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  • Articles  (1,808)
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  • Hindawi  (1,808)
  • 2010-2014  (1,808)
  • Computer Science  (1,418)
  • Economics  (390)
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  • Articles  (1,808)
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  • 1
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    The Telegraph Equation and Its Solution by Reduced Differential Transform Method (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-09-16
    Description: One-dimensional second-order hyperbolic telegraph equation was formulated using Ohm’s law and solved by a recent and reliable semianalytic method, namely, the reduced differential transform method (RDTM). Using this method, it is possible to find the exact solution or a closed approximate solution of a differential equation. Three numerical examples have been carried out in order to check the effectiveness, the accuracy, and convergence of the method. The RDTM is a powerful mathematical technique for solving wide range of problems arising in science and engineering fields.
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  • 2
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    Prediction of Surface Roughness When End Milling Ti6Al4V Alloy Using Adaptive Neurofuzzy Inference System (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-10-02
    Description: Surface roughness is considered as the quality index of the machine parts. Many diverse techniques have been applied in modelling metal cutting processes. Previous studies have revealed that artificial intelligence techniques are novel soft computing methods which fit the solution of nonlinear and complex problems like metal cutting processes. The present study used adaptive neurofuzzy inference system for the purpose of predicting the surface roughness when end milling Ti6Al4V alloy with coated (PVD) and uncoated cutting tools under dry cutting conditions. Real experimental results have been used for training and testing of ANFIS models, and the best model was selected based on minimum root mean square error. A generalized bell-shaped function has been adopted as a membership function for the modelling process, and its numbers were changed from 2 to 5. The findings provided evidence of the capability of ANFIS in modelling surface roughness in end milling process and obtainment of good matching between experimental and predicted results.
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  • 3
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    The Supply Chain Triangle: How Synchronisation, Stability, and Productivity of Material Flows Interact (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-10-03
    Description: Empirical evidence created a commonly accepted understanding that synchronisation and stability of material flows impact its productivity. This crucial link between synchronous and stable material flows by time and quantity to create a supply chain with the highest throughput rates is at the heart of lean thinking. Although this supply chain triangle has generally been acknowledged over many years, it is necessary to reach a finer understanding of these dynamics. Therefore, we will develop and study supply chains with the help of fluid dynamics. A multistage, continuous material flow is modelled through a conservation law for material density. Unlike similar approaches, our model is not based on some quasi steady-state assumptions about the stochastic behaviour of the involved supply chain but rather on a simple deterministic rule for material flow density. These models allow us to take into account the nonlinear, dynamical interactions of different supply chain echelons and to test synchronised and stable flow with respect to its potential impacts. Numerical simulations verify that the model is able to simulate transient supply chain phenomena. Moreover, a quantification method relating to the fundamental link between synchronisation, stability, and productivity of supply chains has been found.
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  • 4
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    Efficient Serial and Parallel Algorithms for Selection of Unique Oligos in EST Databases (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-04-09
    Description: Obtaining unique oligos from an EST database is a problem of great importance in bioinformatics, particularly in the discovery of new genes and the mapping of the human genome. Many algorithms have been developed to find unique oligos, many of which are much less time consuming than the traditional brute force approach. An algorithm was presented by Zheng et al. (2004) which finds the solution of the unique oligos search problem efficiently. We implement this algorithm as well as several new algorithms based on some theorems included in this paper. We demonstrate how, with these new algorithms, we can obtain unique oligos much faster than with previous ones. We parallelize these new algorithms to further improve the time of finding unique oligos. All algorithms are run on ESTs obtained from a Barley EST database.
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    Topics: Biology , Computer Science
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  • 5
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    An EPQ Model with Unit Production Cost and Set-Up Cost as Functions of Production Rate (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-09-13
    Description: Extensive research has been devoted to economic production quantity (EPQ) problem. However, no attention has been paid to problems where unit production and set-up costs must be considered as functions of production rate. In this paper, we address the problem of determining the optimal production quantity and rate of production in which unit production and set-up costs are assumed to be continuous functions of production rate. Based on the traditional economic production quantity (EPQ) formula, the cost function associated with this model is proved to be nonconvex and a procedure is proposed to solve this problem. Finally, utility of the model is presented using some numerical examples and the results are analyzed.
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  • 6
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    A Complex Dynamical Analysis of the Indian Stock Market (2014)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2014-12-15
    Description: This paper seeks to analyze the dynamical structure of the Indian stock market by considering two major Indian stock market indices, namely, BSE Sensex and CNX Nifty. The recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) is applied on the daily closing data of the two series during the period from January 2, 2002, to October 10, 2013. A Rolling Window of 100 and step size 21 are applied in order to see how both the series behave over time. The analysis based on three RQA measures, namely, % determinism (DET), laminarity (LAM), and trapping time (TT), provides conclusive evidence that the Indian equity market is chaotic in nature. Evidences for phase transition in the Indian equity market around the time of financial crisis are also found.
