Miniaturization and microfabrication of analytical instrumentation for chemical and biological analyses has been proceeding at a rapid pace for a few decades, and has gained momentum in the past decade with the introduction and application of microfabricated instruments. Motivating factors for performing microscale separations and analyses are reduced reagent, solvent and sample consumption, re...

Although electronic commerce is regarded as a revolution that has transformed the structure of business and the mechanisms of economic systems, research on price competition and strategic behaviors in electronic commerce has been conducted through empirical approaches, yielding conflicting results. Considering the development of technologies supporting electronic commerce, there have been few a...

This paper summarizes the lessons learned from a full-scale test on two RC frame prototypes that have recently been tested on LNEC shaking-table using four pairs of biaxial synthetic ground motion records during 15WCEE Conference (2012). The reference structures are two single-story RC frames which are geometrically identical but with different reinforcement details. The simplified inelastic mo...

BACKGROUND Meta-analyses may be prone to generating misleading results because of a paucity of experimental studies (especially in surgery); publication bias; and heterogeneity in study design, intervention and the patient population of included studies. When investigating a specific clinical or scientific question on which several relevant meta-analyses may have been published, value judgments...

This paper analyses factors affecting the performance of a melodic contour-based QBH system, and presents an analytical model for the same. We present a constrained optimisation framework to find the optimal values of performance-affecting system parameters.

This study examined disciplinary rhetoric in research articles, focusing on different traditions in structuring text discourses from a metadiscourse-move analytic approach. The corpus consisted of 72 research article Introductions (RAIs): 36 in applied linguistics and 36 in chemistry. Swales’ CARS model (1990, 2004) and Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse (2005) were used as analytica...

Thermo-Elasto-Plastic analyses of thick-walled spherical tanks made of functionally graded materials are investigated analytically. These tanks are subjected to positive or negative temperature gradient and internal pressure loadings separately or simultaneously. The power law modeling has been used for through-the-thickness variation of mechanical properties. von Mises yield criterion and Elas...