Search results for "programming."
showing 10 items of 3035 documents
Early Development of the Gut Microbiota and Immune Health
2014
In recent years, the increase in human microbiome research brought about by the rapidly evolving “omic” technologies has established that the balance among the microbial groups present in the human gut, and their multipronged interactions with the host, are crucial for health. On the other hand, epidemiological and experimental support has also grown for the ‘early programming hypothesis’, according to which factors that act in utero and early in life program the risks for adverse health outcomes later on. The microbiota of the gut develops during infancy, in close interaction with immune development, and with extensive variability across individuals. It follows that the specific process of…
Are you a good employee or simply a good guy? Influence costs and contract design
2013
We develop a principal–agent model with a moral hazard problem in which the principal has access to a hard signal (the level of output) and a soft behavioral signal (the supervision signal) about the agent's level of effort. In our model, the agent can initiate influence activities and manipulate the behavioral signal. These activities are costly for the principal as they detract the agent from the productive task. We show that the agent's ability to manipulate the behavioral signal leads to low-powered incentives and increases the cost of implementing the efficient equilibrium as a result. Interestingly, the fact that manipulation activities entail productivity losses may lead to the desig…
Fair Transfer Prices of Global Supply Chains in the Process Industry
2016
This work addresses the optimisation of transfer prices for the fair profit distribution among the members involved in a global supply chain in the process industry. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed for production and distribution planning of global supply chains, where the optimal transfer prices of products between plants and markets are determined. Two solution approaches are presented for fair solutions using Nash and lexicographic maximin principles. The applicability of the proposed models and approaches are demonstrated by an illustrative example. The results show that both approaches can fairly distribute the whole supply chain’s profit to the members.
Measuring microfinance performance
2015
MFIs are measured according to two dimensions. One is their outreach to poor people, that is, their ability to provide poor families access to financial services. This is the MFIs’ social mission. The other dimension is their financial sustainability, that is, their ability to pay their employees, lenders, and other suppliers, in short, their ability to produce a profit from their operations. We set out the main microfinance measures and confirm earlier findings that profitability is rather weak in microfinance, and that operational costs constitute a large part of the total costs. We argue that researchers should put more efforts into identifying the MFI’s cost drivers because social outre…
Toward fast malaria detection by secondary speckle sensing microscopy
2012
Diagnosis of malaria must be rapid, accurate, simple to use, portable and low cost, as suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO). Despite recent efforts, the gold standard remains the light microscopy of a stained blood film. This method can detect low parasitemia and identify different species of Plasmodium. However, it is time consuming, it requires well trained microscopist and good instrumentation to minimize misinterpretation, thus the costs are considerable. Moreover, the equipment cannot be easily transported and installed. In this paper we propose a new technique named "secondary speckle sensing microscopy" ((SM)-M-3) based upon extraction of correlation based statistics of s…
Determination of the mineral composition of foods by infrared spectroscopy: a review of a green alternative.
2014
The determination of mineral composition of foods involves, in most cases, the use of long and tedious sample preparation, which consumes acids and reagents and sometimes requires the use of expensive instrumentation. This is the main reason for the search for direct analytical procedures, based on the use of infrared sample spectra and chemometrics, to model the signals in order to determine the presence of essential and trace toxic elements in foods. The state-of-the-art of the research in this field has been established in the present review article from the critical evaluation of articles available in the literature. Chemometric methods employed and their validation, together with a dis…
Simple Fingerprint Minutiae Extraction Algorithm Using Crossing Number On Valley Structure
2007
Most of the existing fingerprint extraction techniques currently available are based on ridge structure. The ridge usually has thicker structure than the valley, so that more processing time is needed to extract the ridge than extracting the valley. Taking the advantage of the thin structure of the valley, we proposed an algorithm that reduces the time needed for minutiae extraction. The algorithm was developed in Matlab environment using fingerprint images from FVC2004. In order to show the performance of the algorithm, numerical results are presented.
OPTIMIZATION OF POLYGENERATION SYSTEMS SERVING A CLUSTER OF BUILDINGS
2012
The optimization of combined energy systems for the production and distribution of warm and cold fluids to civil users is very complex; two possible configurations, i.e. the small single units for individual buildings and the large plants integrated with district heating networks, can be essentially considered, especially in cold climates. Dealing with such a complex problem, involving a very large number of variables, requires efficient algorithms and resolution techniques. The present chapter illustrates a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP)1 approach to the optimization of synthesis, design and operation for CHCP-based μ-grids including thermal energy storages. A novel approach is presen…
Is the Ghosh model interesting?
2009
International audience; The overall value of the Ghosh model is appraised. Its treatment of quantities and prices is scrutinized by examining the variant with data in quantities and prices, and the variant with data in value and price indexes. The methodology involves returning to the accounting equations and shows that: (i) the Ghosh model offers solutions of limited interest, being incapable of providing prices or price indexes separately from quantities; (ii) what is taken to be the equation of Ghosh's value model is actually that of Ghosh's physical model; (iii) the Ghosh model may serve for cost-push exercises, but the dual of the Leontief model performs the same task in a much simpler…
Building a new CTL model checker using Web services
2013
This Computation Tree Logic (CTL) is widely used to capture compositions of reactive systems. Model checking is particularly well-suited for the automated verification of finite-state systems, both for software and for hardware. A CTL model checker tool allows designers to automatically verify that systems satisfy specifications expressed in the language of CTL logic. In this paper we present a new CTL model checker implemented in client-server paradigm. CTL Designer, the client tool, allows an interactive construction of the CTL models as state-transition graphs. Java and C# APIs are provided for programmatic construction of large models. The server part of our tool embeds the core of the …