A two-channel microarray measures the relative expression levels of thousands of genes from a pair of biological samples. In order to reliably compare gene expression levels between and within arrays, it is necessary to remove systematic errors that distort the biological signal of interest. The standard for accomplishing this is smoothing "MA-plots" to remove intensity-dependent dye bias and a...

In this paper we consider a job shop scheduling problem with blocking (zero buffer) constraints. Blocking constraints model the absence of buffers, whereas in the traditional job shop scheduling model buffers have infinite capacity. There are two known variants of this problem, namely the blocking job shop scheduling (BJSS) with swap allowed and the BJSS with no-swap. A swap is needed when ther...

Mice responses to immunization with Schistosoma mansoni antigens were investigated. Priming with cercarial antigen preparation (CAP) induced significant (P < 0.05) IgM, IgG, IgG2a, IgG2b, and IgA increases, while booster caused a significant IgG1 increase. A soluble worm antigen preparation (SWAP) caused significant IgG elevation. Priming with soluble egg antigen (SEA) caused significant IgM an...

The rising number of loading devices called swap bodies in road transport has created new opportunities for carriers and novel challenges for researchers in vehicle routing synchronization. Nevertheless, there are few vehicle routing models in literature that integrate swap bodies for combined road transport and there is no known best practice in the industry to handle these opportunities. In t...

This paper presents a theoretical model of default risk in the context of the ``market'' model approach to interest rate dynamics. We propose a model for ®nite-interval interest rates (such as LIBOR) which explicitly takes into account the possibility of default through the in ̄uence of a point process with deterministic intensity. We relate the defaultable interest rate to the non-defaultable i...

The Swap Body Vehicle Routing Problem (SB-VRP) is a generalization of the classical Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) where a particular structure as well as several operational aspects for the trucks composing the fleet are considered. This research has been motivated by the VeRoLog Solver Challenge 2014, organized together by VeRoLog and PTV group, aiming to motivate the study of real-world logis...

One of the first graph theoretical problems which got serious attention (already in the fifties of the last century) was to decide whether a given integer sequence is equal to the degree sequence of a simple graph (or it is graphical for short). One method to solve this problem is the greedy algorithm of Havel and Hakimi, which is based on the swap operation. Another, closely related question i...

BACKGROUND In the past decade the sector-wide approach (SWAp) model has been promoted by donors and adopted by governments in several countries. The purpose of this study is to look at how partners involved in the health SWAp in Bangladesh define ownership and coordination, in their daily work and to analyse the possible implications of these definitions. METHODOLOGY The study object was a pr...

An agro-hydrological simulation model is useful for agriculture monitoring. One issue in running such model is parameter identification, especially when the target area is large such as provincial or country level. Remote Sensing (RS) provides us with useful information over large area. RS cannot observe input parameters of agro-hydrological models directly. However, a method to estimate input ...