The chemical evolution of the Milky Way is investigated using a dual-phase metal-enriched infall model in which primordial gas fuels the earliest epoch of star formation, followed by the ongoing formation of stars from newly accreted gas. The latest metallicity distribution of local K-dwarfs is reproduced by this model, which allows the Galactic thin disk to form from slightly metal-enriched ga...

The “cracking an open safe” methodology has been used to tabulate HAZUS-based seismic vulnerability as functions of structure-independent intensity, while avoiding iteration in the structural analysis. The vulnerability functions give mean damage factor (MDF, defined here as mean repair cost as a fraction of replacement cost) versus 5%-damped elastic spectral acceleration response at 0.3-second...

Life-cycle inventory (LCI) data are needed to scientifically document the environmental performance of materials for applications as governed by the many new green building standards, purchasing guidelines, and energy and climate change policy issues. This study develops the LCI data for medium-density fiberboard (MDF), a composite wood panel product comprised of wood fibers, urea– formaldehyde...

MDF tree is a data structure (index) that is used to speed up similarity searches in huge databases. To achieve its goal the indexes should exploit some property of the dissimilarity measure. MDF indexes assume that the dissimilarity measure can be viewed as a distance in a metric space. Moreover, in this framework is assumed that the distance is computationally very expensive and then, countin...

A sparse system identification algorithm for network echo cancellation is presented. This new approach exploits both the fast convergence of the improved proportionate normalized least mean square (IPNLMS) algorithm and the efficient implementation of the multidelay adaptive filtering (MDF) algorithm inheriting the beneficial properties of both. The proposed IPMDF algorithm is evaluated using i...

Wood and Cowan (1995) replicated and extended Moray's (1959) investigation of the cocktail party phenomenon, which refers to a situation in which one can attend to only part of a noisy environment, yet highly pertinent stimuli such as one's own name can suddenly capture attention. Both of these previous investigations have shown that approximately 33% of subjects report hearing their own name i...