There is an unmet need for greater investment in preparedness against major epidemics and pandemics. The arguments in favour of such investment have been largely based on estimates of the losses in national incomes that might occur as the result of a major epidemic or pandemic. Recently, we extended the estimate to include the valuation of the lives lost as a result of pandemic-related increase...

Simulating the dynamic response of trucks requires that a model be constructed and subjected to road inputs. Inclusion or omission of flexible frame effects is often based on intuition or assumption. If frame vibration is assumed to be significant, it is typically incorporated in one of two ways. Either a complex finite element model of the frame is used, or a simplified linear modal expansion ...

Earthquakes generate multi-directional ground motions, two components in the horizontal direction and one in the vertical. Nevertheless, the effect of vertical motion on site response analysis has not been the object of extensive research. The 2010/2011 Canterbury sequence of seismic events in New Zealand is a prime example among other earlier field observations strongly corroborating that the ...

DNA nanostructures formed by association of four oligonucleotides d(TGGGGT) (TG4T quadruplexes) are studied by steady-state and time-resolved optical spectroscopy with femtosecond resolution using fluorescence upconversion. A comparison between singlestranded and four-stranded structures and the corresponding stoichiometric mixture of noninteracting nucleotides shows how horizontal and vertical...

A 50-day time series of high-resolution temperature in the deepest layers of the Canada Basin in the Arctic Ocean indicates that the deep Canada Basin is a dynamically active environment, not the quiet, stable basin often assumed. Vertical motions at the near-inertial (tidal) frequency have amplitudes of 10– 20 m. These vertical displacements are surprisingly large considering the downward near...

Introduction: The accuracy of patient positioning plays an important role for radiotherapy tasks. Short and automated Quality Assurance (QA) programs are becoming one of the challenging tasks in Radiotherapy. The current study, investigates the accuracy of treatment couch positioning with four degrees of freedom (4DoF) using a fast and accurate method based on an image acquired...

We generalize the Allais common consequence effect by describing three common consequence effect conditions and characterizing their implications for the probability weighting function in rank-dependent expected utility. The three conditions—horizontal, vertical, and diagonal shifts within the probability triangle—are necessary and sufficient for different curvature properties of the probabilit...

We explain how to optimize portfolios of bonds and stocks with respect to the Expected Shortfall (ES), respectively RORC or RORAC based on ES. In a pragmatic approach we combine and correlate a stock market model with geometric brownian motions with a two-factor Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (CIR-2) model for the interest rates/bonds. We use recent results from the theory of risk capital allocation, perfo...