No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author. Cover picture: Three dimensional schematic representation of the steps that lead to controller design. The fish is cloned for scientific purposes only, without permission of the Dutch government.

We show that for each integer h ≥ 2, there exists a least positive integer ch so that if P is a poset having a planar cover graph and the height of P is h, then the dimension of P is at most ch. Trivially, c1 = 2. Also, Felsner, Li and Trotter showed that c2 exists and is 4, but their proof techniques do not seem to apply when h ≥ 3. We focus on establishing the existence of ch, although we sus...

We consider capacitated vertex cover with hard capacity constraints (VC-HC) on hypergraphs. In this problem we are given a hypergraph G = (V,E) with a maximum edge size f . Each edge is associated with a demand and each vertex is associated with a weight (cost), a capacity, and an available multiplicity. The objective is to find a minimum-weight vertex multiset such that the demands of the edge...

Let G = (X, Y; E) be a balanced bipartite graph of order 2n. The path-cover number pc(H) of a graph H is the minimum number of vertex-disjoint paths that use up all the vertices of H. S ⊆ V(G) is called a balanced set of G if |S ∩ X| = |S ∩ Y|. In this paper, we will give some sufficient conditions for a balanced bipartite graph G satisfying that for every balanced set S, there is a bi-cycle of...

This article studies crime rates’ response to economic conditions. Using a longitudinal data set covering about 20 countries over the period 1970-2010, we investigate whether crime rates respond asymmetrically to increases in unemployment and recoveries in economic conditions. We find a positive response of crime rates on variation in unemployment rates, but we do not find compelling evidence o...

In 1988, Seiya Negami published a conjecture stating that a graph G has a finite planar cover (i.e. a homomorphism from some planar graph onto G which maps the vertex neighbourhoods bijectively) if and only if G embeds in the projective plane. Though the ”if” direction is easy, and over ten related research papers have been published during the past 20 years of investigation, this beautiful con...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Single optotype tests of visual acuity are widely used for preschool vision screening in order to optimise cooperation with testing. These tests may, however, underestimate the visual acuity deficit in amblyopia because they lack visual crowding. This study assessed the resultant negative predictive value (NPV) for amblyopia. METHODS Cohort study of 936 children in the Cambrid...

Testing in the software industry is, in general an ad hoc task. There are guidelines to follow but in most cases do not cover sufficient portions of the software product. Recent work has been done to automatically generate test cases such that designers are no longer responsible for designing the test cases but ensuring that the specification of the software is valid. These formal specification...

This paper assesses the feasibility of forest cover mapping and the delineation of deforestation using Japanese Earth Resource Satellite (JERS-1) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The assessment is carried out at five test sites in Germany (Thuringia), the UK (Kielder), Sweden (Remningstorp and Brattåker) and Russia (Chunsky). These temperate and boreal sites all have high forest cover, but ...