The response of a thin-film polystyrene melt to a raster-scanned scanning force microscope tip was investigated. At high temperatures the scanning process induced intricate pattern formation whose quantitative characteristics were compared at different temperatures and scan rates. The dependence of the patterns on temperature and scan rate was consistent with time-temperature superposition as d...

BACKGROUND Data on the association between obesity and asthma control are conflicting. We performed an analysis to elucidate the association between body mass index (BMI) and asthma control in a large sample of asthmatics. MATERIALS AND METHODS Data were obtained from a previous study in which the Asthma Control Questionnaire (ACQ) and Asthma Control Test (ACT) were validated for a Spanish po...

Warranty is a powerful marketing tool for the manufacturer and a good protection for both the manufacturer and the customer. However, warranty always involves additional costs to the manufacturer, which depend on product reliability characteristics and warranty parameters. This paper presents an approach to optimisation of warranty parameters for known product failure distribution to reduce the...

In this paper, we present a new metric to estimate the perceived difference in contrast between an original image and a reproduction. This metric, named weighted-level framework EE (WLF-DEE), implements a multilevel filtering based on the difference of Gaussians model proposed by Tadmor and Tolhurst (2000) and the new Euclidean color difference formula in log-compressed OSA-UCS space proposed b...

Water-level fluctuations (WLF) affect the ecological processes and patterns of lakes in several ways. Aquatic habitats and feeding or breeding grounds are gained or lost, as light, climate and wave impacts change to mention only a few phenomena. While the phenomenon of WLF has been studied in many rivers (better known as flood pulse, Junk & Wantzen, 2004) and environmental flows (Bunn et al., 2...

Forecasting the number of warranty claims is vitally important for manufacturers/warranty providers in preparing fiscal plans. In existing literature, a number of techniques such as log-linear Poisson models, Kalman filter, time series models, and artificial neural network models have been developed. Nevertheless, one might find two weaknesses existing in these approaches: (1) they do not consi...

in today’s fiercely competitive products market, product warranty has started playing an important role. currently, a large number of products are being sold with warranty policies in the form of free replacement warranty, pro-rata warranty, and combined warranty policies. pro-rata warranties are relatively a complex concept. the modeling of failures during the warranty period and the costs for...

As long as lakes and reservoirs are an important component of the global carbon cycle, monitoring of their metabolism is required, especially in the tropics. In particular, the response of deep reservoirs to water-level fluctuations (WLF) is an understudied field. Here, we study community metabolism through oxygen dynamics in a deep monomictic reservoir where high WLF (~10 m) have recently occu...

This paper addresses the impact of warranty of malfunctioning and warranty of misinforming on making informed purchase decisions over the adoption period. We propose mathematical models for quantification of the risk of misinforming by exploring customers’ learning evolution. These measures, dynamic in their nature, allow evaluation of customer’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction as a function of...

a r t i c l e i n f o Peck and Shu (2009) found that touching a product causes greater endowment effect. We seek to replicate and extend this finding to the case that whether touching a product consumers have just bought may increase the willingness to pay (WTP) for warranty. Loss aversion, the tendency to prefer avoiding losses over obtaining equivalent monetary gains, often explains product w...