We consider a simple tournament model with two stages and compare two information conditions: Either intermediate information on the subjects’ relative positions after the first stage is available or it is not. According to our theoretical predictions, equilibrium behavior in both stages is not affected by intermediate information. In laboratory experiments, we also find no difference between a...

Laboratory and numerical experiments were conducted to investigate the evolution of soil water evaporation during a continuous drying event. Simulated soil water contents and temperatures by the calibrated model well reproduced measured values at different depths. Results show that the evaporative drying process could be divided into three stages, beginning with a relatively high evaporation ra...

Type-2 defuzzification is a two-stage process. Type-reduction, the first stage, gives rise to a type-1 fuzzy set known as the type-reduced set (TRS), which for the second stage is defuzzified to give a crisp number. This paper focusses on the TRS itself, which reveals a fascinating internal structure. We provide a description of and explanation for this structure, then go on to suggest how it m...

BACKGROUND All-versus-all BLAST, which searches for homologous pairs of sequences in a database of proteins, is used to identify potential orthologs, to find new protein families, and to provide rapid access to these homology relationships. As DNA sequencing accelerates and data sets grow, all-versus-all BLAST has become computationally demanding. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We present Fas...

BACKGROUND Existing guidance for developing public health interventions does not provide information for researchers about how to work with intervention providers to co-produce and prototype the content and delivery of new interventions prior to evaluation. The ASSIST + Frank study aimed to adapt an existing effective peer-led smoking prevention intervention (ASSIST), integrating new content fr...

Proposed in this study is a hybrid model for supporting the performance of a department within Amir Kabir University in Iran. The proposal is a two-stage model designed to fully rank the organizational departments where each faculty has multiple inputs and outputs. First, the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) separately formulates each pair of units. In the second stage, the pair-wise evaluation ...

This paper aims to reschedule online metro trains in delay scenarios. A graph representation and a mixed integer programming model are proposed to formulate the optimization problem. The solution approach is a two-stage optimization method. In the first stage, based on a proposed train state graph and system analysis, the primary and flow-on delays are specifically analyzed and identified with ...

Extraction of regions of interest plays an important rule in computer aided lung nodules detection. However, because of the complex background and structure, accurate and robust extraction of ROIs in medical image still remains a problem. Aim at this problem, a two-stage operations joint filter: Hessian-LoB, is proposed. The first stage is blobs (which being taken as candidate ROIs) detection a...

Speech analysis tools within the Lingus system have been used on a large scale for adults and children learning Swedish as second language. Several thousands of students have had the opportunity to for instance compare their own pitch curves with those of native speakers. The attitudes and experience of students and teachers have been investigated, in a first stage through a number of interview...

The dynamic structural behavior in DNA due to interaction with cisplatin is essential for the functionality of platinum-based anti-cancer drugs. Here we report a novel method to monitor the interaction progress in DNA-cisplatin reaction in real time with a solid-state nanopore. The interaction processes are found to be well elucidated by the evolution of the capture rate of DNA-cisplatin comple...