OBJECTIVES To compare 3 communication modes (postal, fax, and e-mail) in a rotavirus vaccine physician survey. METHODS We used 3 communication modes to distribute a survey to physicians listed in the membership directory of the Georgia Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The directory listed 1391 members; however, 404 were deemed ineligible on the basis of their listing as a specia...

We derive a JPEG compliant image compressor which is based on hierarchical vector quantization (HVQ). The goal is to reduce complexity while increasing compression speed. For each block, the DCT DC coefficient is encoded in the regular way while the residual is mapped through HVQ to a pre-computed bit-stream corresponding to the compressed DCT AC coefficients. Approximation quality is generally...

Purpose: Despite the stimulating roles of market demand and green issues to green innovation and business success, the relationships among these aspects remains controversial. The lack of the consensus on these links causes a missing research gap in the extant literature. This study aims to examine the mediating effect of green innovation and environmental performance on the relationship betwee...

We introduce a model system of stochastic entities, called rowers which include some essentials of the behavior of real cilia. We introduce and discuss the problem of symmetry breaking for these objects and its connection with the onset of macroscopic, directed flow in the fluid. We perform a mean field-like calculation showing that hydrodynamic interaction may provide for the symmetry breaking...

Technical systems are subjected to a variety of excitations that cannot generally be described in deterministic ways. External disturbances like wind gusts or road roughness as well as uncertainties in system parameters can be described by random variables, with statistical parameters identified through measurements, for instance. For general systems the statistical characteristics such as the ...

The Langevin system subjected to non-Gaussian noise has been discussed, by using the second-order moment approach with the two models for generating the noise. We have derived the effective differential equation (DE) for a variable x, from which the stationary probability distribution P (x) has been calculated with the use of the Fokker-Planck equation. The result of P (x) calculated by the mom...

Thermoelastic simulation of functionally graded materials is practically important for engineers. Here, the extension and assembly of our two previous papers (Computational Mechanics 2006, 38, p51-60; Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements 2008, 32, p704-712) is presented to evaluate the transient temperature and stress distributions in two-dimensional functionally graded solids. In this c...

A large class of physically important nonlinear and nonhomogeneous evolution problems, characterized by advection-like and diffusion-like processes, can be usefully studied by a time-differential form of Kolmogorov’s solution of the backward-time Fokker-Planck equation. The differential solution embodies an integral representation theorem by which any physical or mathematical entity satisfying ...