We analyse the trade-off between the speed with which a gene can propagate information, the noise of its output and its metabolic cost. Our main finding is that for any given level of metabolic cost there is an optimal trade-off between noise and processing speed. Any system with a non-vanishing leak expression rate is suboptimal, i.e. it will exhibit higher noise and/or slower speed than leak-...

OBJECTIVE To measure parental tolerance for a false-positive newborn screening result by assessing perceived quality of life for screening results and health states associated with expanded newborn screening programs for metabolic disorders. DESIGN Perceived quality of life was measured using time trade-off and willingness-to-pay questions for a false-positive newborn screening result and oth...

Caching is an effective mechanism for reducing bandwidth usage and alleviating server load. However, the use of caching entails a compromise between content freshness and refresh cost. An excessive refresh allows a high degree of content freshness at a greater cost of system resource. Conversely, a deficient refresh inhibits content freshness but saves the cost of resource usages. To address th...

Today’s mobile terminals have several access network interfaces. New protocols have been proposed during the last few years to enable the concurrent use of multiple access paths for data transmission. In practice, the use of different access technologies is subject to different interconnection costs, and mobile users have preferences on interfaces jointly depending on performance and cost facto...

Would slightly better performance be significantly more valuable from a market perspective? Would significantly better performance be just slightly more expensive to implement? When dealing with quality requirements, we often end up in a difficult trade-off analysis. Aspects such as release targets, end-user experience, and business opportunities must be taken into consideration. But when is th...

A CCORDING TO RECENT POLLS, MANY AMERICANS CONsider health care reform the No. 1 domestic issue. 1 Presidential candidates, other politicians, health policy experts, labor leaders, business groups, and others have responded with numerous reform proposals. And somehow in the clamoring, health care reform has become equated exclusively with expanding coverage to the 47 million uninsured Americans...

Concern over information privacy is widespread and rising. However, prior research is silent about the value of information privacy and the benefit of privacy protection. We conducted a conjoint analysis to explore individuals’ trade-offs between the benefits and costs of providing personal information to Websites. We find that economic incentives (monetary reward and future convenience) do aff...

We present a novel treatment of the fundamental problem of erasing a bit. We propose a cost function that extends to path space the principle due to Szilard and Landauer that erasing a bit requires at least kBT log 2 units of energy. We introduce notions of reliability of information storage via a reliability timescale τr, and speed of erasing via an erasing timescale τe. Our problem formulatio...

Project Solutions. Increasing responsiveness is often dealt against decreasing another valuable resource. As responsiveness is a quality, the most significant resources in a software project to trade off are scope, cost, time, and other quality aspects. In a lot of systems, namely “embedded systems”, software is an integral part, but only one part of the system. Here trade-offs against hardware...