Feature modeling has enjoyed success as a widely used variability modeling method in companies utilizing product lines. A number of different feature modeling methods have been proposed with expanded notational concepts and ability to model various dependencies among features. Despite popular usage and relatively simple concepts, different feature modeling methods tend not to explicate their pu...

This short text summarizes the work in biology proposed in our book, Perspectives on Organisms, where we analyse the unity proper to organisms by looking at it from different viewpoints. We discuss the theoretical roles of biological time, complexity, theoretical symmetries, singularities and critical transitions. We explicitly borrow from the conclusions in some key chapters and introduce them...

Perception and memory of linguistic information is biased in favor of stimuli that conform to structural regularities. At the level of word form, there is evidence that initial consonant clusters varying in grammatical status (e.g., br vs. *bn, *bd, *rb) differentially affect response times in same-different matching (e.g., slower responses to rbif REBIF than to brif BERIF; Berent & Lennertz, 2...

Vegetation phenology has been used in studies as an indicator of an ecosystem’s responses to climate change. Satellite remote sensing techniques can capture changes in vegetation greenness, which can be used to estimate vegetation phenology. In this study, a long-term vegetation phenology study of the Greater Khingan Mountain area in Northeastern China was performed by using the Global Inventor...

We use Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) measurements from the VIRGO (Variability of solar IRradiance and Gravity Oscillations) instrument on board SOHO to obtain preliminary estimates of the mean total radiative energy emitted by X-class solar flares. The basic tool is that of summed-epoch analysis, which has also enabled us to detect and partially characterize systematic errors present in the basi...

This paper examines the empirical validity of a model of homogeneous input demand under price uncertainty in which firms trade off expected input cost against its variability (risk) in selecting the optimal input supplier mix. Using recent work in time-series econometrics, this model is applied to the Japanese steam-coal import market, where five suppliers compete: China, the Soviet Union, Sout...

The surface ozone time series is analyzed for the seasonal and inter-annual variations and the trend in the following three categories (a) monthly mean (b) 8 hr monthly mean and (c) daily maximum monthly mean measured at 8 (urban/suburban) sites in Portugal for the period 2000–2010. The inter-annual variation of the monthly mean surface ozone time series showed an year to year variation with th...

For time series discrimination,the main idea behind the proposed approach is to use a variance/covariance criterion to strengthen or weaken aligned observations according to their contribution to the variability within and between classes. To this end, the classical variance/covariance expression is extended to a set of time series, as well as to a partition of time series.

In the framework of the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative, a global, almost daily, soil moisture (SM) product is being developed from passive and active satellite microwave sensors, at a coarse spatial resolution. This study contributes to its validation by using finer spatial resolution ASAR Wide Swath and in situ soil moisture data taken over three sites in Ireland, from 2007 to...

Abstract: In order to obtain Markov heavy-traffic approximations for infinite-server queues with general non-exponential service-time distributions and general arrival processes, possibly with time-varying arrival rates, we establish heavy-traffic limits for two-parameter stochastic processes. We consider the random variables Qe(t, y) and Qr(t, y) representing the number of customers in the sys...