    Print ISSN: 2090-2123
    Electronic ISSN: 2090-2131
    Topics: Economics
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  • 7
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    An In Silico Approach towards the Prediction of Druglikeness Properties of Inhibitors of Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor1 (2014)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2014-12-16
    Description: Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness worldwide. It is caused by the abnormal growth of the retinal blood vessels. Plasminogen activator inhibitor1 (PAI1) is the key growth factor and the inhibition of PAI1 can reduce the angiogenesis. In this study, currently available inhibitors are taken and tested for the toxicity, binding affinity, and bioactivities of the compounds by in silico approach. Five toxic free inhibitors were identified, among which N-acetyl-D-glucosamine shows the significant binding affinity and two of the molecules are having the better bioactivity properties. The molecular optimization of 2-(acetylamino)-2-deoxy-A-D-glucopyranose and alpha-L-fucose can be used for the treatment of diabetic retinopathy.
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    Topics: Biology , Computer Science
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  • 8
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    Modelling and Predicting the Breaking Strength and Mass Irregularity of Cotton Rotor-Spun Yarns Containing Cotton Fiber Recovered from Ginning Process by Using Artificial Neural Network Algorithm (2011)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2011-06-15
    Description: One of the main methods to reduce the production costs is waste recycling which is the most important challenge for the future. Cotton wastes collected from ginning process have desirable properties which could be used during spinning process. The purpose of this study was to develop predictive models of breaking strength and mass irregularity (CVm%) of cotton waste rotor-spun yarns containing cotton waste collected from ginning process by using the artificial neural network trained with backpropagation algorithm. Artificial neural network models have been developed based on rotor diameter, rotor speed, navel type, opener roller speed, ginning waste proportion and yarn linear density as input parameters. The parameters of artificial neural network model, namely, learning, and momentum rate, number of hidden layers and number of hidden processing elements (neurons) were optimized to get the best predictive models. The findings showed that the breaking strength and mass irregularity of rotor spun yarns could be predicted satisfactorily by artificial neural network. The maximum error in predicting the breaking strength and mass irregularity of testing data was 8.34% and 6.65%, respectively.
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  • 9
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    Alleviating the Collision States and Fleet Optimization by Introducing a New Generation of Automated Guided Vehicle Systems (2011)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2011-06-14
    Description: The aim of the current research is to propose a new generation of automated guided vehicle systems for alleviating the collision states in material handling systems where the automated guided vehicles movements are allowed to be both unidirectional and bidirectional. The objective function is to maximize the average annual profit in an FMS system using a simulation method. Despite several researches done in this field, this criterion has been studied rarely. The current study includes some new changes in AGV design for preventing some common problems such as congestions and deadlocks based on real profits/costs analysis in a flexible manufacturing system. For this reason, some experiments have been carried out to study the effects of several empty vehicle dispatching rules on average annual profit. The results show that the proposed framework is efficient and robust enough for industrial environments.
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  • 10
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    Simulation of Cerebral Aneurysm Growth and Prediction of Evolving Rupture Risk (2011)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2011-06-29
    Description: Cerebral aneurysms are local expansions of blood vessel walls in the brain blood system. The rupture of an aneurysm is a very severe event associated with a high rate of mortality. When cerebral aneurysms are detected, clinicians need to decide if operation is required. The risk of aneurysm rupture is then compared to the risks associated with the medical intervention. In the present paper, a probabilistic framework for a mechanically based rupture risk assessment of cerebral aneurysms is proposed. The method is based on the assumption that the strength of aneurysmal tissues can be described by a statistical distribution. A structural analysis of the aneurysm in question is performed, and the maximum stress experienced by the aneurysm is compared to the strength distribution. The proposed model was compared with clinical results for ruptured aneurysms in terms of rupture density and accumulated rupture risk as a function of aneurysm size. The model was able to reproduce the clinical results well. The proposed framework may potentially be used under in vivo conditions to predict the risk of rupture for diagnosed aneurysms.
