The market for software components is growing, driven on the \demand side" by the need for rapid deployment of highly functional products, and on the \supply side" by distributed object standards. As components and component vendors proliferate, there is naturally a growing concern about quality, and the eeectiveness of testing processes. White box testing, particularly the use of coverage crit...

This paper presents the results of preliminary assessment of water quality along Red Sea coast adjoining Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Jeddah is a major city with a population of over 2.6 million and an area 1,200 km. To study the impacts, samples of the Red Sea were collected from 24 important locations near Jeddah and analyzed in the laboratory for various water quality parameters. These parameters i...

The purpose of implementation-based testing is to gain a measure of confidence in the correctness of the software by providing adequate coverage of the code. One unit of testing in object-oriented software is a class. However, classes use other classes and if class interactions form a cycle of dependencies then, to test a client class that uses an untested supplier class, stubs must be construc...

An increasingly number of low- and middle-income countries have developed and implemented a national policy towards universal coverage of healthcare for their citizens over the past decade. Among them is China which has expanded its population coverage by health insurance from around 29.7% in 2003 to over 90% at the end of 2010. While both central and local governments in China have significant...

Finland, among the first to adopt mobile broadband services, faces rapid growth of mobile data traffic. Therefore, Finnish mobile operators continually invest in their radio access networks to handle this growth, which represents an attractive revenue source. This study presents a demand curve estimate for mobile broadband data traffic, which takes into account the impact of technology evolutio...

We present e cient algorithms for several instances of the following facility location problem. (Facilities and demand sites are represented as points in the plane.) Place k obnoxious facilities, with respect to n given demand sites and m given regions, where the goal is to maximize the minimal distance between a demand site and a facility, under the constraint that each of the regions must con...

The existence of sufficient demand for insurance coverage against infrequent losses is important for the adequate function of insurance markets for natural disaster risks. This study investigates how characteristics of flood risk influence household flood insurance demand based on household surveys undertaken in Germany and the Netherlands. Our analyses confirm the hypothesis that willingness t...

There exist various service systems that have hierarchical structure. In hierarchical service networks, facilities at different levels provide different types of services. For example, in health care systems, general centers provide low-level services such as primary health care services, while the specialized hospitals provide high-level services. Because of demand congestion in service networ...