The tremendous advancements in medical technology in the last several years have made it possible to sustain a person who has minimal brain functioning .... It is now possible to hold such persons on the threshold of death for an indeterminate period of time by utilizing extraordinary mechanical or other artificial means to sustain their vital bodily functions. The procedures used can be accura...

This paper assesses the object-oriented data paradigm, and describes an algebraic approach which permits the generation of data objects from relational data, based on the knowledge captured in a formal Entity-Relationship model, the Structural Model. The advantage is that now objects can be created that satisfy a variety of particular views, as long as the hierarchies represented by the views a...

In a first-price auction, asymmetries among bidders typically result in inefficient allocations— that is, the winner of the auction may not be the person who values the object the most. This inefficiency creates a motive for post-auction resale, and when bidders take resale possibilities into account, their bidding behavior is affected as well. Standard models of such auctions, by and large, im...

When learning a complex task our nervous system self-organizes large groups of neurons into coherent dynamic activity patterns. During this, a network with multiple, simultaneously active, and computationally powerful cell assemblies is created. How such ordered structures are formed while preserving a rich diversity of neural dynamics needed for computation is still unknown. Here we show that ...

A metallic paint scheme for an architectural wall is created using computer aided color appearance design techniques. New computer graphic hardware that allows real-time rendering of complex reflectance functions is employed to produce photo-realistic images of the metallic paint applied to the surface of the wall. An interpolation scheme is developed that permits one and two dimensional metall...

In 2008, the statute authorizing the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to issue air permits was amended to include a unique requirement to analyze and consider "cumulative levels and effects of past and current environmental pollution from all sources on the environment and residents of the geographic area within which the facility's emissions are likely to be deposited." Data describin...

The continual public health threat posed by the emergence of novel influenza viruses necessitates the ability to rapidly monitor infection and spread in experimental systems. To analyze real-time infection dynamics, we have created a replication-competent influenza reporter virus suitable for in vivo imaging. The reporter virus encodes the small and bright NanoLuc luciferase whose activity serv...

Abstract Previous studies on economic growth have separately examined the role of housing, banking, and credit market conditions, despite their interrelatedness. Therefore, this paper comprehensively investigates relative importance four indicators [house prices, residential investment, corporate spreads, aggregate bank liquidity creation (LC)] to forecast U.S. real GDP growth. We do so after a...