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  • 11
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    Numerical Modelling Approaches for Assessing Improvements to the Flow Circulation in a Small Lake (2011)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2011-08-04
    Description: Kamaniskeg Lake is a long, narrow, and deep small lake located in the northern part of Ontario, Canada. The goals of this paper were to examine various options to improve the water quality in the northern part of the lake by altering the local hydraulic flow conditions. Towards this end, a preliminary screening suggested that the flow circulation could be increased around a central island (Mask Island) in the northern part of the lake by opening up an existing causeway connecting the mainland and central island. Three-dimensional (3D) hydraulic and transport models were adopted in this paper to investigate the hydraulic conditions under various wind forces and causeway structures. The modelling results show that opening the causeway in a few places is unlikely to generate a large flow circulation around the central island. Full circulation only appears to be possible if the causeway is fully removed and a strong wind blows in a favourable direction. The possible reasons for existing water quality variations at the intake of a local WTP (water treatment plant) are also explored in the paper.
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  • 12
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    Comparison of Two Models for Radiative Heat Transfer in High Temperature Thermal Plasmas (2011)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2011-08-10
    Description: Numerical simulation of the arc-flow interaction in high-voltage circuit breakers requires a radiation model capable of handling high-temperature participating thermal plasmas. The modeling of the radiative transfer plays a critical role in the overall accuracy of such CFD simulations. As a result of the increase of computational power, CPU intensive methods based on the radiative transfer equation, leading to more accurate results, are now becoming attractive alternatives to current approximate models. In this paper, the predictive capabilities of the finite volume method (RTE-FVM) and the P1 model are investigated. A systematic comparison between these two models and analytical solutions are presented for a variety of relevant test cases. Two implementations of each approach are compared, and a critical evaluation is presented.
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  • 13
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    A Fully Nonlinear, Dynamically Consistent Numerical Model for Ship Maneuvering in a Seaway (2011)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2011-10-10
    Description: This is the continuation of our research on development of a fully nonlinear, dynamically consistent, numerical ship motion model (DiSSEL). In this paper we report our results on modeling ship maneuvering in arbitrary seaway that is one of the most challenging and important problems in seakeeping. In our modeling, we developed an adaptive algorithm to maintain dynamical balances numerically as the encounter frequencies (the wave frequencies as measured on the ship) varying with the ship maneuvering state. The key of this new algorithm is to evaluate the encounter frequency variation differently in the physical domain and in the frequency domain, thus effectively eliminating possible numerical dynamical imbalances. We have tested this algorithm with several well-documented maneuvering experiments, and our results agree very well with experimental data. In particular, the numerical time series of roll and pitch motions and the numerical ship tracks (i.e., surge, sway, and yaw) are nearly identical to those of experiments.
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  • 14
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    Outpatient Appointment Scheduling with Variable Interappointment Times (2011)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2011-10-12
    Description: Healthcare currently consumes 17% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product and is expected to reach 20% within the coming decade. Confronted with such high costs, sharp demand, and limited capacity, many hospitals now are vying for shorter lengths of stay and are transferring services from inpatient to outpatient facilities. This paper seeks to develop a methodology for constructing effective outpatient appointment scheduling systems. The objective of these appointment systems is to minimize the average total cost function describing total costs incurred by patient waiting and by staff idle time and overtime. In the paper, we will establish that the average total cost function exhibits a unimodal curve. The lowest point of the curve essentially means the lowest average total cost. We will next develop a simulation-based heuristic algorithm for finding an outpatient schedule near the lowest point. In the paper, we present numerical examples using the heuristic based upon a set of predetermined unit costs. Specifically, we find the near optimal interappointment times for schedules, where there are two and three patients in each block, respectively. The current work does not consider possible no shows and walk-ins. Future work will undertake these issues.
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  • 15
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    Slicing Cuts on Food Materials Using Robotic-Controlled Razor Blade (2011)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2011-12-06
    Description: Cutting operations using blades can arise in a number of industries, for example, food processing industry, in which cheese, fruit and vegetable, even meat, are involved. Certain questions will rise during these works, such as “why pressing-and-slicing cuts use less force than pressing-only cuts” and “how is the influence of the blade cutting-edge on force”. To answer these questions, this research developed a mathematical expression of the cutting stress tensor. Based on the analysis of the stress tensor on the contact surface, the influence of the blade edge-shape and slicing angle on the resultant cutting force were formulated and discussed. These formulations were further verified using experimental results by robotic cutting of potatoes. Through studying the change of the cutting force, the optimal slicing angle can be obtained in terms of maximum feeding distance and minimum cutting force. Based on the blade sharpness properties and the specific materials, the required cutting force can be predicted. These formulation and experimental results explained the basic theory of blade cutting fracture and further provided the support to optimize the cutting mechanism design and to develop the force control algorithms for the automation of blade cutting operations.
