We present the results of Monte Carlo mass-loss predictions for massive stars covering a wide range of stellar parameters. We critically test our predictions against a range of observed massloss rates – in light of the recent discussions on wind clumping. We also present a model to compute the clumping-induced polarimetric variability of hot stars and we compare this with observations of Lumino...

The foliage clumping index quantifies the degree of the deviation of leaf spatial distribution in the canopy from the random case. It is of comparable importance for ecological models as the leaf area index for quantifying radiation interception and distribution in plant canopies. Previously, an improved angular index named normalized difference between hotspot and darkspot was proposed for ret...

The average rate of emission of ionizing radiation per unit volume (or emissivity) in the universe can be calculated as the ratio of the intensity of the ionizing background to the mean free path of ionizing photons. The intensity of the background is measured from the mean transmitted flux of the Lyα forest, and the mean free path is measured from the abundance of Lyman limit systems, which ha...

Clumping factor B (ClfB) from Staphylococcus aureus is a bifunctional protein that binds to human cytokeratin 10 (K10) and fibrinogen (Fg). ClfB has been implicated in S. aureus colonization of nasal epithelium and is therefore a key virulence factor. People colonized with S. aureus are at an increased risk for invasive staphylococcal disease. In this study, we have determined the crystal struc...

Human fibrmnogen interacts with pathogenic staphylococci, causing their clumping through an unexplained mechanism. We attempted to characterize the interaction between the staphylococcal fibrinogen receptor(s) and the binding region on the fibrmnogen molecule by employing binding studies and the clumping reaction. Binding studies revealed that the Aa chain of human fibrinogen possesses a high a...

We introduce a novel approach to incremental e-mail categorization based on identifying and exploiting “clumps” of messages that are classified similarly. Clumping reflects the local coherence of a classification scheme and is particularly important in a setting where the classification scheme is dynamically changing, such as in e-mail categorization. We propose a number of metrics to quantify ...

Two GFC (Generic Flow Control) protocols are currently under study within the CCITT, namely the BT/NTT proposal and the Australian proposal. In this paper, their basic operating principles are recalled. Then, since it has been recognized in earlier studies that Cell Delay Variation, or more precisely cell clumping, has a major impact on peak cell rate control performed in the Usage Parameter Co...

Applications in which data take nonnegative values but have a substantial proportion of values at zero occur in many disciplines. The modeling of such “clumped-at-zero” or “zero-inflated” data is challenging. We survey models that have been proposed. We consider cases in which the response for the non-zero observations is continuous and in which it is discrete. For the continuous and then the d...