abstract financial crises and currency instabilities within developing and emerging economies during the last decade had a tremendous impact on the economic performance and increased vulnerability of economies against domestic and foreign shocks. the timing of capital liberalization is one of the significant debates among other issues related to currency instability, and it would be more conven...

Computer or communication networks are so designed that they do not easily get disrupted under external attack and, moreover, these are easily reconstructed when they do get disrupted. These desirable properties of networks can be measured by various parameters such as connectivity, toughness, tenacity and rupture degree. Among these parameters, rupture degree is comparatively better parameter ...

Mouse and Caenorhabditis elegans mutants with altered life spans are being used to investigate the aging process and how genes determine life span. The survival of a population can be modeled by the Gompertz function, which comprises two parameters. One of these parameters ("G") describes the rate at which mortality accelerates with age and is often described as the "rate of aging." The other p...

The present report meta-analyzes more than 300 empirical articles describing a relationship between psychological stress and parameters of the immune system in human participants. Acute stressors (lasting minutes) were associated with potentially adaptive upregulation of some parameters of natural immunity and downregulation of some functions of specific immunity. Brief naturalistic stressors (...

Combining GIS with neuro-fuzzy modeling has the advantage that expert scientific knowledge in coastal aquaculture activities can be incorporated into a geospatial model to classify areas particularly vulnerable to pollutants. Data on the physical environment and its suitability for aquaculture in an Irish fjard, which is host to a number of different aquaculture activities, were derived from a ...

Self-esteem is shaped by the appraisals we receive from others. Here, we characterize neural and computational mechanisms underlying this form of social influence. We introduce a computational model that captures fluctuations in self-esteem engendered by prediction errors that quantify the difference between expected and received social feedback. Using functional MRI, we show these social predi...

The tenacity of an incomplete connected graph G is defined as T (G) = min{ |S|+m(G−S) ω(G−S) : S ⊂ V (G), ω(G− S) > 1}, where ω(G− S) and m(G− S), respectively, denote the number of components and the order of a largest component inG−S. This is a reasonable parameter to measure the vulnerability of networks, as it takes into account both the amount of work done to damage the network and how bad...

Contamination of ground water is a major concern for citizens as well as local, state, and federal agencies that are involved with the management, quality and quantity of water and human health. However, the generation of vulnerability maps or delineations of vulnerable zones in a map for monitoring purposes are difficult since ground water contamination depends upon numerous, complex interacti...

Web pages today are currently used in contemporary business transaction worldwide for its obvious advantage of wider outreach. Business transactions on an unsecured web site expose the parties involved in the transaction to risks ranging from fraud to loss of integrity as well as fund loss. This paper examines security metrics models available for web application systems and proposes a model fo...