Credit risk management is becoming more and more important in recent years. When a company deals with a financial problem, it may not be able to fulfill its financial obligations, which can cause direct and indirect financial losses to shareholders, creditors, investors and other people in the community. Advanced credit risk models that are based on market value include improving credit quality...

Phase contrast transmission electron microscopy is a powerful tool to enhance the image contrast of transparent materials such as ice-embedded biological specimens and polymer materials. In this method, a phase plate, which is placed at the back-focal plane of the objective lens, gives a phase shift for scattered electron waves, resulting in a significant enhancement contrast of specimens in im...

We show that if a self-reducible set has polynomial-size circuits, then it is low for the probabilistic class ZPP(NP). As a consequence we get a deeper collapse of the polynomial-time hierarchy PH to ZPP(NP) under the assumption that NP has polynomial-size circuits. This improves on the well-known result of Karp, Lipton, and Sipser [KL80] stating a collapse of PH to its second level Σ2 under th...

Via competing provers, we show that if a language A is self-reducible and has polynomial-size circuits then S2 = S2. Building on this, we strengthen the Kämper– AFK Theorem, namely, we prove that if NP ⊆ (NP ∩ coNP)/poly then the polynomial hierarchy collapses to SNP∩coNP 2 . We also strengthen Yap’s Theorem, namely, we prove that if NP ⊆ coNP/poly then the polynomial hierarchy collapses to SNP...

The aim of this study is to quantify the differences in signal transfer strength between different phase contrast (PC) methods using function (CTF) theory. For quantification, two approaches, namely a theoretical approach based on CTF theory and computational simulator, have been used establish several performance indices for evaluating strength. A novel Hilbert PP (HPP) method was proposed com...

A recently introduced hematofluorometer, the "Protofluor-Z" (Helena Laboratories, Beaumont, TX), has several novel features, most notably reporting units expressed as the molar ratio of zinc protoporphyrin (ZPP) to heme, i.e., micromoles of ZPP per mole of heme. We analyzed human blood specimens on the Protofluor-Z and by an ethyl acetate/acetic acid extraction procedure. Data from three labora...

We demonstrate that simple correlation between the various tests of iron status is not sufficient for examining their value in diagnosing iron deficiency (ID). Three degrees of ID are recognized: Iron depletion (ID grade I) is defined by decreased total body iron and normal iron support to erythropoiesis, as diagnosed by decreased storage iron, decreased ferritin, normal sideroblast count, norm...

We propose a new approach towards derandomization in the uniform setting, where it is computationally hard to nd possible mistakes in the simulation of a given probabilistic algorithm. The approach consists in combining both easiness and hardness complexity assumptions: if a derandomization method based on an easiness assumption fails, then we obtain a certain hardness test that can be used to ...