Economic impacts of seasonal influenza vary across US counties, but little estimation has been conducted at the county level. This research computed annual economic costs of seasonal influenza for 3143 US counties based on Census 2010, identified inherent spatial patterns, and investigated cost-benefits of vaccination strategies. The computing model modified existing methods for national level ...

In order to maintain a proper balance between development pressure and water resources protection, and also to improve public participation, efficient tools and techniques for soil and water conservation projects are needed. This paper describes the development and application of a web-based watershed management spatial decision support system, WebWMPI. The WebWMPI uses the Watershed Management...

David P. Wilson, Sally M. Blower We agree with the thesis of Rosen et al. [1] that, despite initiatives such as the World Health Organization’s “3 by 5” program, rationing of HIV/AIDS antiretroviral therapy (ART) will be necessary in the majority of African countries. Diffi cult choices will need to be made, and choices will be constrained due to the limited health infrastructure and lack of qu...

Test case prioritization techniques schedule test cases for execution in an order that attempts to increase their eeectiveness at meeting some performance goal. Various goals are possible; one involves rate of fault detection | a measure of how quickly faults are detected within the testing process. An improved rate of fault detection during testing can provide faster feedback on the system und...

A number of prioritized variants of Reiter’s default logic have been described in the literature. In this paper, we introduce two natural principles for preference handling and show that all existing approaches fail to satisfy them. We develop a new approach which does not suffer from these shortcomings. We start with the simplest case, supernormal default theories, where preferences are handle...

Real-time vaccination following an outbreak can effectively mitigate the damage caused by an infectious disease. However, in many cases, available resources are insufficient to vaccinate the entire at-risk population, logistics result in delayed vaccine deployment, and the interaction between members of different cities facilitates a wide spatial spread of infection. Limited vaccine, time delay...

Both perceptual and cognitive processes are limited in capacity. As a result, attention is selective, prioritizing items and tasks that are important for adaptive behavior. However, a number of recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies suggest that, at least under some circumstances, increasing attention to one task can enhance performance in a second task (e.g., the attentional boost effect)....

Plastics in the marine environment have become a major concern because of their persistence at sea, and adverse consequences to marine life and potentially human health. Implementing mitigation strategies requires an understanding and quantification of marine plastic sources, taking spatial and temporal variability into account. Here we present a global model of plastic inputs from rivers into ...

An operator for the composition of two processes, where one process has priority over the other process, is studied. Processes are described by action systems, and data refinement is used for transforming processes. The operator is shown to be compositional, i.e. monotonic with respect to refinement. It is argued that this operator is adequate for modelling priorities as found in programming la...

Many approaches to the feature-interaction problem propose resolving interactions among modular features by priority. However, feature-rich services, like telephony, offer hundreds of features, raising questions of whether analyzing and prioritizing features is feasible. This article categorizes features by their goals and functionalities. We discuss how features, collected from customer-servic...