BACKGROUND Seasonal variation of flow-mediated vasodilation (FMD) remains controversial. A large cohort study showing that FMD was highest in summer and lowest in winter has been performed in a cross-sectional manner on different populations in different seasons, and the results for the same population were not compared. METHODS FMD was compared between the cool season (14.4 ± 4.4°C) and warm...

modelling and forecasting stock market is a challenging task for economists and engineers since it has a dynamic structure and nonlinear characteristic. this nonlinearity affects the efficiency of the price characteristics. using an artificial neural network (ann) is a proper way to model this nonlinearity and it has been used successfully in one-step-ahead and multi-step-ahead prediction of di...

In this paper, the normalized prediction error of the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal recorded at five different mental tasks was computed. The results indicate that there exists predictability in the EEG signal beyond the baseline prediction of the mean and the one-stepahead normalized prediction error of EEG signal vary greatly when different mental tasks are implemented, which implies that...

Increasing competition (whether for-profit or nonprofit) is forcing businesses to pay much more attention to satisfying customers, including by providing strong customer service. It may help the reader to notice the role of customer service in the overall context of product or service development and management. Wal-Mart is a chain of retail stores operated by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. an American ...

This article explores dominant ideological framings of the economic crisis that began in 2008, by examining shifting meanings of consumer citizenship in the US. The consumer citizen was a central figure in Keynesian ideology—one that encapsulated important assumptions about the proper relationship between production and consumption and the appropriate arenas for citizen engagement with the econ...

If a CSP instance has no solution, it contains a smaller unsolvable subproblem that makes unsolvable the whole problem. When solving such instance, instead of just returning the “no solution” message, it is of interest to return an unsolvable subproblem. The detection of such unsolvable subproblems has many applications: failure explanation, error diagnosis, planning, intelligent backtracking, ...

Computational intelligence approaches to multiple-step-ahead forecasting rely either on iterated one-step-ahead predictors or direct predictors. In both cases the predictions are obtained by means of multi-input single-output modeling techniques. This paper discusses the limits of single-output approaches when the predictor is expected to return a long series of future values and presents a mul...

This paper provides a significant numerical evidence for out-of-sample forecasting ability of linear Gaussian interest rate models with unobservable underlying factors. We calibrate one, two and three factor linear Gaussian models using the Kalman filter on two different bond yield data sets and compare their out-of-sample forecasting performance. One step ahead as well as four step ahead out-o...