While active fiber composites (AFC) based upon solid cross-section piezoelectric fibers are very useful for anisotropic activation of composites, they require high voltages and are constrained to non-conductive matrix materials. AFC’s based upon hollow cross-section piezoelectric fibers have shown promise to lower operating voltages and broaden the choice of possible matrix materials. This pape...

BACKGROUND Many infectious diseases that cause significant morbidity and mortality, especially in the developing world, could be preventable through vaccination. The effort to produce safe, thermally stable, and needle-free mucosal vaccines has become increasingly important for global health considerations. We have previously demonstrated that a thermally stable nanoemulsion, a mucosal adjuvant...

Leveraging quantum mechanics, cryptographers have devised provably secure key sharing protocols[4], [3], [6], [17]. Despite proving the security in theory, real-world application falls short of the ideal. Last year, cryptanalysts completed an experiment demonstrating a successful eavesdropping attack on commercial quantum key distribution (QKD) systems[12]. This attack exploits a weakness in th...

Empirical studies have shown that the size distribution of firms can be described as a lognormal or Pareto distribution. However, these studies have focused on developed countries and little attention has been devoted to developing countries. Using the variable of number of employees as a measure of firm size, this paper investigates the shape of firm size distribution in the food & beverages i...

Introduction: Since confirming as new impacts 19 of the 20 dark spots on Mars detected by [1], ~50 additional new impact sites have been confirmed by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) following their discovery by the Context camera, both on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These impact events have probably occurred within the last decade or so, as indicated by the absence ...

This paper proposed a new general probabilistic multi-item, single-source inventory model with varying mixture shortage cost under two restrictions. One of them is on the expected varying backorder cost and the other is on the expected varying lost sales cost. This model is formulated to analyze how the firm can deduce the optimal order quantity and the optimal reorder point for each item to re...

This paper explores whether home buyers are inattentive to future energy costs. I exploit variation in energy costs in the form of fuel price changes in Massachusetts where there is significant overlap in the geographic and age distributions of oil-heated and gas-heated homes. I find that relative fuel price shifts cause relative changes in housing transaction prices consistent with full capita...

We study the dynamics of excitable integrate-and-fire neurons in a small-world network. At low densities p of directed random connections, a localized transient stimulus results either in self-sustained persistent activity or in a brief transient followed by failure. Averages over the quenched ensemble reveal that the probability of failure changes from 0 to 1 over a narrow range in p; this fai...

In this paper, weakly homogeneous generalized functions in the special Colombeau algebras are determined up to equality in the sense of generalized distributions. This yields characterizations that are formally similar to distribution theory. Further, we give several characterizations of equality in the sense of generalized distributions in these algebras.

Let f be a C∞ function on R and P be a quadratic form defined by P (x) = P (x1, x2, · · · , xm) = x1+· · ·+xp−xp+1−· · ·−xp+q with p+q = m. In this paper, we mainly show that