Quorum sensing is the regulation of gene expression in response to changes in cell density. To measure their cell density, bacterial populations produce and detect diffusible molecules called autoinducers. Individual bacteria internally represent the external concentration of autoinducers via the level of monitor proteins. In turn, these monitor proteins typically regulate both their own produc...

Relevance feedback (RF) and region-based image retrieval (RBIR) are two widely used methods to enhance the performance of contentbased image retrieval (CBIR) systems. In this paper, these two methods are combined. And a region weighting scheme reflecting the process of human visual perception is also proposed to enhance the weighting importance assigned to the region whose pixels are closer to ...

Earth’s climate sensitivity is often interpreted in terms of feedbacks that can alter the sensitivity from that of a no-feedback Stefan-Boltzmann radiator, with the feedback concept and algebra introduced by analogy to the use of this concept in the electronics literature. This analogy is quite valuable in interpreting the sensitivity of the climate system, but usage of this algebra and termino...

A mathematical model for plant communities in water-limited systems is introduced and applied to a mixed woody-herbaceous community. Two feedbacks between biomass and water are found to be of crucial importance for understanding woody-herbaceous interactions: water uptake by plants' roots and increased water infiltration at vegetation patches. The former acts to increase interspecific competiti...

Trust management is one of the most challenging issues in the emerging cloud computing. Although many approaches have been proposed recently for trust management in cloud environments, not much attention has been given to determining the credibility of trust feedbacks. Moreover, the dynamic nature of cloud environments makes guaranteeing the availability of trust management services a difficult...

This study examines the effect of waste and recycling policy on scrap prices and the importance of scrap price feedbacks as a determinate of the costs of waste and recycling policy. The effects of a deposit/refund, advance disposal fee, and recycling subsidies on scrap prices are derived, and the direct and indirect channels of waste reduction are decomposed for the three instruments. Scrap pri...

We discuss a simplifed, conceptual model for the dynamics of the soil-vegetation system in drylands. The model considers the different dynamical processes taking place in vegetated and non-vegetated soil and it distinguishes between the upper soil layer, where rapid evaporation dominates, and the deeper root layer where only plant transpiration takes place. We explore the role of rainfall inter...

Robust Trust Reputation Systems (TRS) provide a most trustful reputation score for a specific product or service so as to support relying parties taking the right decision while interacting with an e-commerce application. Thus, TRS must rely on an appropriate architecture and suitable algorithms that are able to improve the selection, storage, generation and classification of textual feedbacks....