Asymmetric information potentially leads to adverse selection, market inefficiency, and market failure. To mitigate these problems, market designers rely on different policies. Some adopt reputation policies in which they certify high-quality users and help them signal their quality; others provide marketplace guarantee policies and, in the process, prevent low-quality users from participating....

OBJECTIVE. Specification of appropriate personal protective equipment for respiratory protection against influenza is somewhat controversial. In a clinical environment, N95 filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs) are often recommended for respiratory protection against infectious aerosols. This study evaluates the ability of N95 FFRs to capture viable H1N1 influenza aerosols. METHODs. Five N95 F...

Path protection and link protection schemes are the main means of protecting wavelengthdivision multiplexed (WDM) networks from the losses caused by a link failure such as a fiber cut. We propose a new protection scheme, which we term partial path protection (PPP), to select end-to-end backup paths using local information about network failures. PPP designates a different restoration path for e...

Plant xylem must balance efficient delivery of water to the canopy against protection from air entry into the conduits via air-seeding. We investigated the relationship between tracheid allometry, end wall pitting, safety from air-seeding, and the hydraulic efficiency of conifer wood in order to better understand the trade-offs between effective transport and protection against air entry. Root ...

Continuously scaling down and decreasing operation voltages of ICs, from the 5 V TTL-compatible voltage to 3.3 V, then 1.2 now 0.8 for low-power results in more stringent electrostatic discharge protection design requirements, such as a narrow ESD window, low voltage, high robustness. Based on traditional diode string diode-triggered silicon-controlled rectifiers, an enhanced rectifier is propo...