To estimate the mid-point of an open-ended income category and to assess the impact of two equivalence scales on income-health associations. Data were obtained from the 2010 Brazilian Oral Health Survey (Pesquisa Nacional de Saúde Bucal--SBBrasil 2010). Income was converted from categorical to two continuous variables (per capita and equivalized) for each mid-point. The median mid-point was R$ ...

In this contribution, we report the generation of 17-μJ mid-infrared (MIR) pulses with duration of 70 fs and bandwidth of 550 nm centered at 3.75 μm at 1-kHz repetition rate, by a two-stage femtosecond optical parametric amplifier utilizing 4H-silicon carbide crystal as the nonlinear medium. The crystal is selected as it processes orders of magnitude higher damage threshold than traditional MIR...

Motivated by what is required for real-time path planning, the paper starts out by presenting RMPD, a new recursive “local” planner founded on the key notion that, unless made necessary by an obstacle, there must be no deviation from the shortest path between any two points, which would normally be a straight line path in the configuration space. Subsequently, we increase the power of RMPD by i...

Using the growth of population in Australia in the past 10,000 years it is illustrated here how an illusion created by hyperbolic distributions may lead easily to incorrect conclusions. Contrary to the published claim, there was no change in the mechanism of growth of the ancient human population in Australia around 5000 years before present (BP). Data for the number of rock-shelter sites, inte...

This paper presents work aimed at developing and evaluating various two-handed mid-air gestures to operate a computer accurately and with little effort. The main idea driving the design of these gestures is that one hand is used for pointing, and the other hand for four standard commands: selection, drag & drop, rotation and zoom. Two chosen gesture vocabularies are compared in a user evaluatio...

In this paper, the idea of Mid-point ellipse drawing algorithm on a hexagonal grid is proposed. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to that of the conventional ellipse drawing algorithm on a square grid. The qualitative and execution time analysis proves that the proposed algorithm performs better than the conventional ellipse drawing algorithm on a square grid.

The mathematical study of genealogies has yielded important insights in population biology, such as the ability to estimate the time to the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of a sample of genetic sequences or of a group of individuals. Here we introduce a model of cultural genealogies that is a step toward answering similar questions for cultural traits. In our model individuals can inherit f...

An important clue to the evolutionary history of an allele is the structure of the neighboring region of the genome, which we term the genomic background of the allele. Consider two copies of the allele. How similar we expect their genomic background to be is strongly influenced by the age of their most recent common ancestor (MRCA). We apply diffusion theory, first used by Motoo Kimura as a to...

The mutation process is introduced into the colored coalescent theory. The mutation process can be viewed as an independent Poisson process running on the colored genealogical random tree generated by the colored coalescent process, with the edge lengths of the random tree serving as the time scale for the mutation process. Moving backward along the colored genealogical tree, the color of verti...