An individual-based model (IBM) of a spatiotemporal terrestrial ecological population is proposed. This model is spatially explicit and features the position of each individual together with another characteristic, such as the size of the individual, which evolves according to a given stochastic model. The population is locally regulated through an explicit competition kernel. The IBM is repres...

The choice of a basic modeling approach, either population-level or individual-based (IbM), is an important decision to be addressed according to the problem at hand. We present an IbM that simulates the dynamics of a bacterial bioreactor under different handling protocols. The main objective is to provide a simulator that will be easily understood, adjusted and used by non-experts. The model h...

The rapid growth of seismic, biological, and similar data sets has made computation and visualization an increasingly complex task. Due to the inherit architectural differences between supercomputing and visualization hardware, a system for realtime display of these data sets must be carefully designed. We present such a system, comprising all aspects of computation, communication, and visualiz...

BACKGROUND Son preference is predominant in developing countries especially South Asian countries and its effect is most visible when the fertility is on transition. Nepal is a country in South Asia where the fertility has declined and son is valued highly. This study examines the parent's gender preference for children and its effect on fertility and reproductive behaviors. METHODS Study was...

BACKGROUND The fertility experience in Iran suggests that the family planning programs had an effective role in the fertility reduction. This study aimed to specify patterns of marriage in Iran and especially in a northern city of Iran and to investigate the association between patterns of marriage and contraceptive use before first pregnancy and current contraceptive use. METHODS In this cro...

Correlations in family size across generations could have a major influence on human population size in the future. Empirical studies have shown that the associations between the fertility of parents and the fertility of children are substantial and growing over time. Despite their potential long-term consequences, intergenerational fertility correlations have largely been ignored by researcher...

This study proposes a word alignment model based on a recurrent neural network (RNN), in which an unlimited alignment history is represented by recurrently connected hidden layers. We perform unsupervised learning using noise-contrastive estimation (Gutmann and Hyvärinen, 2010; Mnih and Teh, 2012), which utilizes artificially generated negative samples. Our alignment model is directional, simil...

In this paper we present IBM Tivoli Monitoring, a systems management application that displays autonomic behavior at run time, and we focus on extending it in order to encompass the design and the deployment phases of the product life cycle. We review the resource model concept, illustrate it with an example, and discuss its role throughout the product life cycle. Then we introduce basic concep...

Mixture probability density functions had recently been proposed to describe some fertility patterns characterized by a bi-modal shape. These mixture probability density functions appear to be adequate when the fertility pattern is actually bi-modal but less useful when the shape of age-specific fertility rates is unimodal. A further model is proposed based on skew-symmetric probability density...