces at the long wavelength which is very important for communicational applications. Enhanced of Kerr nonlinearity in a double quantum dots is investigated. It is found that the electron tunneling has an essential role to reducing the linear absorption and increasing the Kerr nonlinearity at long wavelength  

About 20 percent of people above 60 years old suffer from tinnitus though no definitive treatment has been found for it. Evaluation of electrical brain activity using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) is one of the methods to investigate the underlying reasons of tinnitus perception. Previous studies using ERPs suggest that the precognitive memory in tinnitus groups is negatively affected in comparison to the normal hearing groups. In this study, cognitive memory has been assessed using visual and auditory P300 response with oddball paradigm. Fifteen chronic tinnitus subjects and six normal hearing subjects participated in the experiment. T-test with significance level of 0.05 was applied on... 

Introduction: Some tinnitus subjects habituate to their tinnitus but some others do not and complain of its annoyance tremendously. Normal sensory memory and change detection processes are needed for detecting the tinnitus signal as a prediction error and habituation to tinnitus. The purpose of this study was to compare auditory mismatch negativity as the index of sensory memory and change detection among the studied groups to search for the factors involving in the perception of tinnitus and preventing habituation in decompensated tinnitus subjects. Methods: Electroencephalography was recorded from scalp electrodes in compensated tinnitus, decompensated tinnitus, and no tinnitus control... 

In this study the output beam profiles of the single mode and multimode optical fibers are investigated by the cross sectional imaging technique. Different experiments are performed for the single mode and multimode fibers and the captured images are compared. The relative near field intensity distribution and their relative changes with respect to the distance is examined and some fiber parameters are obtained. A similar pattern in the real-time image is observed for the two type fibers and major differences are discussed. Using this method it is possible to determine the numerical aperture of the illuminated fiber, which is about 0.22 for the tested fiber. The effect of coherency of the... 

In 1998, Mu and Varadharajan proposed an anonymous e-voting scheme to be applied in both small-scale and large-scale elections. They claimed that it protects the anonymity of voters and prevents double voting. They also mentioned that if a malicious voter votes more than once, his identity will be discovered by the election authority. In 2003, Lin et al. demonstrated that the scheme fails to resist double voting and further proposed an enhanced scheme to overcome the weakness. Their scheme has received a much of interest by Yang et al. (2004), Hwang et al. (2005), and Rodriguez-Henriquez et al. (2007). They have improved Lin et al.'s scheme to prevent their proposed weaknesses. This paper... 

In this study the optical beam transfer and imaging in an optical fiber coupling is discussed. In coupling two fibers, some measurements from intensity perspective are performed and intensity profile is investigated. A theoretical model for the power transmission in fiber coupling is developed and theoretical function is compared with the experimental results. The amount of light delivered to the receiving fiber depends on the acceptance angle of the receiving fiber and the core cross sections of both fibers. Intensity profile function obtained theoretically agrees well with the measured results. The intensity variation as a function of the air gap variation is investigated in this article.... 

In this paper, we propose a new anonymous channel protocol for authentication in GSM mobile communication networks. The protocol is the result of incorporating our anonymity scheme to an efficient GSM authentication protocol proposed by Chang et al. As a result, our protocol has all the features of their scheme including anonymity. Compared with the most recent protocols in this area, such as those by Peinado and Hwang et al., we show that our scheme generally is more secure and more efficient. © 2008, Inderscience Publishers  

Many smart-card-based remote authentication schemes have been proposed recently. In 2004, Yoon et al. presented an improved scheme which is the leading of a research track started from Sun, 2000. In this paper, we illustrate that Yoon et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to the parallel session attack and propose an enhancement of the scheme to resist that attack. In our scheme the parties further establish a forward-secure session key by employing only hash functions to protect the subsequent communications. We also demonstrate that our scheme has better security in comparison to other related works, while it does not incur much computational cost © 2007 Springer  

Seismic response of large concrete tower structures with passive or active damping is important in terms of performance under earthquake loads. The conventional finite element method has been used successfully in linear and nonlinear analyses in large concrete structures. The method can be performed by subdividing the large structure into small uniform elements having approximate shape functions. Although this replaces a single complicated structural system with a number of simple uniform elements, in cases of tall concrete tower structures with cracking and crushing behaviour in the concrete material and yielding in the reinforcement, the computer time and memory can be large. Hence, it is... 