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  • 16
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    A New Optimization via Simulation Approach for Dynamic Facility Layout Problem with Budget Constraints (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-03-16
    Description: A new efficient heuristic algorithm has been developed for the dynamic facility layout problem with budget constraint (DFLPB) using optimization via simulation technique. The heuristic integrates integer programming and discrete event simulation to address DFLPB. In the proposed algorithm, the nonlinear model of the DFLP has been changed to a pure integer programming (PIP) model. Then, the optimal solution of the PIP model has been used in a simulation model that has been designed in a similar manner as the DFLP for determining the probability of assigning a facility to a location. After a sufficient number of runs, the simulation model obtains near optimum solutions. Finally, to test the performance of the algorithm, several test problems have been taken from the literature and solved. The results show that the proposed algorithm is more efficient in terms of speed and accuracy than other heuristic algorithms presented in previous works.
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  • 17
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    Basic Characteristics of IEC Flickermeter Processing (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-12-21
    Description: Flickermeter is a common name for a system that measures the obnoxiousness of flicker caused by voltage fluctuations. The output of flickermeter is a value of short-term flicker severity indicator, . This paper presents the results of the numerical simulations that reconstruct the processing of flickermeter in frequency domain. With the use of standard test signals, the characteristics of flickermeter were determined for the case of amplitude modulation of input signal, frequency modulation of input signal, and for input signal with interharmonic component. For the needs of simulative research, elements of standard IEC flickermeter signal chain as well as test signal source and tools for acquisition, archiving, and presentation of the obtained results were modeled. The results were presented with a set of charts, and the specific fragments of the charts were pointed out and commented on. Some examples of the influence of input signal’s bandwidth limitation on the flickermeter measurement result were presented for the case of AM and FM modulation. In addition, the diagrams that enable the evaluation of flickermeter’s linearity were also presented.
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  • 18
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    Information in Repeated Ultimatum Game with Unknown Pie Size (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-02-21
    Description: Within existing literature, it is well known that people’s behavior in ultimatum game experiments cannot be explained by perfect rationality model. There is, however, evidence showing that people are boundedly rational. In this paper, we studied repeated ultimatum game experiments in which the pie size is only known to the proposer (player 1), but the transaction history is made known to both players. We found that subject’s behavior can be very well explained by the history-consistent-rationality model (HCR model) of Lee and Ferguson (2010), which suggests that people’s behavior is affected by what they observed in the past. The HCR model is able to yield point predictions whose errors are on average within 5% of the total pie size. The experimental results provide evidence that subjects' behavior is boundedly rational with respect to the transaction history.
    Print ISSN: 2090-2123
    Electronic ISSN: 2090-2131
    Topics: Economics
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  • 19
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    Statistical Analysis of Terminal Extensions of Protein β-Strand Pairs (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-02-21
    Description: The long-range interactions, required to the accurate predictions of tertiary structures of β-sheet-containing proteins, are still difficult to simulate. To remedy this problem and to facilitate β-sheet structure predictions, many efforts have been made by computational methods. However, known efforts on β-sheets mainly focus on interresidue contacts or amino acid partners. In this study, to go one step further, we studied β-sheets on the strand level, in which a statistical analysis was made on the terminal extensions of paired β-strands. In most cases, the two paired β-strands have different lengths, and terminal extensions exist. The terminal extensions are the extended part of the paired strands besides the common paired part. However, we found that the best pairing required a terminal alignment, and β-strands tend to pair to make bigger common parts. As a result, 96.97%  of β-strand pairs have a ratio of 25% of the paired common part to the whole length. Also 94.26% and 95.98%  of β-strand pairs have a ratio of 40% of the paired common part to the length of the two β-strands, respectively. Interstrand register predictions by searching interacting β-strands from several alternative offsets should comply with this rule to reduce the computational searching space to improve the performances of algorithms.
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  • 20
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    Solving the 0/1 Knapsack Problem by a Biomolecular DNA Computer (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-02-21
    Description: Solving some mathematical problems such as NP-complete problems by conventional silicon-based computers is problematic and takes so long time. DNA computing is an alternative method of computing which uses DNA molecules for computing purposes. DNA computers have massive degrees of parallel processing capability. The massive parallel processing characteristic of DNA computers is of particular interest in solving NP-complete and hard combinatorial problems. NP-complete problems such as knapsack problem and other hard combinatorial problems can be easily solved by DNA computers in a very short period of time comparing to conventional silicon-based computers. Sticker-based DNA computing is one of the methods of DNA computing. In this paper, the sticker based DNA computing was used for solving the 0/1 knapsack problem. At first, a biomolecular solution space was constructed by using appropriate DNA memory complexes. Then, by the application of a sticker-based parallel algorithm using biological operations, knapsack problem was resolved in polynomial time.
