Surface interactions occur near the land–atmosphere interface, thus affecting temperature, convection, boundary layer, and stability of atmosphere. A proper representation surface is a crucial component for numerical atmospheric air quality modeling. We assessed four land schemes—1. 5–layer thermal diffusion scheme (1 5-Layer); 2. unified Noah model (2 Noah); 3. rapid update cycle (3 RUC) model...

The problem this paper addresses is how to modify an existing operating system’s I/O subsystem to support new high-speed networks and high-bandwidth multimedia applications that will play an important role in future computing environments. The proposed I/O subsystem is called universal continuous media I/O (UCM I/O). This paper will cover the preliminary design of UCM I/O, some of the trade-off...

Software maintenance accounts for a significant proportion of the cost of the software life cycle. Software engineers must spend a considerable amount of time understanding the software system functional attributes and non-functional (e.g., availability, security, etc.) aspects prior to performing a maintenance task. In this paper, we propose a dynamic analysis approach to recover availability ...

This paper presents an empirical exercise in economic forecast using traditional time series methods, such as ARIMA and unobservable components models (UCM), and artificial neural networks (ANN). We use monthly gross industrial output data for the state of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) to perform a comparative exercise and access the relative performance of the different forecasting methods. The r...

This study investigated the frequency and pattern of mutations that arose in lacI transgenes in lung tissues of mice exposed to 300 p.p.m. of benzene for 6 h/day x 5 days/week for 12 weeks. The nucleotide sequence changes in 86 lacI- transgenes from lung tissues of eight benzene-exposed mice (BEM) and 78 spontaneous lacI- transgenes from lung tissues of eight unexposed control mice (UCM) were i...

Unplugged is a school prevention programme widely implemtend in Europe, with some positive evaluations. This research aims to measure the impact of this program on tobacco use by means of the lifetime and last-30-day tobacco use prevalence indicators and verify the duration of the intervention's measurable effect over time. The study was designed as a randomised controlled prevention trial. The...

Recursion is a programming paradigm as well as a problem solving strategy thought to be very challenging to grasp for university students. This article outlines a pilot study, which expands the age range of students exposed to the concept of recursion in computer science through instruction in a series of interesting and engaging activities. In this study, a small number of students (n = 9) age...

High-resolution numerical simulations of the urban heat island (UHI) effect with the widely-used Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model are assessed. Both the sensitivity of the results to the simulation setup, and the quality of the simulated fields as representations of the real world, are investigated. Results indicate that the WRF-simulated surface temperatures are more sensitive to t...

The rat kidney's morphological and transepithelial transport properties may change in response to different physiologic conditions. To better understand those processes, we used a non-linear optimization technique to estimate parameter sets that maximize key measures that assess the effectiveness and efficiency of a mathematical model of the rat urine concentrating mechanism (UCM). We considere...