This longitudinal cohort study evaluated the diversity, commonality, and stability of Streptococcus mutans genotypes associated with dental caries history. Sixty-seven 5- and 6-yr-old children, considered as being at high caries risk, had plaque collected from baseline through 36 months for S. mutans isolation and genotyping using repetitive extragenic palindromic-PCR (4,392 total isolates). De...

This paper evaluates three component commonality strategies in supply chain environment: Distinctive Part (DP), Pure Component Commonality (PCC), and Mixed Component Commonality (MCC) strategies. DP is where all products consist of distinctive parts and no common component is used, while PCC is where one or more parts from different products are completely replaced by common components. In MCC,...

Neurogenesis and axon outgrowth are features shared by normal nervous system development and certain forms of epileptogenesis. This observation has led to the hypothesis that some aspects of normal development and epileptogenesis have common molecular mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, we have used DNA microarray analysis to characterize gene expression in the dentate gyrus and identify genes...

The standard for minimum acceptable product development performance is high and rising in many industries. It is no longer possible to dominate large markets by developing and mass producing one product at a time. Increasingly, good product development means developing a family, or platform of products, and producing them in a flexible process tailored to the needs of individual customers. We d...

Image-set clustering is a problem decomposing a given image set into disjoint subsets satisfying specified criteria. For single vector image representations, proximity or similarity criterion is widely applied, i.e., proximal or similar images form a cluster. Recent trend of the image description, however, is the local feature based, i.e., an image is described by multiple local features, e.g.,...