This report provides practical guidelines for the use of inexpensive electromagnetic valves characterized by large dead volumes (tens to hundreds of μL) for the generation of small (nL) droplets on demand in microfluidic chips. We analyze the role of the ratio of resistances and of the elastic capacitance of the fluidic connectors between the reservoir of the liquid, the valve and the microflui...

An attractive approach to leveraging the ability of cloudcomputing platforms to provide resources on demand is to build elastic applications, which can scale up or down based on resource requirements. To ease the development of elastic applications, it is useful for programmers to write applications with simple, inelastic semantics and rely on runtime systems to provide elasticity. While this a...

This paper introduces Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster (EC3), a tool that creates elastic virtual clusters on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. The clusters are self-managed entities that scale out to a larger number of nodes on demand, up to a maximum size specified by the user. Whenever idle resources are detected, the clusters automatically scale in, according to some predefin...

This paper presents estimates of the economic and demographic effects on the demand for steak, roast, and ground beef. Using an almost ideal demand system, the results indicate that demand is inelastic for steak and ground beef, elastic for roast, cross-price effects are significant, and all goods are Hicks-Allen substitutes. The impact of certain demographic effects, such as household size, re...

Developing the infrastructures for preventing non-communicable diseases is one of the most important goals of healthcare context in recent years. In this regard, the number and capacity of preventive healthcare facilities as well as assignment of customers to facilities should be determined for each region. Besides the accessibility, the utility of customers is a determinative factor in partici...

The importance of user benefits in transport projects assessments is well-known by transport planners and economists. Generally they have the greatest impact on the result of costbenefit analysis. It is common practice to adopt the consumer surplus measure for calculating transport user benefits. Normally the well-known “Rule of a Half”, as a practical approximation for the integral of the dema...

This paper studies the issue of locational market power of suppliers in a market that is situated on a network. Locational market power arises when locational advantage allows suppliers to act non-competitively and raise prices above competitive levels. We propose a quantifiable definition of locational market power and analyze its properties over a general network. We also conduct a detailed a...

Exponential growth of video traffic challenges the current paradigm to stream large amounts of video contents to end users. Cloud computing with elastic resource allocation supported enables cost-effective video streaming with desired QoE requirements. We abstract a new theoretical model from real systems for elastic media streaming by introducing a virtual content service provider that rents c...

Public inoculation centers are examples of facilities providing service to customers whose demand is elastic to travel and waiting time. That is, people will not travel too far, or stay in line for too long to obtain the service. The goal, when planning such services, is to maximize the demand they attract, by locating centers and staffing them so as to reduce customers’ travel time and time sp...

Regardless of the form of restructuring, deregulated electricity industries share one common feature: the absence of any significant, rapid demand-side response to the wholesale (or, spot market) price. For a variety of reasons, electricity industries continue to charge most consumers an average cost based on regulated retail tariff from the era of vertical integration, even as the retailers th...