Activity-Based Costing (ABC) was developed in the mid 1980s by Kaplan and it has been applied very popular in developed countries with obvious advantages. Although ABC system has more advantages than traditional costing (TC) system, but in today’s competitive economic environment it has not met fulfilled provision of sufficient information for decision-making, especially single ABC method ignor...

Developing a platform for in vitro cartilage formation would enhance the study of cartilage development, pathogenesis, and regeneration. To improve neocartilage formation, our group developed a novel self-assembly process for articular chondrocytes, which has been improved in this study using a novel combination of catabolic and anabolic agents. TGF-β1 was applied in conjunction with the enzyme...

The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is an active field of optimization based on swarm intelligence in recent years. Inspired by the mutation strategies used in Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm, this paper introduced three types strategies (“rand”, “best”, and “current-to-best”) and one or two numbers of disturbance vectors to ABC algorithm. Although individual mutation strategies in ...

Previous studies have suggested that altruistic behaviors for children and grandchildren (ABC) have a complex mechanism for psychiatric morbidity among parents and grandparents. The interaction between ABC and sense of obligation to children/grandchildren (SOC) may help to provide a better understanding of the association between ABC and psychiatric morbidity. In this study, we seek to investig...

About a 100 years ago, the Drosophila white mutant marked the birth of Drosophila genetics. The white gene turned out to encode the first well studied ABC transporter in arthropods. The ABC gene family is now recognized as one of the largest transporter families in all kingdoms of life. The majority of ABC proteins function as primary-active transporters that bind and hydrolyze ATP while transp...

BACKGROUND Insects evolved ingenious adaptations to use extraordinary food sources. Particularly, the diet of herbivores enriched with noxious plant secondary metabolites requires detoxification mechanisms. Sequestration, which involves the uptake, transfer, and concentration of occasionally modified phytochemicals into specialized tissues or hemolymph, is one of the most successful detoxificat...

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) and artificial bee colony (ABC) are new optimization methods that have attracted increasing research interests because of its simplicity and efficiency. However, when being applied to high-dimensional optimization problems, PSO algorithm may be trapped in the local optimal because of its low global exploration efficiency; ABC algorithm has slower convergence sp...