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  • 21
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    Using Protein Clusters from Whole Proteomes to Construct and Augment a Dendrogram (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-02-21
    Description: In this paper we present a new ab initio approach for constructing an unrooted dendrogram using protein clusters, an approach that has the potential for estimating relationships among several thousands of species based on their putative proteomes. We employ an open-source software program called pClust that was developed for use in metagenomic studies. Sequence alignment is performed by pClust using the Smith-Waterman algorithm, which is known to give optimal alignment and, hence, greater accuracy than BLAST-based methods. Protein clusters generated by pClust are used to create protein profiles for each species in the dendrogram, these profiles forming a correlation filter library for use with a new taxon. To augment the dendrogram with a new taxon, a protein profile for the taxon is created using BLASTp, and this new taxon is placed into a position within the dendrogram corresponding to the highest correlation with profiles in the correlation filter library. This work was initiated because of our interest in plasmids, and each step is illustrated using proteomes from Gram-negative bacterial plasmids. Proteomes for 527 plasmids were used to generate the dendrogram, and to demonstrate the utility of the insertion algorithm twelve recently sequenced pAKD plasmids were used to augment the dendrogram.
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    Study of Swarm Behavior in Modeling and Simulation of Cluster Formation in Nanofluids (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-02-21
    Description: Modeling the multiagents cooperative systems inspired from biological self-organized systems in the context of swarm model has been under great considerations especially in the field of the cooperation of multi robots. These models are trying to optimize the behavior of artificial multiagent systems by introducing a consensus, which is a mathematical model between the agents as an intelligence property for each member of the swarm set. The application of this novel approach in the modeling of nonintelligent multi agents systems in the field of cohesion and cluster formation of nanoparticles in nanofluids has been investigated in this study. This goal can be obtained by applying the basic swarm model for agents that are more mechanistic by considering their physical properties such as their mass, diameter, as well as the physical properties of the flow. Clustering in nanofluids is one of the major issues in the study of its effects on heat transfer. Study of the cluster formation dynamics in nanofluids using the swarm model can be useful in controlling the size and formation time of the clusters as well as designing appropriate microchannels, which the nanoparticles are plunged into.
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    On the Meaning of Affinity Limits in B-Cell Epitope Prediction for Antipeptide Antibody-Mediated Immunity (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-11-15
    Description: B-cell epitope prediction aims to aid the design of peptide-based immunogens (e.g., vaccines) for eliciting antipeptide antibodies that protect against disease, but such antibodies fail to confer protection and even promote disease if they bind with low affinity. Hence, the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) was searched to obtain published thermodynamic and kinetic data on binding interactions of antipeptide antibodies. The data suggest that the affinity of the antibodies for their immunizing peptides appears to be limited in a manner consistent with previously proposed kinetic constraints on affinity maturation in vivo and that cross-reaction of the antibodies with proteins tends to occur with lower affinity than the corresponding reaction of the antibodies with their immunizing peptides. These observations better inform B-cell epitope prediction to avoid overestimating the affinity for both active and passive immunization; whereas active immunization is subject to limitations of affinity maturation in vivo and of the capacity to accumulate endogenous antibodies, passive immunization may transcend such limitations, possibly with the aid of artificial affinity-selection processes and of protein engineering. Additionally, protein disorder warrants further investigation as a possible supplementary criterion for B-cell epitope prediction, where such disorder obviates thermodynamically unfavorable protein structural adjustments in cross-reactions between antipeptide antibodies and proteins.
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  • 24
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    Intervention in Biological Phenomena via Feedback Linearization (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-03-07
    Description: The problems of modeling and intervention of biological phenomena have captured the interest of many researchers in the past few decades. The aim of the therapeutic intervention strategies is to move an undesirable state of a diseased network towards a more desirable one. Such an objective can be achieved by the application of drugs to act on some genes/metabolites that experience the undesirable behavior. For the purpose of design and analysis of intervention strategies, mathematical models that can capture the complex dynamics of the biological systems are needed. S-systems, which offer a good compromise between accuracy and mathematical flexibility, are a promising framework for modeling the dynamical behavior of biological phenomena. Due to the complex nonlinear dynamics of the biological phenomena represented by S-systems, nonlinear intervention schemes are needed to cope with the complexity of the nonlinear S-system models. Here, we present an intervention technique based on feedback linearization for biological phenomena modeled by S-systems. This technique is based on perfect knowledge of the S-system model. The proposed intervention technique is applied to the glycolytic-glycogenolytic pathway, and simulation results presented demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
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    Literature Retrieval and Mining in Bioinformatics: State of the Art and Challenges (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-03-07
    Description: The world has widely changed in terms of communicating, acquiring, and storing information. Hundreds of millions of people are involved in information retrieval tasks on a daily basis, in particular while using a Web search engine or searching their e-mail, making such field the dominant form of information access, overtaking traditional database-style searching. How to handle this huge amount of information has now become a challenging issue. In this paper, after recalling the main topics concerning information retrieval, we present a survey on the main works on literature retrieval and mining in bioinformatics. While claiming that information retrieval approaches are useful in bioinformatics tasks, we discuss some challenges aimed at showing the effectiveness of these approaches applied therein.
