Maintenance helps to extend equipment life by improving its condition and avoiding catastrophic failures. Appropriate model or mechanism is, thus, needed to quantify system availability vis-a-vis a given maintenance strategy, which will assist in decision-making for optimal utilization of maintenance resources. This paper deals with semi-Markov process (SMP) modeling for steady state availabili...

This paper introduces the concept of Environmental Security in relation with the parameters of the environment which could affect the availability of essential resources for populations. Water availability and its management are evaluated in different regions of the world and in different environmental conditions and the role of international organisations on this issue has been taken into cons...

INTRODUCTION A mercury (Hg) processing plant previously operating in KwaZulu-Natal Province (South Africa) discharged Hg waste into a nearby river system causing widespread contamination since the 1980s. Although the processing plant ceased operation in the 1990s, Hg contamination (due to residual Hg) remains significant. Previous studies in the area since the plant's closure have found elevate...

In this working note we describe our submission to the FIRE2017 IRMiDiS track. We participated in both sub-tasks, the first of which was directed at identifying the need or availability of specific resources and the second at matching tweets expressing the need for a resource with tweets mentioning their availability. Our linguistically motivated approach using pattern matching of word n-grams ...

This research investigated impulse buying as resulting from the depletion of a common—but limited—resource that governs self-control. In three investigations, participants’ self-regulatory resources were depleted or not; later, impulsive spending responses were measured. Participants whose resources were depleted, relative to participants whose resources were not depleted, felt stronger urges t...

Volunteer computing uses the free resources in Internet and Intranet environments for large-scale computation and storage. Currently, 70 applications use over 12 PetaFLOPS of computing power from such platforms. However, these platforms are currently limited to embarrassingly parallel applications. In an effort to broaden the set of applications that can leverage volunteer computing, we focus o...

The explosive growth of the bioinformatics field has led to a large amount of data and software applications publicly available as web resources. However, the lack of persistence of web references is a barrier to a comprehensive shared access. We conducted a study of the current availability and other features of primary bioinformatics web resources (such as software tools and databases). The m...

OBJECTIVES Using data from a large cohort of adults aged 45 to 84 years-old, we investigated whether availability of recreational resources is related to physical activity levels. METHODS Data from a multiethnic sample of 2723 adult residents of New York City, NY; Baltimore, Md; and Forsyth County, NC, were linked to data on locations of recreational resources. We measured the availability (d...