Water scarcity is one of the main concerns of several countries around the world. In this context, several approaches have been proposed for resource conservation and available water augmentation through specific actions such as process intensification and the use, reclamation, reuse, and recycle of alternative water sources. Nonetheless, there are no reported methodologies optimizing the multi...

IN 1985, individuals filing U.S. tax returns reported $166.4 billion of long-term capital gains in excess of short-term capital losses.' The following year Congress enacted a significant increase in capital gains taxes effective in 1987, and capital gains realizations for 1986 nearly doubled, to $324.8 billion.2 That investors' expectations of tax changes would alter their realization practices...

Draft animal power (DAP) has been identified as an environmentally friendly technology that is based on renewable energy and encompasses integration of livestock and crop production systems. Draft animal technology provides farmers with a possibility to cheaply access and use manure from the draft animals and farm power needed to apply renewable practices for land intensification. Compared to m...

Abstract Sustainable intensification of agricultural lands might reconcile the conservation tropical forest with food production, but in-depth assessments considering uncertainty and extreme values are missing. Uncertainty prohibits mapping probabilities to potential future states or ranking these in terms their likelihood. This turn hampers assessment possible decision outcomes. Here, we use s...

BACKGROUND Blood pressure, lipid, and glycemic control are essential for reducing cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. Many health care systems have successfully shifted aspects of chronic disease management, including population-based outreach programs designed to address CVD risk factor control, to non-physicians. The purpose of this study is to evaluate provision of new information to non-phys...

BACKGROUND Standard remission induction chemotherapy consisting of anthracycline plus cytarabine (3+7) is administered for adult acute myeloid leukemia (AML). However, the effects of intensified regimen on complete remission (CR), relapse and overall survival (OS) remain unknown. METHODS We analyzed 1195 patients treated with idarubicin plus cytarabine/BHAC (3+7) from 2002 to 2013. Among them...

Economic dispatch with valve point effect and Prohibited Operating Zones (POZs) is a non-convex and discontinuous optimization problem. Harmony Search (HS) is one of the recently presented meta-heuristic algorithms for solving optimization problems, which has different variants. The performances of these variants are severely affected by selection of different parameters of the algorithm. Intel...

The banking sectors of the European Union have faced numerous challenges in the past decade. With regard to old EU members, as a result of the Second European Banking Directive and the Single European Passport the speed of deregulation accelerated, and with the elimination or lowering of barriers market-entry costs substantially decreased, favouring competition and the creation of a Unified Ban...

A systematic design methodology is developed for producing multiple main products plus side products starting with one or more bio-based renewable source. A superstructure that includes all possible reaction and separation operations is generated through thermodynamic insights and available data. The number of alternative processes is systematically reduced through a screening procedure until o...