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    Flux Analysis of the Trypanosoma brucei Glycolysis Based on a Multiobjective-Criteria Bioinformatic Approach (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-10-14
    Description: Trypanosoma brucei is a protozoan parasite of major of interest in discovering new genes for drug targets. This parasite alternates its life cycle between the mammal host(s) (bloodstream form) and the insect vector (procyclic form), with two divergent glucose metabolism amenable to in vitro culture. While the metabolic network of the bloodstream forms has been well characterized, the flux distribution between the different branches of the glucose metabolic network in the procyclic form has not been addressed so far. We present a computational analysis (called Metaboflux) that exploits the metabolic topology of the procyclic form, and allows the incorporation of multipurpose experimental data to increase the biological relevance of the model. The alternatives resulting from the structural complexity of networks are formulated as an optimization problem solved by a metaheuristic where experimental data are modeled in a multiobjective function. Our results show that the current metabolic model is in agreement with experimental data and confirms the observed high metabolic flexibility of glucose metabolism. In addition, Metaboflux offers a rational explanation for the high flexibility in the ratio between final products from glucose metabolism, thsat is, flux redistribution through the malic enzyme steps.
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    Social Insurance and Truncated Benefits: Measuring the Impacts of Workers' Compensation (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-25
    Description: This study addresses the indirect impacts of state-mandated workers' compensation benefits on workers' wages. The benefit structure of workers' compensation causes a fundamental estimation problem. I develop a new strategy to limit the biases inherent in earlier models. I utilize individual-level census data (between 1940 and 1990) to exploit benefit variation that occurs both across states and within the fifty states over time. The results suggest that wage offsets are not constant across time and may be larger for workers at lower-wage levels.
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    Demand for Meat in the Rural and Urban Areas of Kenya: A Focus on the Indigenous Chicken (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-27
    Description: This study intends to estimate the demand for indigenous chicken meat in Kenya, including other available meat products for comparison purposes. Data used was collected from six counties. A total 930 rural and urban households were sampled. Linear Approximated Almost Ideal Demand System (LA/AIDS) model was used to obtain the demand elasticities and to examine the socioeconomic and demographic factors influencing the meat budget shares. The results ascertain that the socio-demographic factors such as household location, the proportion of household members and the family size are important factors in explaining perceived variations in the consumption of meat products. Indigenous chicken meat, beef and mutton, were identified as necessities. Indigenous chicken meat and beef were identified as substitutes while indigenous chicken, goat and exotic chicken meats were complements. In view of the high expenditure elasticities, therefore, considering a policy option that would enhance consumer income is desirable, since it will result in high consumption thereby providing more incentives for production of meat products. The information generated would be more beneficial to the interest groups in the livestock sector as a whole. This would be utilised in the formulation of effective policies in line with food security and poverty alleviation.
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    Eulerian Oil Spills Model Using Finite-Volume Method with Moving Boundary and Wet-Dry Fronts (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-10-03
    Description: The world production of crude oil is about 3 billion tons per year. The overall objective of the model in present study is supporting the decision makers in planning and conducting preventive and emergency interventions. The conservative equation for the slick dynamics was derived from layer-averaged Navier-Stokes (LNS) equations, averaged over the slick thickness. Eulerian approach is applied across the model, based on nonlinear shallow water Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations. Depth-integrated standard k-ε turbulence schemes have been included in the model. Wetting and drying fronts of intertidal zone and moving boundary are treated within the numerical model. A highly accurate algorithm based on a fourth-degree accurate shape function has been used through an alternating-direction implicit (ADI) scheme which separates the operators into locally one-dimensional (LOD) components. The solution has been achieved by the application of KPENTA algorithm for the set of the flow equations which constitutes a pentadiagonal matrix. Hydrodynamic model was validated for a channel with a sudden expansion in width. For validation of oil spill model, predicted results are compared with experimental data from a physical modeling of oil spill in a laboratory wave basin under controlled conditions.
