In this investigation the aim is to broaden the space of optics for Low Concentrating Photovoltaic applications. The main target is to achieve the concentration of sunlight uniformly over a large photovoltaic receiver. To solve this problem we implemented a Monte-Carlo method and defined a new parameter in order to facilitate the analysis of irradiance distributions. The geometric parameters to...

The observation that accounting is central to an on-going drive to reform the public sector is hardly new. The case of benchmarking, however, illustrates that a ‘new management accounting’ has been appropriated by public sector reformers and the accountants who serve information ‘needs’ generated by the dichotomous ‘problem’ of central governmental fiscal control versus decentralised empowermen...

Directed hypergraphs have already been shown to unveil several combinatorial inspired results for the SAT problem. In this paper we approach the SAT problem by searching a transversal of the directed hypergraphs associated to its instance. We introduce some particular clause orderings and study their influence on the backtrack process, exhibiting a new subclass of CNF for which SAT is polynomia...

We derive asymptotic approximations for the sequence f(n) de5ned recursively by f(n) = min16j¡n {f(j) + f(n− j)}+ g(n), when the asymptotic behavior of g(n) is known. Our tools are general enough and applicable to another sequence F(n) = max16j¡n {F(j) + F(n − j) + min{g(j); g(n− j)}}, also frequently encountered in divide-and-conquer problems. Applications of our results to algorithms, group t...

A meta-analysis was performed to compare cervical arthroplasty with anterior cervical diskectomy and fusion for single-level cervical spondylosis. A comprehensive search was conducted with PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials from January 1, 2000, to April 30, 2015. Random-effects models were used for heterogeneous data. Fixed-effects models were used for poole...