Cross-border capital flows have been increasing in real value at a pace of about 6 percent a year since 1980, faster than those of world gross domestic product (GDP) and trade. The progress has been particularly rapid since 1990 (though with a temporary drop during 1997–2002, and another probably temporary dip that started in 2008). This reflects falling barriers to capital flows in many parts ...

Seven analogs of the natural, α-helix peptides IsCT1 and IsCT2-found in the venom of scorpion Opithancatus Madagascariensis-have been synthesized and tested to compare their antibacterial and hemolytic activity against natural peptides. In general, results show that increasing hydrophobicity by substituting positions 5 and 9 of the sequences with alanine, valine, and leucine, enhances antibacte...

Based on a Petri-net based simulation model, we investigate the effect of different customer response to stock-out on both the stock-out supply chain and the competing supply chain. Five types of customer stock-out responses are incorporated in the model to quantitatively assess the correlation between customer response and supply chain performance including bullwhip effect (BWE), on-hand inven...

We consider the following problems: (a) Given a labelled Petri net and a finite automaton, are they equivalent? (b) Given a labelled Petri net, is it equivalent to some (unspecified) finite automaton? These questions are studied within the framework of trace and bisimulation equivalences, in both their strong and weak versions. (In the weak version a special action—likened to an "-move in autom...

We examine both the modeling power of normal and sinkless Petri nets and the computational complexities of various classical decision problems with respect to these two classes. We argue that although neither normal nor sinkless Petri nets are strictly more powerful than persistent Petri nets, they nonetheless are both capable of modeling a more interesting class of problems. On the other hand,...

The traditional algorithms for recognizing handwritten alphanumeric characters are dependent on hand-designed features. In recent days, deep learning techniques have brought about new breakthrough technology for pattern recognition applications, especially for handwritten recognition. However, deeper networks are needed to deliver state-of-the-art results in this area. In this paper, inspired b...

This paper presents an hierarchical approach with neural networks to locate the positions of the fingertips in grey-scale images of human hands. The first chapters introduce and sum up the research done in this area. Afterwards, our hierarchical approach and the preprocessing of the grey-scale images are described. A low-dimensional encoding of the images is done by the means of Gabor-Filters a...

This paper attempts to quantify the social, private, and public-finance values of reducing obesity through pharmaceutical and medical interventions. We find that the total social value of bariatric surgery is large for treated patients, with incremental social cost-effectiveness ratios typically under $10,000 per life-year saved. On the other hand, pharmaceutical interventions against obesity y...

We present Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) observations of Marsward and tailward fluxes of suprathermal (>25 eV) ions in the near-Mars (∼1–1.5 Mars radii downstream) magnetotail. Statistical results show that the Marsward proton flux and magnetic field draping pattern are well organized by the upstream motional electric field direction. We observe both significant Marsward proton...

This paper introduces a novel hardware and software system to measure, process, and sonify the instantaneous hydrodynamic pressure at any surface of the human body during sports swimming. In particular, we use four sensors attached to the palmar and dorsal side of the hands to calculate the net pressure difference of piezo probes, corresponding to the net energy transferred to water due to hand...