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    DC Motor Parameter Identification Using Speed Step Responses (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-10-04
    Description: Based on the DC motor speed response measurement under a step voltage input, important motor parameters such as the electrical time constant, the mechanical time constant, and the friction can be estimated. A power series expansion of the motor speed response is presented, whose coefficients are related to the motor parameters. These coefficients can be easily computed using existing curve fitting methods. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the application of this approach. In these experiments, the approach was readily implemented and gave more accurate estimates than conventional methods.
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    Theoretic and Experimental Studies on the Casting of Large Die-Type Parts Made of Lamellar Graphite Grey Pig Irons by Using the Technology of Polystyrene Moulds Casting from Two Sprue Cups (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-10-16
    Description: This paper presents a comparative analysis between the practical results of pig iron die-type part casting and the results reached by simulation. The insert was made of polystyrene, and the casting was downward vertical. As after the part casting and heat treatment cracks were observed in the part, it became necessary to locate and identify these fissures and to establish some measures for eliminating the casting defects and for locating them. The research method was the comparisons of defects identified through verifications, measurements, and metallographic analyses applied to the cast part with the results of some criteria specific to simulation after simulating the casting process. In order to verify the compatibility between reality and simulation, we then simulated the part casting respecting the real conditions in which it was cast. By visualising certain sections of the cast part during solidification, relevant details occur about the possible evolution of defects. The simulation software was AnyCasting, the measurements were done through nondestructive methods.
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    Online Projective Integral with Proper Orthogonal Decomposition for Incompressible Flows Past NACA0012 Airfoil (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-10-18
    Description: The projective integration method based on the Galerkin-free framework with the assistance of proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) is presented in this paper. The present method is applied to simulate two-dimensional incompressible fluid flows past the NACA0012 airfoil problem. The approach consists of using high-accuracy direct numerical simulations over short time intervals, from which POD modes are extracted for approximating the dynamics of the primary variables. The solution is then projected with larger time steps using any standard time integrator, without the need to recompute it from the governing equations. This is called the online projective integration method. The results by the projective integration method are in good agreement with the full scale simulation with less computational needs. We also study the individual function of each POD mode used in the projective integration method. It is found that the first POD mode can capture basic flow behaviors but the overall dynamic is rather inaccurate. The second and the third POD modes assist the first mode by correcting magnitudes and phases of vorticity fields. However, adding the fifth POD mode in the model leads to some incorrect results in phase-shift forms for both drag and lift coefficients. This suggests the optimal number of POD modes to use in the projective integration method.
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    Dynamic Response of Cable-Supported Façades Subjected to High-Level Air Blast Loads: Numerical Simulations and Mitigation Techniques (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-10-25
    Description: A glazing façade subjected to blast loads has a structural behaviour that strongly differs from the typical response of a glazing system subjected to ordinary loads. Consequently, sophisticated modelling techniques are required to identify correctly its criticalities. The paper investigates the behaviour of a cable-supported façade subjected to high-level blast loading. Nonlinear dynamic analyses are performed in ABAQUS/Explicit using a sophisticated FE-model (M01), calibrated to dynamic experimental and numerical results. The structural effects of the total design blast impulse, as well as only its positive phase, are analyzed. At the same time, the possible cracking of glass panels is taken into account, since this phenomenon could modify the response of the entire façade. Finally, deep investigations are dedicated to the bearing cables, since subjecting them to elevated axial forces and their collapse could compromise the integrity of the cladding wall. Based on results of previous studies, frictional devices differently applied at their ends are presented to improve the response of the façade under the impact of a high-level explosion. Structural effects of various solutions are highlighted through dynamic simulations. Single vertical devices, if appropriately calibrated, allow reducing significantly the axial forces in cables, and lightly the tensile stresses in glass panes.
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    Information in Repeated Ultimatum Game with Unknown Pie Size (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-02-08
    Description: Within existing literature, it is well known that people’s behavior in ultimatum game experiments cannot be explained by perfect rationality model. There is, however, evidence showing that people are boundedly rational. In this paper, we studied repeated ultimatum game experiments in which the pie size is only known to the proposer (player 1), but the transaction history is made known to both players. We found that subject’s behavior can be very well explained by the history-consistent-rationality model (HCR model) of Lee and Ferguson (2010), which suggests that people’s behavior is affected by what they observed in the past. The HCR model is able to yield point predictions whose errors are on average within 5% of the total pie size. The experimental results provide evidence that subjects' behavior is boundedly rational with respect to the transaction history.
