Most randomized controlled trials (RCT) of social programs test interventions at modest scale. While the hope is that promising programs will be scaled up, there are few successful examples of this scale-up process in practice. It would be ideal to know which programs will work at large scale before investing the resources to take them to scale. But it would seem that the only way to tell wheth...

I n the past, only major Internet players such as Amazon, eBay, and Google were interested in deploying large-scale Web services. However , this is changing rapidly—all sorts of companies and governmental organizations are suddenly looking towards Web services as a platform that might support a wide range of demanding applications. Examples of such systems include big banking and brokerage data...

Sicklepod (Senna obtusifolia L., Fabaceae) is a leguminous plant that thrives unwanted in crop fields such as soybean farms and is therefore described as a weed especially in many Southeastern States in the US. Although the recent introduction of “round-up-ready” soybeans mitigates infestation of the beans by sicklepod, the latter is so prolific that even volunteer stands yield over a 1120 kg/h...

www.pharmtech.com rational approach to scale-up has been used in the physical sciences for quite some time. This approach, called dimensional analysis, is a proven method of developing functional relationships that describe any given process in a dimensionless form to facilitate modeling and scale-up or scale-down. This short article reviews and demonstrates the dimensional analysis method as a...

This paper studies the robustness of SIFT and SURF against different image transforms (rigid body, similarity, affine and projective) by quantitatively analyzing the variations in the extent of transformations. Previous studies have been comparing the two techniques on absolute transformations rather than the specific amount of deformation caused by the transformation. The paper establishes an ...