The Neurothermostat is an adaptive controller that regulates indoor air temperature in a residence by switching a furnace on or oo. The task is framed as an optimal control problem in which both comfort and energy costs are considered as part of the control objective. Because the consequences of control decisions are delayed in time, the Neurothermostat must anticipate heating demands with pred...

Since the late 1950s, land reclamation from lakes has been a common human disturbance to ecosystems in China. It has greatly diminished the lake area, and altered natural ecological succession. However, little is known about its impact on the carbon (C) cycle. We conducted an experiment to examine the variations of chemical properties of dissolved organic matter (DOM) and C mineralization under...

AIM The aim was to assess the pharmacokinetic (PK) interaction of curcumin and glibenclamide (GL) in diabetic rats. MATERIALS AND METHODS Sprague-Dawley rats induced with diabetes were divided into 2 groups of six rats in each. Group I: GL (6 mg/kg po once daily) treatment in diabetic rats and group 2: Curcumin (50 mg/Kg po once daily) + GL (dose as above) in diabetic rats. Blood samples were...

The ability to predict which alien plants will transition from naturalized to invasive prior to their introduction to novel regions is a key goal for conservation and has the potential to increase the efficacy of weed risk assessment (WRA). However, multiple factors contribute to plant invasion success (e.g., functional traits, range characteristics, residence time, phylogeny), and they all mus...

The pharmacokinetic characteristics of cefepime were determined after first dose (n = 35) and again under steady-state conditions (n = 31) with a group of 37 infants and children. In eight subjects, a cefepime dose given by intramuscular injection was substituted for an intravenous dose, and disposition characteristics were studied again. Study subjects ranged in age from 2.1 months to 16.4 yea...

In this study, we examine the ways in which user attitudes towards privacy and security relating to mobile devices and the data stored thereon may impact the strength of unlock authentication, focusing on Android’s graphical unlock patterns. We conducted an online study with Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 750) using self-reported unlock authentication choices, as well as Likert scale agreement/dis...

Abstract Ecological residence is the direction of residence development in 21 century; it is the final choice of people when their living standard becomes high enough. Ecological Residence pursues high harmony and unification among nature, buildings and human, and improves the ecological environment and living quality of human. This article analyzes the problems in developing ecological residen...

In developing countries without universal social safety nets, co-residence between older parents and adult children is a central feature of old-age security arrangements. However, the impact of the health status of elderly on adult care-giving members’ labour supply is less well-known. In this paper we use data from the 2000 Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS 3), to examine the impact of care-...

The residence time measures the time spent by a water parcel or a pollutant in a given water body and is therefore widely used in environmental studies. The adjoint method introduced by Delhez et al. (2004) to compute this diagnostic is revised here to take into account the effect of the initialization and of the boundary conditions. In addition to the equation for the mean residence time, it i...

Variability of residence time in the Tropical Tropopause Layer during Northern Hemisphere winter K. Krüger, S. Tegtmeier, and M. Rex Leibniz-Institute for Marine Sciences at Kiel University (IFM-GEOMAR), Kiel, Germany Environment Canada, Toronto, Canada Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany Received: 18 April 2009 – Accepted: 15 May 2009 – Published: 28 May 20...