Recent years have seen a surge of interest in computational complexity results in card games. We focus in this paper on trick-taking card games, extending a study started in 2013. This class ranges from WHIST and CONTRACT BRIDGE to SKAT and TAROT. We investigate how the number of cards per suit, the ranks, impacts the complexity of solving arbitrary positions. We prove that 2 distinct ranks are...

The Stochastic Calculus of Looping Sequences (SCLS) is a recently proposed modelling language for the representation and simulation of biological systems behaviour. It has been designed with the aim of combining the simplicity of notation of rewrite systems with the advantage of compositionality. It also allows a rather simple and accurate description of biological membranes and their interacti...

We present a static analysis to infer the amount of data that a distributed system may transmit. The different locations of a distributed system communicate and coordinate their actions by posting tasks among them. A task is posted by building a message with the task name and the data on which such task has to be executed. When the task completes, the result can be retrieved by means of another...

Introduction In colonial America, throughout the Southeast region of the country, an invisible line once existed (Figure 1). With no identified boundaries, that line ran roughly in a southwest direction from the Chesapeake to a point in the Low Country. That line separated two politically, environmentally and socially disparate regions inhabited by culturally distinct yet similar groups of ensl...

This study is a work in progress that sets out to measure the readiness for e-commerce of an aggressively developing economy in East Africa – Ethiopia – a nation that has a significant historical and geo-political status at the horn in order for it to be able to compete in the global information economy. The paper initially embarks on explaining the distinction among the fundamental concepts of...

The paper presents the Stochastic Calculus of Looping Sequences (SCLS) suitable to describe microbiological systems, such as cellular pathways, and their evolution. Systems are represented by terms. The terms of the calculus are constructed by basic constituent elements and operators of sequencing, looping, containment and parallel composition. The looping operator allows tying up the ends of a...

We use time-resolved-small angle neutron scattering to study the kinetics of asphaltene nanoparticle aggregation in incompatible crude oil mixtures. We induce asphaltene aggregation by mixing asphaltene-rich Syrian crude oil ~SACO! with a paraffinic British crude oil and observe the scattered neutron intensity, I, as a function of wave number, q, over times, t, ranging from twenty minutes to ab...

CIOs in Hungary, Romania, and South Africa (SA) are today overcoming disadvantages that their firms suffered during decades of closed national markets. This paper reports on a series of interviews conducted with CIOs in these developing countries focusing on national and organizational strategies used to prepare for international competition and globalization. They achieved competitiveness by i...

The present layout of the indoor wireless mesh network test-bed build at the Meraka Institute is introduced. This is followed by a description of a numerical electromagnetic model for the complete test-bed, including the coupling and diffraction effects, as generated with WIPL-D Pro. The results of numerical simulations are compared with the measurements. The findings help to quantify errors an...

We apply a logistic smooth transition market model (LSTM) to a sample of returns on Australian industry portfolios to investigate whether bull and bear market betas differ. Unlike other studies, our LSTM model allows for smooth transition between bull and bear states and allows the data to determine the threshold value. The estimated value of the smoothness parameter was very large for all indu...