The conventional Cobb-Douglas production function model require strong assumptions such as the constant elasticity and the entire frontier efficiency. The varying elasticity production function is an useful extension but it does not take frontier efficiency into account, and the data envelope analysis model involves the use of linear programming methods to estimate the frontier efficiency where...

Elasticity is the ability of a software system to dynamically scale the amount of the resources it provides to clients as their workloads increase or decrease. Elasticity is praised as a key advantage of cloud computing, where computing resources are dynamically added and released. However, there exists no concise or formal definition of elasticity, and thus no approaches to quantify it have be...

Elasticity is a key property of cloud computing environments and one of the features which distinguishes this paradigm from other ones. An elasticity metric could be used to define and to monitor Service Level Agreements (SLAs), to compare and to benchmark different cloud providers or to improve provisioning and management decisions in real time if it could be measured with some simple procedur...

Modulus of elasticity of flapper valve material is an important parameter for compressor design since it can affect efficiency and life time of the compressor. Modulus of elasticity is usually considered as a material constant. Actually, it can vary with material orientations and conditions and even environments such as temperature will also affect this value. Therefore, the parameters that can...

Series elastic actuation that takes inspiration from biological muscle-tendon units has been extensively studied and used to address the challenges (e.g. energy efficiency, robustness) existing in purely stiff robots. However, there also exists another form of passive property in biological actuation, parallel elasticity within muscles themselves, and our knowledge of it is limited: for example...

Conventional diagnostic ultrasound images portray differences in the acoustic properties of soft tissues, whereas ultrasound-based elasticity images portray differences in the elastic properties of soft tissues (i.e. stiffness, viscosity). The benefit of elasticity imaging lies in the fact that many soft tissues can share similar ultrasonic echogenicities, but may have different mechanical prop...

Income and price elasticity of demand quantify the responsiveness of markets to changes in income and in prices, respectively. Under the assumptions of utility maximization and preference independence (additive preferences), mathematical relationships between income elasticity values and the uncompensated own and cross price elasticity of demand are here derived using the differential approach ...

BACKGROUND Human skin properties have been used as an important diagnostic component in traditional medicine as they change with health conditions. Sasang constitutional medicine (SCM) puts emphasis on the recognition of the constitution-specific skin features prior to the diagnostic decision of health. In this work, in search of skin-characteristics effectively reflecting SCM features, we comp...

The importance of mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) in vascular regeneration is becoming increasingly recognized. However, few in vitro studies have been performed to identify the effects of environmental elasticity on the differentiation of MSC into vascular cell types. Electrospinning and photopolymerization techniques were used to fabricate a three-dimensional (3-D) polyethylene glycol dimethacry...