Apoptosis and autophagy are important molecular processes that maintain organismal and cellular homeostasis, respectively. While apoptosis fulfills its role through dismantling damaged or unwanted cells, autophagy maintains cellular homeostasis through recycling selective intracellular organelles and molecules. Yet in some conditions, autophagy can lead to cell death. Apoptosis and autophagy ca...

Expected lifetime and reliability of multilayer ceramic actuators were considered. 5 · 5 · 5 mm sized multilayer ceramic actuators with 60 ceramic sheet layers embedded internal electrodes were selected in this experimental analysis. Specially selected rectified AC bias was applied to the multilayer ceramic actuators to remove heating during charging and discharging process. Sixteen sets of mul...

These are notes from introductory lectures given at the Ecole Normale in Paris and at the Strasbourg meeting dedicated to the memory of Claude Itzykson. I review in considerable detail and in a hopefully pedagogical way the work of Seiberg and Witten on N = 2 supersymmetric SU(2) gauge theory without extra matter. This presentation basically follows their original work, except in the last secti...

One of the ultimate targets of lean manufacturing paradigm is to balance production and produce at takt time in production cells. This paper investigates the performance of a lean cell that implements the previous lean goals under uncertainty. The investigation is based on a system dynamics approach to model a dynamic lean cell. Backlog is used as a performance metric that reflects the cell’s r...

A computational Reference Model of Distributed Group Decision Support Systems (RM-DGDSS) is described. This Reference Model is a supplement of the standardized Reference Model of OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) and can be a candidate for standardization in ODP (Open Distributed Processing). The RM-DGDSS defines a distributed architecture environment for supporting a group of decision makers ...

Taking Yingxiu, the epicentre of the Wenchuan earthquake, as the study area, a method for geological disaster extraction using high-resolution remote sensing imagery was proposed in this study. A high-resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was used to create mask imagery to remove interfering factors such as buildings and water at low altitudes. Then, the mask imagery was diced into several s...

This study analyses the factors affecting investment decisions concerning end-user support (EUS), which is even more complex than that of centralised data processing (DP). The alternatives of proactive and reactive end-user support (EUS) in a modern LAN environment are compared by analysing the failure risk of one specific component (HUB) of the LAN. The additional preventive actions and manage...

In this paper, we present new multi-year and 72-day mean seasonal-latitudinal tidal structures in exospheric temperature derived from joint analysis of CHAMP and GRACE accelerometer measurements. These results include diurnal tides DE3, DE2, D0, and DW2 and semidiurnal tides S0, SE1, SE2, SE3, SW4, and SW6. We also employ Hough mode extensions (HMEs) and the Climatological Model of Thermosphere...

In this paper, we consider the problem of modeling machine availability in enterprise-area and wide-area distributed computing settings. Using availability data gathered from three different environments, we detail the suitability of four potential statistical distributions for each data set: exponential, Pareto, Weibull, and hyperexponential. In each case, we use software we have developed to ...

This paper presents our analysis of the failure behavior of large scale systems using the failure logs collected by Los Alamos National Laboratory on 22 of their computing clusters.We note that not all nodes show similar failure behavior in the systems. Our objective, therefore, was to arrive at an ordering of nodes to be incrementally (one by one) selected for duplication so as to achieve a ta...