Iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable mental retardation in the world today. Iodine deficiency was common in the developed world until the introduction of iodized salt in the 1920’s. The incidence of iodine deficiency is connected to low iodine levels in the soil and water. We examine the impact of salt iodization in the US by taking advantage of this natural geographic variatio...

This chapter presents an original continuous time methodology and mathematical models applied for analyzing the effectiveness of technical and economic aspects of the operation of heat and electricity sources.

Since iodine readily sublimes at ambient temperature, the effectiveness of salt iodization programs depends on the stability of the iodine carrier, typically potassium iodate. We examined the stability of iodine in typical salts available in 12 countries in a controlled laboratory setting, at high temperature (40°C) and controlled humidity (60 or 100%) for periods up to 12 months. Iodine was ra...

Many proposals for fault tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) suffer detectable loss processes. Here we show that topological FTQC schemes, which are known to have high error thresholds, are also extremely robust against losses. We demonstrate that these schemes tolerate loss rates up to 24.9%, determined by bond percolation on a cubic lattice. Our numerical results show that these schemes retai...

Sputum induction with hypertonic saline is one of the most commonly used and reliable noninvasive methods to examine airway inflammation. The safety of induced sputum has been the subject of many reports focusing on stable asthma of any severity and the procedure is regarded as safe [1]. However, data on safety of induced sputum in acute asthma is limited. In a previous small study, we safely i...

Secondary salinity caused by rising saline groundwater due to the clearing of land for agriculture has caused serious loss of productive land in Western Australia. In 1989, the Australian Bureau of Statistics conducted a survey of farmers which reported that 443 441 ha or 2.83 percent of the 15.7 million ha of cleared land in south-western Australia was saline. A further survey in 1994 showed t...

Routing in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is a challenge since it must handle network partitioning, long delays, and dynamic topology. Meanwhile, routing protocols of the traditional mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) cannot work well due to the failure of its assumption that most network connections are available. In this paper, we propose a hop count based heuristic routing protocol by utilizing...