This study analyses social, economic and political ‘lock-ins’ for understanding community resilience and land degradation. The study focuses on lock-ins from within communities, using four case study communities in Italy affected by land degradation. The analysis highlights the complex interrelationships between various lock-ins, and suggests that the communities are on pathways of declining re...

The Fiduccia-Matheyses algorithm (FM) [1] is a representative iterative improvement algorithm for a hypergraph partitioning problem. But the quality of the FM is not stable. Kim and Moon [3] introduced lock gain as a primary measure for choosing the nodes to move. It uses the history of search more eÆciently. Lock gain showed excellent performance for general graphs. We adapt the lock gain for ...

Two useful Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) functions in a transport network are "lock" and "loopback". The lock function enables an operator to lock a transport path such that it does not carry client traffic, but can continue to carry OAM messages and may carry test traffic. The loopback function allows an operator to set a specific node on the transport path into loopback mo...

Lock-free algorithms are extremely hard to be built correct due to their fine-grained concurrency natures. Formal techniques for verifying them are crucial. We present a framework for verification of CAS-based lock-free algorithms, and prove a nontrivial lock-free algorithm Scalable Synchronous Queue that is practically adopted in Java 6. The strength of our approach lies on that it relieves th...

A frequency agile multiplying injection-locked oscillator (MILO) suitable for fast power cycling was designed in 65nm GP CMOS. Edge detectors and multiple injection sites extend the lock range of the x4 multiplier to 36.3% of its free-running frequency. Lock range is further extended to 55.7% (2.3-4 GHz) by using 2 MILOs with adjacent lock ranges. Monitoring circuits identify the correct MILO a...

BACKGROUND Suture pretension during tendon repair is supposed to increase the resistance to gap formation. However, its effects on the Bunnell suture technique are unknown. The purpose of this study was to determine the biomechanical effects of suture pretension on the Bunnell and cross-lock Bunnell techniques for tendon repair. METHODS Eighty porcine hindlimb tendons were randomly assigned t...

OBJECTIVES Antimicrobial lock solutions are used for prevention and management of catheter-related bloodstream infections. ML8-X10 (a prototype oil-in-water micro-emulsion based on a novel free fatty acid), vancomycin/heparin and taurolidine/citrate/heparin (Taurolock™-Hep500) lock solutions were tested against biofilm-forming Staphylococcus epidermidis and methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcu...

Existing technologies, institutions, andbehavioral norms together act to constrain the rate and magnitude of carbon emissions reductions in the coming decades. The inertia of carbon emissions due to such mutually reinforcing physical, economic, and social constraints is referred to as carbon lock-in. Carbon lock-in is a special case of path dependency, which is common in the evolution of comple...