There has been significant recent research interest in utilizing leaderfollower Stackelberg game in security applications. Indeed, Stackelberg games are seen at many deployed applications [6]: ARMOR at Los Angeles International Airport, IRIS for Federal Air Marshals Service, GUARDS for the Transportation Security Administration, and TRUSTS for the Los Angeles Metro Rail System [3] (under evalua...

Staphylococci are common causes of healthcare-associated and community-associated infections. However, limited data are available on the prevalence, phenotypes and molecular characteristics of Staphylococci in metro system around the world. 320 surface samples were collected from the Guangzhou metro system to isolate and characterize Staphylococci strains. Of the samples, 75.6% (242/320) were c...

“Aging-friendly” communities are environments where people can live their entire lives rather than having to relocate because of age-related changes. The objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which middle-aged, long-term residents in Wisconsin perceived their communities to be aging-friendly, and to determine whether these perceptions varied according to county rurality. Rura...

In a modern metropolis, metro rail systems have become a dominant mode for mass transportation. The structural health of a metro tunnel is closely related to public safety. Many vibration-based techniques for detecting and locating structural damage have been developed in the past several decades. However, most damage detection techniques and validation tests are focused on bridge and building ...

Metropolitan ring networks are usually used to connect the high speed backbone networks with the high speed access networks. In this paper, we focus on the end-to-end performance of a multi-ring architecture in which metropolitan access networks (MANs) are interconnected by a metropolitan core network. These rings are synchronized and can be interconnected transparently through single access no...

Elastic tissue equivalence is a vital requirement of synthetic materials proposed for many resilient, soft tissue engineering applications. Here we present a bioelastomer made from tropoelastin, the human protein that naturally facilitates elasticity and cell interactions in all elastic tissues. We combined this protein's innate versatility with fast non-toxic fabrication techniques to make hig...

Surgical sealants have been used for sealing or reconnecting ruptured tissues but often have low adhesion, inappropriate mechanical strength, cytotoxicity concerns, and poor performance in biological environments. To address these challenges, we engineered a biocompatible and highly elastic hydrogel sealant with tunable adhesion properties by photocrosslinking the recombinant human protein trop...

Vermicomposts, which are produced by the fragmentation of organic wastes by earthworms, have a fine particulate structure and contain nutrients in forms that are readily available for plant uptake. In greenhouse trials, the growth of marigold and tomato seedlings, in a commercial horticultural potting medium (Metro-Mix 360), was enhanced significantly upon substitution of Metro-Mix 360 with 10 ...

Quantum key distribution (QKD) systems have already reached a reasonable level of maturity. However, a smooth integration and a wide adoption of commercial QKD systems in metropolitan area networks has still remained challenging because of technical and economical obstacles. Mainly the need for dedicated fibers and the strong dependence of the secret key rate on both loss budget and background ...

The equal headway instability-the fact that a configuration with regular time intervals between vehicles tends to be volatile-is a common regulation problem in public transportation systems. An unsatisfactory regulation results in low efficiency and possible collapses of the service. Computational simulations have shown that self-organizing methods can regulate the headway adaptively beyond the...