From its emergence to the present day, traffic light control systems have been widely used to monitor and control the flow of vehicles. However, with the increasing number of public (bus) and private ...vehicles (car, motorcycle, and truck), urban centers are becoming more and more populous. Such phenomenon leads to traffic congestion and increases environmental and noise pollution. In order to stem the rise of such problems, large cities are adopting technological solutions, materializing the concept of smart cities. While observing traffic management systems themselves, several hardware and software solutions have been studied and implemented around the world. This article aims to contribute to traffic signals improvement by developing a centralized traffic light control system, using a unique wireless communication network. In order to prove the system's effectiveness, the most common types of urban intersections were analyzed. Direct control routines were implemented for network traffic lights, providing a complete control system for extraordinary events, such as closing roads due to accidents or public events. Finally, safety routines were formulated to report the operating status of the traffic light system lamps to a central management. With the aid of a logic analyzer connected to the outputs for each focal group, it was possible to set up an operating stages timing diagram of each traffic light. Thus, the system validation was achieved based on theoretical and practical timing diagrams similarities.
Given a spacetime with nonvanishing torsion, we discuss the equation for the evolution of the separation vector between infinitesimally close curves in a congruence. We show that the presence of a ...torsion field leads, in general, to tangent and orthogonal effects on the congruence; in particular, the presence of a completely generic torsion field contributes to a relative acceleration between test particles. We derive, for the first time in the literature, the Raychaudhuri equation for a congruence of timelike and null curves in a spacetime with the most generic torsion field.
We generalize the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations for space-times endowed with a Weyssenhof-like torsion field in the Einstein-Cartan theory. The new set of structure equations clearly show how ...the presence of torsion affects the geometry of the space-time. We obtain new exact solutions for compact objects with non-null intrinsic spin surrounded by vacuum, explore their properties, and discuss how these solutions should be smoothly matched to an exterior space-time. We study how the intrinsic spin of matter changes the Buchdahl limit for the maximum compactness of stars. Moreover, under rather generic conditions, we prove that in the context of a Weyssenhof-like torsion, no static, spherically symmetric compact objects supported only by the intrinsic spin can exist. We also provide some algorithms to generate new solutions.
The authors recall the application of fixed-lag particle smoothing (FLPS) to perform blind turbo equalisation under a Bayesian framework, assuming that the noise variance is unknown. This approach ...has been successfully applied in previous works, at the price of increasing equaliser computational complexity. This study's main contribution is to propose a strategy to monitor, along the iterations, the quality of channel estimate and soft information about the coded symbols, to switch from FLPS to the BCJR algorithm when performing soft-input soft-output equalisation. This approach allows saving significant computational effort without affecting bit error rate performance. Simulation results and a careful computational complexity analysis show the effectiveness of the techniques herein presented.
Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) has been shown to respond to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT). It has been established that achieving pathological complete response (pCR) for certain aggressive ...subtypes of breast cancer, including HER-2 (over-expressed) and TNBC, provides an important surrogate marker for predicting long-term clinical response and survival outcomes.
How to increase the number of patients that achieve pCR remains challenging. Platinum-based NACT seems to be part of the solution and capecitabine, an active drug in metastatic breast cancer, but not a standard one in earlier stages may have found its place in the adjuvant setting. In the near future immunotherapy can play a role in early TNBC
Mucosal melanoma accounts for 1% of all melanomas. It is more aggressive than cutaneous melanoma, and local excision provides the best disease-free survival. The vast majority of patients eventually ...develop metastases, with a metastatic pattern independent of the primary tumor site. While studies show that BRAF and KIT inhibitors have a role in the management of these patients, the actual treatment focus is on immunotherapy. Herein is described the case of a 79-year-old woman with metastatic mucosal melanoma and bone marrow infiltration causing disseminated intravascular coagulation, who was treated with an immunotherapy combination (anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD-1 antibodies), achieving complete disease remission. This is the third case of melanoma with disseminated intravascular coagulation at presentation and the second case treated with immunotherapy in the literature, but the only one achieving disease remission.
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