Prehistoric archaeological sites in the center of the Iranian Plateau suddenly disappeared around the end of the 4th millennium BCE. At Tepe Sialk, near Kashan, the last cultural period, namely Sialk IV - probably established around 3400 BCE after the last settlements of Sialk III6-7b - was abandoned approximately after 500 years. The material culture of this period, known as Proto-Elamite peri...

Response time is one key point of di erentiation among electronic commerce (e-commerce) Web sites. Snafu and slow-downs at major Web sites during special events or peak times demonstrate the diÆculty of scaling up ecommerce sites. Such slow response times and down times can be devastating for e-commerce sites as indicated in a recent study by Zona Research[1] on the relationship between Web pag...

Motivated by applications to service systems, we develop simple engineering approximation formulas for the steady-state performance of heavily-loaded G/GI/n+GI multi-server queues, which can have non-Poisson and non-renewal arrivals and non-exponential service-time and patience-time distributions. The formulas are based on recently established Gaussian manyserver heavy-traffic limits, but invol...

Although soil invertebrates play a decisive role in maintaining ecosystem functioning, little is known about their structural composition in Alpine soils and how their abundances are affected by the currently ongoing land-use changes. In this study, we re-assessed the soil macrofauna community structure of managed and abandoned Alpine pastureland, which has already been evaluated 14 years earli...

We propose kinetic models for the spread of permanent innovations and transient fads by the mechanism of social reinforcement. Each individual can be in one of M + 1 states of awareness 0, 1, 2, . . . ,M , with state M corresponding to adopting an innovation. An individual with awareness k < M increases to k+1 by interacting with an adopter. Starting with a single adopter, the time for an initi...

Many freshwater fish species are considered vulnerable to stream temperature warming associated with climate change because they are ectothermic, yet there are surprisingly few studies documenting changes in distributions. Streams and rivers in the U.S. Rocky Mountains have been warming for several decades. At the same time these systems have been experiencing an increase in the severity and fr...