I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. Abstract This thesis presents a study of the bias-induced threshold voltage metastability phenomenon of the hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin f...

this paper examines whether combining generalized hyperbolic skew-t distribution, recently introduced in the field of insurance, and extreme value theory (evt) could result in a modeling of loss function that could model central value as well as extreme value in appropriate manner. the data used in this study are the amount of property damage and bodily injury covered under automobile liability...

The threshold model is a simple but classic model of contagion spreading in complex social systems. To capture the complex nature of social influencing we investigate numerically and analytically the transition in the behavior of threshold-limited cascades in the presence of multiple initiators as the distribution of thresholds is varied between the two extreme cases of identical thresholds and...

in this research, air sampling of workplaces was carried out by two methods (long - time and short - time). the mean formaldehyde concentration with long - time method in pathology labs, surgery and endoscopy sections were 0.96 0.25 and 0.13 ppm and with short - time method, 8 hours, was 3, 0.3 and 0.2 ppm. the mean formaldehyde concentration in pathology labs was above the standard values (tlv...

We study epidemic threshold properties in a scale-free random graph model. We show via a branching process approximation that the divergence of the second moment of the degree distribution is equivalent to the absence of an epidemic threshold. We study further the relation between diameter and epidemic threshold. Absence of an epidemic threshold happens precisely when a positive fraction of the...

a b s t r a c t there are three types of nerve fibers that are involved in the transmission of pain stimuli: c fibers (slower fibers) for thermal, mechanical and chemical stimuli, a-delta fibers for thermal or mechanical stimuli and a-beta fibers for touch stimuli. clinically, this is crucial in making an accurate assessment of the pain level experienced by a suffering patient, in indicating th...

We develop a new ensemble of modular random graphs in which degree-degree correlations can be different in each module, and the inter-module connections are defined by the joint degree-degree distribution of nodes for each pair of modules. We present an analytical approach that allows one to analyze several types of binary dynamics operating on such networks, and we illustrate our approach usin...

We hypothesized that in patients with COPD, poor nutritional status adversely influences exercise tolerance by limiting aerobic capacity of exercising muscles. In 28 patients with stable COPD, we correlated nutritional status with gas exchange indexes obtained during maximal incremental cycle ergometer exercise and with respiratory function parameters. On the basis of percent of ideal body weig...

Velocity threshold plays an important role in the particle swarm optimization. In this paper, a novel stochastic velocity threshold automation strategy is proposed by incorporated with Lévy probability distribution. As is known, Lévy probability distribution has an infinite second moment and is likely to generate an offspring that is far away from its parent. Therefore, this method employs a la...