Although it is well recognized that gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows are obscured and reddened by dust in their host galaxies, the wavelength dependence and quantity of dust extinction are still poorly known. Current studies on this mostly rely on fitting the afterglow spectral energy distributions (SEDs) with template extinction models. The inferred extinction (both quantity and wavelength dep...

Approximate computing is a research area where we investigate a wide spectrum of techniques to trade off computation accuracy for better performance or energy consumption. In this work, we provide a general introduction to approximate computing. Also, we propose a taxonomy to make it easier to discuss the merits of different approximation techniques. Our taxonomy emphasizes the expected cost of...

I calculate the top quark forward-backward asymmetry at the Tevatron in both the laboratory frame and the tt̄ rest frame. I show that soft-gluon corrections are the dominant contribution to the asymmetry and closely approximate exact results through next-tonext-to-leading order (NNLO). I present a calculation of the asymmetry including approximate next-to-next-to-next-to-leading-order (N3LO) sof...

It is sometimes the case that one has a “known” but unwieldy (joint) distribution for a large dimensional random vector Y , and would like to know something about the distribution (like, for example, the marginal distribution of Y1). While in theory it might be straightforward to compute the quantity of interest, in practice the necessary computation can be impossible. With the advent of cheap ...

Patients with frontal lobe damage have been shown to produce implausible answers in cognitive estimation, a task requiring approximate answers to quantity-related questions of general semantic knowledge. We investigated a patient with frontal lobe damage who presented executive deficits and difficulties in cognitive estimation. The patient also showed difficulties in verbal numerosity estimatio...

In this paper, we introduce a goal-oriented procedure for the updating of mechanical models. It is based as usual on information coming from measurement data, but these data are post-processed in a convenient way in order to firstly update model parameters which are the most influent for the prediction of a given quantity of interest. The objective is thus to perform a partial model calibration...

This paper deals with an economic order quantity model where demand is stock dependent. Items received are not of perfect quality and each lot received contains percentage defective imperfect quality items, which follow a probability distribution. Two cases are considered. 1) Imperfect quality items are held in stock and sold in a single batch after a 100 percent screening process. 2) A hundred...

This paper presents an application of Approximate Entropy (ApEn) and Sample Entropy (SampEn) in the analysis of heart rhythm, blood pressure and stroke volume for the diagnosis of vasovagal syndrome. The analyzed biosignals were recorded during positive passive tilt tests—HUTT(+). Signal changes and their entropy were compared in three main phases of the test: supine position, tilt, and pre-syn...

The performance of a type of fuzzy sliding mode control is researched by considering the nonlinear characteristic of a missile-target interception problem to obtain a robust interception process. The variable boundary layer by using fuzzy logic is proposed to reduce the chattering around the switching surface then is applied to the interception model which was derived. The performances of the s...

This work describes the complexity found in the normal and the deaf crying acoustic waves. Using approximate entropy, in a single figure, the complexity of the auto-covariance of the signal is computed. Thus, using this complexity value, we are able to discriminate the normal and the deaf infants crying domains with