Mycoplasma pneumoniae causes a range of airway and extrapulmonary pathologies in humans. Clinically, M. pneumoniae is associated with acute exacerbations of human asthma and a worsening of experimentally induced asthma in mice. Recently, we demonstrated that Community Acquired Respiratory Distress Syndrome (CARDS) toxin, an ADP-ribosylating and vacuolating toxin synthesized by M. pneumoniae, is...

This paper describes an ongoing process to define a suitable process improvement model for story cards based requirement engineering process and practices at agile software development environments. Key features of the SMM (Story card Maturity Model) process are: solves the problems related to the story cards like requirements conflicts, missing requirements, ambiguous requirements, define stan...

We study Markov chains which model genome rearrangements. These models are useful for studying the equilibrium distribution of chromosomal lengths, and are used in methods for estimating genomic distances. The primary Markov chain studied in this paper is the top-swap Markov chain. The top-swap chain is a card-shuffling process with n cards divided over k decks, where the cards are ordered with...

This paper studies a cooperative card game called Hanabi from an algorithmic combinatorial game theory viewpoint. The aim of the game is to play cards from 1 to n in increasing order (this has to be done independently in c different colors). Cards are drawn from a deck one by one. Drawn cards are either immediately played, discarded or stored for future use (overall each player can store up to ...

Consider the following method of card shuffling. Start with a deck of N cards numbered 1 through N. Fix a parameter p between 0 and 1. In this model a " shuffle " consists of uniformly selecting a pair of adjacent cards and then flipping a coin that is heads with probability p. If the coin comes up heads then we arrange the two cards so that the lower numbered card comes before the higher numbe...

TRACS (Tool for Research on Adaptive Cognitive Strategies) is a new suite of card games played with a special deck, where the back of each card is a clue to the front of the card. This design simulates the clue/truth structure of real world domains like medicine and warfare, where truths (fronts of cards) must be diagnosed from clues (backs of cards) in order to make decisions (cards to choose,...

Recent U.S. antitrust litigation and concerns by regulatory authorities over fees in Australia and the European Union have questioned the nature of various bilateral relationships and associated fees underlying credit card transactions. A two-period model is constructed to study the interactions among consumers, merchants, and a card issuer. The model yields the following results. First, if the...