The conventional finite element method has been used successfully in linear and nonlinear analyses in concrete chimney structures. The method can be performed by subdividing the large structure into small uniform elements having approximate shape functions. Although this replaces a single complicated structural system into a number of simple uniform elements, in cases of tall concrete chimney structures with cracking and crushing behavior in concrete material and yielding in the reinforcement, the computer time and memory can be large. Hence, it is desirable to search for a procedure requiring a fewer number of elements and also less computer time and effort to model a structure. In this... 

Conventional finite element method has been used successfully in linear and nonlinear analyses in tall chimney structures. The method can be performed by subdividing the large structure with small uniform elements having approximate shape functions. Although this replaces a single complicated structural system with the number of simple uniform elements, in cases of tall concrete chimney structures with cracking and crushing behavior in concrete material and yielding in the reinforcement, the computer time and memory can be large. Hence, it is desirable to search for a procedure requiring lesser number of elements and also less computer time and effort to model a structure. In this respect,... 

Let G be a graph. It is well-known that G contains a proper vertex-coloring with χ(G) colors with the property that at least one color class of the coloring is a dominating set in G. Among all such proper vertex-coloring of the vertices of G, a coloring with the maximum number of color classes that are dominating sets in G is called a dominating-χ-coloring of G. The number of color classes that are dominating sets in a dominating-χ-coloring of G is defined to be the dominating-χ-color number of G and is denoted by dχ(G). In this paper, we prove that if G is a claw-free graph with minimum degree at least two, then dχ(G)≥2  

Design and operation of an optical fiber sensor based on the intensity modulation is reported in this article. Two distinct mechanisms are considered for the optical power loss and the sensor operation is explained in terms of these effects. The dominant loss mechanism is found to be the evanescent loss and based on this phenomenon the optical fiber sensor is designed. Performance of this sensor is tested as a liquid level sensor for water and the experimental results are reported. The dry and wet signals for this probe are measured for a series of measurements and important factors concerning the design and operation of sensor are described. The precision of measured values, reproducibility... 

Short ZnO nanorods and long ZnO nanowires have been produced on SiO2 and Si substrates by VLS and VS mechanisms via a double tube chemical vapor transport and condensation (CVTC) process. The role of reactants and droplet interfaces on the nucleation and growth of ZnO nanorods have been investigated. A conceptual model for nucleation of ZnO nanorods has been proposed by describing the half-oxidation and reduction reactions at the growth front. The importance of Zn vapor in the nucleation phenomena has been studied by changing starting materials. Atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and EDX analysis have been used to characterize ZnO nanorods and investigate the... 

In this paper, optimization and control of a tubular reactor for thermal bulk post-polymerization of styrene have been investigated. By using the reactor mathematical model, static and dynamic simulations are carried out. Based on an objective function including polymer conversion and polydispersity, reactor optimal temperature profile has been obtained. In the absence of model mismatch, desired product characteristic can also be obtained by applying the corresponding reactor wall or jacket temperature profile. To achieve this temperature trajectory, reactor jacket is divided into three zones and jacket inlet temperatures are used as manipulated variables. Effectiveness of the proposed... 

We investigate the potentials of applying the coded caching paradigm in wireless networks. In order to do this, we investigate physical layer schemes for downlink transmission from a multiantenna transmitter to several cache-enabled users. As the baseline scheme, we consider employing coded caching on the top of max-min fair multicasting, which is shown to be far from optimal at high-SNR values. Our first proposed scheme, which is near-optimal in terms of DoF, is the natural extension of multiserver coded caching to Gaussian channels. As we demonstrate, its finite SNR performance is not satisfactory, and thus we propose a new scheme in which the linear combination of messages is implemented...