We construct a polynomial-time algorithm to approximate the branch-width of certain symmetric submodular functions, and give two applications. The first is to graph “clique-width”. Clique-width is a measure of the difficulty of decomposing a graph in a kind of tree-structure, and if a graph has clique-width at most k then the corresponding decomposition of the graph is called a “k-expression”. ...

The etiology of a compressive spinal cord injury can occur secondary to developmental or acquired causes. In horses neurologic gait deficits have been recognized since 1860. In 1938 the term Wobblers syndrome was used to describe these gait abnormalities. There are many terms used to describe this syndrome such as cervical vertebral malformation, cervical vertebral instability, and cervical ver...

There are several reasons why this book might be of interest to a TEX user. First, LTEX has a prominent place in the book. Second, the book describes a very interesting offshoot of literate programming, a topic traditionally popular in the TEX community. Third, since a number of TEX users work with data analysis and statistics, R could be a useful tool for them. Since some TUGboat readers are l...

Abrasive water jet machining (AWJM) is one of the non conventional machining process for difficult to cut brittle, hard and thin materials. The process parameters which are mainly influence the quality of machining in AWJM are water pressure, stand-off distance, nozzle diameter, traverse speed, abrasive flow rate and abrasive size. This is an environment friendly and relatively inexpensive proc...

Experimental investigations were conducted to assess the influence of Abrasive Water Jet Machining (AWJM) process parameters on surface roughness (Ra) and kerf taper ratio (TR) of aramid fibre reinforced plastics (AFRP) composite. The approach was based on Taguchi’s Method and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to optimize the AWJM process parameters for effective machining. It was found that travers...