With the evolution of technology, the maintenance of sophisticated systems is of concern for system engineers and system designers. The maintenance cost of the system depends in general on the replacement and repair policies. The system replacement may be in a strictly periodic fashion or on a random basis depending upon the maintenance policy. At failure, the repair of the system may be perfor...

background: there is much debate about effects of medicinal plants such as saffron (crocus sativus) on human health. women are highly involved in farming and processing of this plant. this study is aimed at evaluating the saffron impacts on miscarriage rate of female farmers working in saffron fields. methods: this was a prospective case-control study on pregnant female farmers during harvestin...

In this article we look at the evolution of information systems from the perspective of the evolution of domain languages, and provide a report on some of our ongoing research activities. Many if not all analysis and design approaches for information systems base themselves on techniques involving some sort of natural language analysis. However, the view on language underlying these approaches ...

BACKGROUND Chagas disease (CD) is a frequent cause of dilated cardiomyopathy (CMP) in developing countries, leading to clinical heart failure and worse prognosis. Therefore, the development and evolution of this CMP has always been a major topic in numbers of previous studies. A comprehensive echocardiographic study of left ventricular (LV) mechanics, fully assessing myocardial contraction, has...

One of the unique insights provided by the growing number of fully sequenced genomes is the pervasiveness of gene duplication and gene loss. Indeed, several metrics now suggest that rates of gene birth and death per gene are only 10-40% lower than nucleotide substitutions per site, and that per nucleotide, the consequent lineage-specific expansion and contraction of gene families may play at le...

The construction of an Information System takes several years. Part of the solution is in the improvement of methods technique and tools to adapt systems. In this context, we propose an evolution process at the requirement level based on the concept of gap. This approach allows, on the one hand, thanks to the abstraction mechanism to focus only on goals and ways to achieve them avoiding the det...

The generalized successive overrelaxation (GSOR) method was presented and studied by Bai, Parlett and Wang [Numer. Math. 102(2005), pp.1-38] for solving the augmented system of linear equations, and the optimal iteration parameters and the corresponding optimal convergence factor were exactly obtained. In this paper, we further estimate the contraction and the semi-contraction factors of the GS...

Contraction theory entails a theoretical framework in which convergence of a nonlinear system can be analysed differentially in an appropriate contraction metric. This paper is concerned with utilizing stochastic contraction theory to conclude on exponential convergence of the Unscented Kalman-Bucy Filter. The underlying process and measurement models of interest are Itô-type stochastic differe...