Despite the popularity of the ``learning'' curve, it should be called the ``forecasting'' curve. Given an industrial process, the traditional learning curve forecasts how costs are expected to decline (or other performance measures improve) in the future. Forecasting is certainly very useful. Nevertheless, the previous literature is notably mute on how the improvement or learning occurs. Withou...

In most tissues of vertebrates, gap junctions control the exchange of ions and small molecules between adjacent cells, thus co-ordinating the cellular activities. The application of the dual voltage-clamp method to cell pair preparations enables one to elucidate the electrical properties of gap junctions and gap junction channels. The conductive and kinetic data obtained at the multichannel and...

A mathematical model is developed which describes the dynamics of radiation-induced mortality of a non-homogeneous (in radiosensitivity) mammalian population. It relates statistical biometric functions with statistical and dynamic characteristics of a critical system in organism of specimens composing this population. The model involves two types of distributions, the normal and the log-normal,...

This paper examines logistics services and strategic dimensions in Taiwanese (Republic of China, ROC) maritime ®rms. This is done by means of a review of previous studies and personal interviews; data collection has also included a questionnaire survey. A factor analysis and a principal components analysis were conducted in order to assess the degree of importance of a large number of service a...

We develop a crossover equation of state (EOS) for square-well fluids with varying well width. This equation yields the exact second and third virial coefficients, and accurately reproduces first-order (high-temperature) perturbation theory results. In addition, this EOS yields the correct scaling exponents near the critical point. We perform extensive new molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo sim...

Central coherence theory (Frith, U., 1989. Autism: Explaining the Enigma. Blackwell, Oxford.) is addressed by exploring linguistic processing in normally intelligent adults with either autism or Asperger syndrome, to test whether local coherence is impaired. Local coherence is the ability to make contextually meaningful connections between linguistic information in short-term or working memory....

We have only limited awareness of the system by which we control our actions and this limited awareness does not seem to be concerned with the control of action. Awareness of choosing one action rather than another comes after the choice has been made, while awareness of initiating an action occurs before the movement has begun. These temporal differences bind together in consciousness the inte...

Abst rac t -Few systematic descriptions of aphasia characteristics are available about the Spanish language. Three different language aspects are examined in this paper: phonology, aphasic substitutions (paraphasias), and morphosyntax. It has been observed that phonological errors in Spanish speaking aphasics more frequently involve vowels than consonants. It is proposed that this is related to...

A combined neurophysiological and computational approach is reviewed that leads to a proposal for how neural networks in the temporal cortical visual areas of primates could function to produce invariant object representation and identification. A similar approach is then reviewed which leads to a theory of how the hippocampus could rapidly store memories, especially episodic memories including...

The ability to perform efficient collision detection is essential in virtual reality environments and their applications, such as walkthroughs. In this paper we re-explore a classical structure used for collision detection – the binary space partitioning tree. Unlike the common approach, which attributes equal likelihood to each possible query, we assume events that happened in the past are mor...