Continuously changing nature of technological environment has been enforcing to revise the process of information security risk analysis accordingly. A number of quantitative and qualitative risk analysis methods have been proposed by researchers and vendors. The purpose of these methods is to analyze today's information security risks properly. Some of these methods are supported by a software...

This paper describes our retrieval system participated in the Patent Retrieval Task at the Fourth NTCIR Workshop. The main task was an associative patent retrieval task, in which a patent application including a target claim is used to search documents that can invalidate the demand in the claim. Our system can be characterized by the structure analysis for both target claim and entire applicat...

Construction Projects are being implemented under different contract systems in the Midwest. Negotiated design-build has been a popular contract system in recent years. It provides various advantages through entailing the contractor to be responsible for the whole project. However, design-build turns out to be risky system for both owners and contractors unless the risks are identified, quantif...

Managing and controlling color, from scanner to monitor to output devices, are serious issues for the printing and imaging industries. Accurate color control is vital for predictable quality of final product, whether printed or displayed. Costs of controlling color are significant. Printing has become much more science than art and any company, especially those involved in printing and other me...

Endothelial cell dysfunction is emerging as an ultimate culprit for diverse cardiovascular diseases and cardiovascular complications of chronic renal diseases, yet the definition of this new syndrome, its pathophysiology, and therapy remain poorly defined. Here, I summarize some molecular mechanisms leading from hyperhomocystinemia, elevated asymmetric dimethylarginine, and advanced glycolation...

The deformation of the fingerpads along the contact surfaces in a real grasp provides local information about the shape of the object, which is crucial for the stability of the grasp. Several experiments were performed to investigate whether it was possible to transmit information about the shape of a virtual object grasped via a singlecontact haptic interface, in spite of the fact that thimble...

Since the first diabetic was treated with insulin in 1922, millions of patients have relied on frequent insulin injections and glucose monitoring to combat the disease and its complications. Improved immunosuppressive regimens in islet transplantation developed in the Edmonton protocol raised the hopes of diabetics worldwide for a complete cure and insulin independence. However, transplant succ...

As hard as it is to believe now, it was permissible not long ago to sell a prescription drug (in the USA) without providing evidence that it worked; all that was needed was evidence it was safe. Then, KefauvereHarris changed everything. Acting largely in response to the thalidomide tragedy, Estes Kefauver, a senator from Tennessee, and representative Oren Harris from Arkansas introduced the ame...

Studies in mutant organisms deficient in RNA interference (RNAi) and related post-transcriptional gene silencing implicated a role for a single class of RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (RdRp). Nevertheless, sequence homologs to these RdRps have not been found in coelomate organisms such as Drosophila or mammals. This lack of homologous sequences does not exclude that an RdRp functions in RNAi in ...