Companies in a variety of industries (e.g., airlines, hotels, theaters) often use last-minute sales to dispose of unsold capacity. Although this may generate incremental revenues in a short term, the long-term consequences of such a strategy are not immediately obvious: more discounted last-minute tickets may lead to more consumers anticipating the discount and delaying the purchase rather than...

Phenotypic switching allows for rapid transitions between alternative cell states and is important in pathogenic fungi for colonization and infection of different host niches. In Candida albicans, the white-opaque phenotypic switch plays a central role in regulating the program of sexual mating as well as interactions with the mammalian host. White-opaque switching is controlled by genes encode...

Candida albicans is the most prevalent human fungal pathogen. The research described in this thesis has focused on the identification and characterization of the regulatory pathways controlling white-opaque switching, mating, biofilm formation and the relationship among them in this pathogen. White-opaque switching and mating in C. albicans are under the repression of the a1-α2 complex. Based o...

White-opaque switching in the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans is an alternation between two distinct types of cells, white and opaque. White and opaque cells differ in their appearance under the microscope, the genes they express, their mating behaviors, and the host tissues for which they are best suited. Each state is heritable for many generations, and switching between states occurs ...

Opaque predicate obfuscation, a low-cost and stealthy control flow obfuscation method to introduce superfluous branches, has been demonstrated to be effective to impede reverse engineering efforts and broadly used in various areas of software security. Conventional opaque predicates typically rely on the invariant property of well-known number theoretic theorems, making them easy to be detected...

Experiment 1 examined whether the semantic transparency of an English unspaced compound word affected how long it took to process it in reading. Three types of opaque words were each compared with a matched set of transparent words (i.e. matched on the length and frequency of the constituents and the frequency of the word as a whole). Two sets of the opaque words were partially opaque: either t...