most of the analyses and modeling concerning the mountain physical and human environmental changes have been based on theoretical speculation rather than scientific field observations. lack of standard observations and measurements in scattered and case specific monitoring programs offer only partially useful results for planning and management. all propositions and conclusions are hence mingle...

The recent release of the Java version 5.0 "Tiger" introduces some significant language changes. For educators, some of these changes provide opportunities to improve teaching, while others pose additional problems that require awareness to avoid them. The authors have recently completed the inclusion of support for all new language features into a wellknown educational IDE for Java – BlueJ – a...

We explore advances in Java Virtual Machine (JVM) technology along with new high performance I/O libraries in Java 1.4, and find that Java is increasingly an attractive platform for scientific clusterbased message passing codes. We report that these new technologies allow a pure Java implementation of a cluster communication library that performs competitively with standard C-based MPI implemen...

BACKGROUND Viral load testing is considered the gold standard for monitoring HIV treatment; however, given its high cost, some patients cannot afford viral load testing if this testing is not subsidized. Since foreign aid for HIV/AIDS in Vietnam is rapidly decreasing, we sought to assess willingness to pay (WTP) for viral load and CD4 cell count tests among HIV-positive patients, and identified...

CORBA is an industrial standard for distributed object-oriented applications covering aspects such as heterogeneity and interoperability of products of different vendors. However, the CORBA standard does not define any methods for load balancing and there is a considerable confusion of terms describing associated load balancing techniques. Starting from the general platformand language-independ...

Persistent high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is strongly associated with the development of high-grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) or cancer. Not all persistent infections lead to cancer. Viral load measured at a single time-point is a poor predictor of the natural history of HPV infections. However the profile of viral load evolution over time could distinguish nonpro...

We assessed the performance of HIV-1 genotyping tests in rescue therapy. Patients were divided into two groups: group 1 (genotyped), included those switching to new antiretroviral drugs based on HIV-1 genotyping data, and group 2 (standard of care -SOC), comprised those in rescue therapy who had not used this test. This was an open and non-randomized study, with 74 patients, followed up for a m...

Recent studies have shown that past selection history affects the allocation of attention on target selection. However, it is unclear whether context-driven selection history can modulate the efficacy of attention allocation on working memory (WM) representations. This study tests the influences of selection history on WM capacity. A display of one item (low load) or three/four items (high load...

the aim of the present paper is to evaluate the influence of the soil- foundation- structure interaction (sfsi) effects on the component demand modifier factor of concrete gravity beams based on asce 41-06 standard. to this end, the beam on the nonlinear winkler foundation approach is employed which is a simple and efficient method. at first, four sets of 3-, 6-, 10- and 15-storey concrete mome...

in the current engineering practices, buildings are commonly designed for an effective lifetime of 50 years. this lifetime can increase the cost of buildings with short lifetimes and can reduce the safety level of buildings with large lifetimes. in this paper, a “service-life factor” has been defined. applying this factor into the nominal values of live, earthquake, wind, and snow loads, the ef...