Clarification of hypotheses can improve research design, measurements, data analysis, and interpretation of results. I will describe how hypotheses could be clarified during the design of an epidemiologic study of cancer risks near nuclear facilities in the United States. Based on what is known about age variation in radiation sensitivity and difficulties in evaluating other cancer risk factors...

The spatial characteristics of land cover are useful for understanding the various impacts of human activity on the overall ecological conditions of the urban environment. The multi-temporal Landsat images (TM) between the years of 1990 and 2003 were used together with the Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques to evaluate the environmental changes in the area around Gabal El Hamza and ...

Acceptance of an innovation can occur through mutliple exposures to individuals who have already accepted it. Presented here is a model to trace the evolution of an innovation in a social network with a preference λ, amidst topological constraints specified mainly by connectivity, k and population size, Nk. With the interplay between properties of innovation and network structure, the model att...

—The Web3D technologies make it possible to create Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) in the popular Internet, thus promoting the popularity of CVE scientific applications to broader areas and making it easily accessible to more online users. However, the scalability of a Large-scale CVE (LCVE) is still limited by the constraints in processing power and network speed of each participating ...

This paper estimates the foreign exchange rate exposure of 6,917 U.S. nonfinancial firms on the basis of stock prices and corporate cash flows. The results show that several firms are significantly exposed to at least one of the foreign exchange rates Canadian Dollar, Japanese Yen and Euro, and significant exposures are more frequent at longer horizons. The percentage of firms for which stock p...

A spectrum evaluator based on a system of four materials has been applied to the evaluation of actinic ultraviolet exposures to humans. The exposures were evaluated between early morning and near noon in summer and the actinic irradiances calculated ranged from 3 μW cm to 5 μW cm. Simultaneously, the broad band irradiances which induced the actinic exposures and/or the biologically effective ex...

The collaboration project described in this paper revolves around the construction of a virtual Tower of Babel in a 3D Collaborative Virtual Environment (3D CVE). It involved students across three cooperating institutions, on three different continents in different time zones. It addresses the increasing need for students to engage in international collaboration, as much of today’s Information ...

We study the interplay in the evolution of Firefox source code and known vulnerabilities in Firefox over six major versions (v1.0, v1.5, v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, and v3.6) spanning almost ten years of development, and integrating a numbers of sources (NVD, CVE, MFSA, Firefox CVS). We conclude that a large fraction of vulnerabilities apply to code that is no longer maintained in older versions. We call...

Large scale fires involving asbestos containing materials are a relatively common occurrence in the UK and can cause significant public concern. The potential public health consequences of such incidents have been explored. Literature reviews were undertaken to identify available information on both the level of asbestos exposures that might result from fires and the potential health impact of ...

Socioeconomic status (SES) exposures during childhood are powerful predictors of adult cardiovascular morbidity, cardiovascular mortality, all-cause mortality, and mortality due to a range of specific causes. However, we still know little about when childhood SES exposures matter most, how long they need to last, what behavioral, psychological, or physiological pathways link the childhood SES e...