Distribution, persistence and atomicity are natural extensions of the ARCADE data model, rather than addon properties. The model is based on the way a programmer views and uses typed data objects. It consists of data units and data unit links which act as the nodes and edges of a directed graph model. It serves as an excellent substrate for implementing various object models and languages. We h...

Functional analysis of genome sequences has largely ignored RNA genes and their structures. We introduce here the notion of 'ribonomics' to describe the search for the distribution of and eventually the determination of the physiological roles of these RNA structures found in the sequence databases. The utility of this approach is illustrated here by the identification in the GenBank database o...

The concept of disaster resilience has received considerable attention in recent years and is increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamic response to natural disasters. In this paper, a new performance index measuring the functionality of a gas distribution network has been proposed, which includes the restoration phase to evaluate the resilience index of the entire network. ...

Pipe systems are in the cores of many real life applications including water, oil and gas distribution as well as airconditioning and compressed air management. Modeling and analysis of flow in pipe networks is of great practical significance in all these areas. Pipe networks are usually made up of thousands of components such as pipes, pumps, valves, tanks and reservoirs. One common way to mod...

The paper describes an OLG economy with a single exhaustible resource that has amenity value. The steady states of this economy form a continuum, implying pathdependency. We compare three policy scenarios; first, a ‘zero extraction’ policy of enforced conservation that avoids environmental degradation, possibly at the expense of intertemporal efficiency. Second, a ‘grandfathering’ policy that e...

Mucins are complex and heavily glycosylated O-linked glycoproteins, which contain more than 70% carbohydrate by weight(1-3). Secreted mucins, produced by goblet cells and the gastric mucosa, provide the scaffold for a micrometers-thick mucus layer that lines the epithelia of the gut and respiratory tract(3,4). In addition to mucins, mucus layers also contain antimicrobial peptides, cytokines, a...

In this paper, we propose a steepest descent algorithm based on the natural gradient to design the controller of an open-loop stochastic distribution control system (SDCS) of multi-input and single output with a stochastic noise. Since the control input vector decides the shape of the output probability density function (PDF), the purpose of the controller design is to select a proper control i...

A large mixed-integer linear program (MILP) and a much smaller nonlinear programming (NLP) approximation of the MILP, involving simulation and response surface estimation via regression analysis, are proposed to solve the problem of the optimal selection of natural gas supply contracts by local gas distribution utilities. Each potential supply source is characterized by several price and nonpri...

There has been a strong interest in more cogent definitions on economies of scale to reveal general urban growth laws and to develop urban performance metrics. Unstructured data, including satellite images, will provide us with new sources to do so by defining cities as aggregates of human activities. Such a uniform definition on the basis of nighttime light clusters is more consistent and econ...

The development of fluorometric methods (l-4) for the quantitative estimation of estrogens in the small quantities present in human urine has opened the way for improvements in the procedures utilized for the extraction and separation of these compounds. A study of the partition coefficients of estrone, estradiol-178,’ and estriol in various solvent systems has been of great value in the develo...