The United States is not only the world's largest economy, but it is also one of the world's largest consumers of natural resources. The country, which is inhabited by some 5% of the world's population, uses roughly one-fifth of the global primary energy supply and 15% of all extracted materials. This article explores long-term trends and patterns of material use in the United States. Based on ...

This paper reviews the development of the Medical Financial Assistance program (MFA) in rural China, including design and implementation processes, and assesses major areas for improvement. Jointly financed by the central and local governments, MFA provides cash assistance to poor households for the purchase of medical services. Because policy design and implementation are decentralized to loca...

since plato is regarded as the first philosopher who started writing on aesthetics and impacted upon artistic aesthetics following him, a review of his perspective on artistic aesthetic is of crucial importance. although fine arts in its current form have not existed at the time of plato, his ideas could be discovered from what he has sporadically expressed on fine arts. there are two viewpoint...

This paper discusses the philosophy behind utilizing blogs to engage Postgraduate learners at the College of Fine Arts (COFA) University of New South Wales (UNSW). Digital diaries (Gleaves, Walker & Grey, 2007) were established to enable a reflexive and collaborative space in which students could discuss and reflect on their personal experiences while completing a compulsory arts industry Inter...

The MFA approach for simulations with dynamical fermions in lattice gauge theories allows in principle to explore the parameters space of the theory (e.g. the β,m plane for the study of chiral condensate in QED) without the need of computing the fermionic determinant at each point. We exploit this possibility for extracting both the renormalization group trajectories (”constant physics lines”) ...

The huge amount of data provided by genome-scale technologies makes discernible biological meanings difficult to access. Here, we report a powerful integrative method to combine genome-wide scale data sets and biological knowledge. Multiple Factor Analysis (MFA) is used to investigate jointly large observation data sets from different ’omic’ areas enriched with biological annotations. This mult...

Mean-field approximations (MFAs) are frequently used in physics. When a process (such as an epidemic or a synchronization) on a network is approximated by MFA, a major hurdle is the determination of those graphs for which MFA is reasonably accurate. Here, we present an accuracy criterion for Markovian susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemics on any network, based on the spectrum of the ...

To achieve an insightful clustering of multivariate data, we propose subspace K-means. Its central idea is to model the centroids and cluster residuals in reduced spaces, which allows for dealing with a wide range of cluster types and yields rich interpretations of the clusters. We review the existing related clustering methods, including deterministic, stochastic, and unsupervised learning app...