I is common for a retailer to sell products from competing manufacturers. How then should the firms manage their contract negotiations? The supply chain coordination literature focuses either on a single manufacturer selling to a single retailer or one manufacturer selling to many (possibly competing) retailers. We find that some key conclusions from those market structures do not apply in our ...

In this paper, we identify an error in the proof of Theorem 1 in the paper Xia, L., Zhao, Q., and Jia, Q.S., “A Structure Property of Optimal Policies for Maintenance Problems with Safety-Critical Components”, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 2008, 5(3): 519-531. Theorem 1 is the most important contribution of the above paper, which shows the optimality of the so-called ...

IPv6, the IETF-designed protocol set dubbed the 'next generation' of IP, is designed as an update of the current version, IPv4, which it is said is beginning to show its age. Much of the vaunted improvement over IPv4 is attributable to the simple fact that IPv6 offers a virtually infinite number of Internet addresses from approximately 200 million assignable IPv4 addresses to countless trillion...

Michael Persinger’s group reports three very interesting experimental findings related to EEG, magnetic fields, photon emissions from brain, and macroscopic quantum coherence. The findings also provide support for the proposal of Hu and Wu that nerve pulse activity could induce spin flips of spin networks assignable to cell membrane. In this article I analyze the experiments from TGD point of v...

In interfacing man-made electronic components with specifically folded biomacromolecules, the perturbative effects of junction structure on any signal generated should be considered. We report herein on the electron-transfer characteristics of the blue copper metalloprotein, azurin, as characterized at a refined level by conducting atomic force microscopy (C-AFM). Specifically, the modulation o...

Unnatural control chart patterns (CCPs) are associated with a particular set of assignable causes for process variation. Hence, effectively recognizing CCPs can substantially narrow down the set of possible causes to be examined, and accelerate the diagnostic search. Recently, machine-learning techniques, especially the artificial neural network (ANN), have been widely used as an effective tool...

This paper presents the results of a literature search for publications containing failure rates and repair times, based on operational experience, for distribution system components that are critical to the reliability of a distribution system. Furthermore, component failure rates found are compared with the conclusions drawn from a previously conducted literature search.

The Hotelling's  control chart, is the most widely used multivariate procedure for monitoring  two or more related quality characteristics, but it’s power lacks the desired performance in detecting small to moderate shifts. Recently, the variable sampling intervals (VSI) control scheme in which the length of successive sampling intervals is determined upon the preceding values has been proved t...