The purpose of this thesis is to introduce a cyclic renewal process as an extension of an alternating renewal process, where each of underlying i.i.d. nonnegative random increments is composed of multiple stages, i.e. Yn = ∑J j=1 Xj , n 1, where Yn denotes the lifetime of the n-th cycle and Yn’s are i.i.d. with respect to n. Such a process may be appropriate for analyzing optimal preventive mai...

outh African has a population of approximately 39 million people, with eleven officially recognized languages in the country. It is bordered by Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. South Africa is considered a middle-income country, with a gross national product per capita of $3,520 in 1996 (World Bank1998:14); it is therefore one of the wealthier countries in Africa...

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a heterogeneous disease in which a variety of distinct genetic alterations might occur. Recent attempts to identify the leukemia stem-like cells (LSC) have also indicated heterogeneity of these cells. On the basis of mathematical modeling and computer simulations, we have provided evidence that proliferation and self-renewal rates of the LSC population have great...

Lin28a is a conserved RNA-binding protein that plays an important role in development, pluripotency, stemness maintenance, proliferation and self-renewal. Early studies showed that Lin28a serves as a marker of spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) and promotes the proliferation capacity of mouse SSCs. However, there is little information about Lin28a in livestock SSCs. In this study, we cloned Capra...

In agreement with evidence that estrogens slow the rate of bone remodeling by suppressing the production of both osteoclasts and osteoblasts, loss of estrogens leads to an increase in the number of osteoclast as well as early osteoblast progenitors (CFU-osteoblasts; CFU-OBs) in the murine bone marrow. Here we show that CFU-OBs are early transit-amplifying progenitors, i.e., dividing cells capab...

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a heterogeneous disease in which a variety of distinct genetic alterations might occur. Recent attempts to identify the leukemia stem-like cells (LSC) have also indicated heterogeneity of these cells. On the basis of mathematical modeling and computer simulations, we have provided evidence that proliferation and self-renewal rates of the LSC population have great...

Species belonging to the genera Alexandrium and Gymnodinium are amongst the dinoflagellates that regularly cause massive coastal phytoplankton blooms along Mediterranean beaches. These episodes encompass a variety of factors favouring bloom development, including near-shore nutrient enrichment, enhanced growth and low water renewal. During the summer of 2003 the development of a bloom was monit...

Age replacement of technical units has received much attention in the reliability literature over the last four decades. Mostly, the failure time distribution for the units is assumed to be known, and minimal costs per unit of time is used as optimality criterion, where renewal reward theory simplifies the mathematics involved but requires the assumption that the same process and replacement st...

In this note, inequalities and bounds for weighted renewal-type integral equations are presented. Some upper and lower bounds for the weighted renewal-type integral equations with monotone weight functions are derived. Some upper and lower bounds for the weighted renewal-type equations with monotone weight functions are derived. Bounds for the difference between two weighted renewal functions a...