We consider the problem of assessing the sustainability of alternative designs (e.g., for an urban environment) that are assembled from multiple components (e.g., water supply, transportation system, shopping centers, commercial spaces, parks). We model the sustainability of a design in terms of a set of sustainability attributes. Given the (qualitative) preferences and tradeoffs of decision ma...

Measurement of progesterone in saliva offers several advantages when compared to assays of serum progesterone, especially when ovarian activity is being assessed. Most published methods for the determination of progesterone in saliva are based on assays developed in research centers, which employ "in-house" reagents that are critically dependent on supplies of highly selected antisera. In this ...

A research and clinical subfield known as "human gene therapy" has grown rapidly since 1990, when the first human trials were approved in the United States. Using quantitative data, this paper describes and analyzes the research and commercial infrastructure, including academic centers, publications, intellectual property, and biotechnology firms, that has developed around the goal of discoveri...

A 1997 Commonwealth Secretariat report on small states commented that “for small states, particularly those that are remote from the major markets and commercial and financial centers, the communications revolution has created the possibility of reducing traditional barriers and opened up new opportunities.” Drawing upon existing research by Nye, Melissen, Chong and others, soft power can be ar...

In this paper we show the main properties of k-means algorithm as a tool for color image quantization. All experiments have been carried out on color images with different number of unique colors and different colorfulness. We have tested the influence of methods of determination of initial cluster centers, of choice of distance metric, of choice of color space. In our tests we have used two di...

Based on the authors' fieldwork, this article examined the spatial and demographic growth of a slum community in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in association with the inhabitants' socioeconomic conditions. In this slum community, which is near the industrial and commercial centers and has developed especially since the early 1970s, most dwellers are migrants from other parts of Colombo. The increase of d...

Control systems for energy such as Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) involve a hierarchy of sensing, monitoring, and control devices connected to centralized control stations/centers. With increasing connectivity to commercial off-the-shelf technologies these systems have become vulnerable to cyber attacks. To assist the energy sector in dealing with these cyber attacks, we propo...

Improving the vitality of cities has long been considered an important goal planning. However, people’s understanding how complex and diverse built environment factors affect urban is still limited. In recent years, emergence new data provides a perspective for study vitality. this article, spatio-temporal variation was quantitatively measured by using Baidu heat map, influence on further analy...

The paper studies L 1 (IR d)-norm approximations from a space spanned by a discrete set of translates of a basis function. Attention here is restricted to functions whose Fourier transform is smooth on IR d n0, and has a singularity at the origin. Examples of such basis functions are the thin-plate splines and the multiquadrics, as well as other types of radial basis functions that are employed...

Kinematic models for post processors have been developed for different multi-axis machining centers, but the actual values which define the kinematic model can be obtained by using expensive measurement equipment. A simple procedure can be developed to acquire these values. This paper proposes a methodology to determine tool compensation vector and rotational compensation vector for the post pr...