The advent of the buyers’ market has imposed a necessity on manufacturing companies to suit individual customer requirements. Companies have answered this need by offering a large variety from which customers can choose their ideal products. Preferably, these products have many common modules to reduce the efforts in development and increase the economy of scale in manufacturing. Still, specifi...

This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in US imports using detailed country-product data. We create a new measure of product contractibility based on the degree of intermediation in international trade for the product. We find important roles for the interaction of country and product characteristics in determining intra-firm trade shares. Intra-firm trade is high for products...

This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in U.S. imports using detailed countryproduct data. We create a new measure of product contractibility based on the degree of intermediation in international trade for the product. We find important roles for the interaction of country and product characteristics in determining intra-firm trade shares. Intra-firm trade is high for product...

In this paper, we propose a new graphical user interface to navigate through an online product catalog. This interface is based on a two dimensional map of the product space in which products and category points are plotted jointly. These category points represent centroids of corresponding products and can be used to interpret the map and to select subsets of products. The methodoly used to cr...

Smoking cessation aids (nicotine replacement products and anti-depressant medication) have been proven to double quitting rates compared to placebo in several randomized controlled trials. But the high initial cost of cessation aids might create a financial barrier to cessation for low-income smokers. In the U.S., Medicaid provides health insurance coverage to low-income people, and in some sta...

Biodegradable polymers are designed to degrade upon disposal by the action of living organisms. Extraordinary progress has been made in the development of practical processes and products from polymers such as starch, cellulose, and lactic acid. The need to create alternative biodegradable water-soluble polymers for down-the-drain products such as detergents and cosmetics has taken on increasin...

Scientists often build and use highly customized systems to support observation and analysis efforts. Creating effective ontologies to manage and share data products created from those systems is a difficult task that requires collaboration among domain experts, e.g., scientists and knowledge representation experts. A framework is presented that scientists can use to create ontologies that desc...

Background: Splicing by overlap extension (SOE) PCR is used to create mutation in the coding sequence of an enzyme in order to study the role of specific residues in protein’s structure and function. Objectives: We introduced a nested-SOE-PCR (N –SOE-PCR) in order to increase the specificity and generating mutations in a gene by SOE-PCR.   Materials and Methods: Genomic DNA from Bacillus thermo...