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    Study of Swarm Behavior in Modeling and Simulation of Cluster Formation in Nanofluids (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-02-09
    Description: Modeling the multiagents cooperative systems inspired from biological self-organized systems in the context of swarm model has been under great considerations especially in the field of the cooperation of multi robots. These models are trying to optimize the behavior of artificial multiagent systems by introducing a consensus, which is a mathematical model between the agents as an intelligence property for each member of the swarm set. The application of this novel approach in the modeling of nonintelligent multi agents systems in the field of cohesion and cluster formation of nanoparticles in nanofluids has been investigated in this study. This goal can be obtained by applying the basic swarm model for agents that are more mechanistic by considering their physical properties such as their mass, diameter, as well as the physical properties of the flow. Clustering in nanofluids is one of the major issues in the study of its effects on heat transfer. Study of the cluster formation dynamics in nanofluids using the swarm model can be useful in controlling the size and formation time of the clusters as well as designing appropriate microchannels, which the nanoparticles are plunged into.
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    Solving the 0/1 Knapsack Problem by a Biomolecular DNA Computer (2013)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2013-02-19
    Description: Solving some mathematical problems such as NP-complete problems by conventional silicon-based computers is problematic and takes so long time. DNA computing is an alternative method of computing which uses DNA molecules for computing purposes. DNA computers have massive degrees of parallel processing capability. The massive parallel processing characteristic of DNA computers is of particular interest in solving NP-complete and hard combinatorial problems. NP-complete problems such as knapsack problem and other hard combinatorial problems can be easily solved by DNA computers in a very short period of time comparing to conventional silicon-based computers. Sticker-based DNA computing is one of the methods of DNA computing. In this paper, the sticker based DNA computing was used for solving the 0/1 knapsack problem. At first, a biomolecular solution space was constructed by using appropriate DNA memory complexes. Then, by the application of a sticker-based parallel algorithm using biological operations, knapsack problem was resolved in polynomial time.
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    Ownership Structure, Financial Decisions, and Institutional Setting: An International Analysis through Simultaneous Equations (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-08-24
    Description: We analyze the mutual relations among firms’ capital structure, ownership structure, and valuation. Through the estimation of a system of simultaneous equations for a sample of 1,130 firms from 16 countries from both the common law and the civil law environments, our results confirm the differential effect of ownership structure on firms’ value in each setting. Whereas in civil law firms the higher ownership concentration results in an entrenchment and an alignment effect, in the common law firms higher ownership concentration increases the value of the firm. Second, we corroborate the endogeneity of ownership structure since we find that ownership structure is affected by the value of the firm and by the capital structure. Third, our results suggest that corporate finance decisions are taken simultaneously with other mechanisms of corporate governance and conditional on firms’ valuation.
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    Insurance and Banking Interconnectedness in Europe: The Opinion of Equity Markets (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-08-29
    Description: Conditional expected shortfalls calculated for European insurance companies and banks under stressed market conditions are shown to be of similar magnitudes. Measured at 95% and 99% stress levels, on data covering the period from 1995 to 2011, the equity-return tail losses of insurance undertakings and banks are indistinguishable. Granger causality analysis, on all pairs of banks and insurance companies included in the sample, shows that banks and insurance companies have equal propensity to cause each others price movements. Even though the business model of insurance undertakings is different from the business model typically applied by banks, and even though insurance companies are not depending to a similar degree on short term funding as banks, the empirical results indicate that the financial equity markets in Europe do not differentiate their trading of banks and insurance companies in periods of stress.
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    Measuring the Performance of River Basins: Application of Total Factor Productivity Approach to Andhra Pradesh, India (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-08-30
    Description: Total Factor Productivity (TFP) measures the growth in output which is not accounted for by inputs. Data Envelopment Analysis which forms the basis for the computation of Malmquist TFP index is used in this paper to study the performance of different river basins in Andhra Pradesh state, India. The results indicated that average technical efficiency of all the basins is only 66%. In all the basins there was a decline in growth of agricultural output during the first two decades, viz., 1979-1980 to 1988-1989 and it had picked in the last decade (1999-2000). All the river basins have TFP change greater than 1 indicating progress in agricultural productivity. Out of the 40 river basins, 14 river basins have technical efficiency change less than 1 indicating decline in TFP growth whereas all the basins have technical changes greater than 1 implying that there is shift in production frontier over years. In general, within the TFP, technical change contributed more than technical efficiency change. Looking at the future options for increasing the agricultural output in the river basins, it is important to focus on improving the TFP growth compared to increasing the quantities of physical inputs.
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    Price Responsiveness of Cigarette Demand in US: Retail Scanner Data (1994–2007) (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-03
    Description: This paper investigates the changes in cigarette demand in response to the changes in cigarette prices; smokeless tobacco prices; adoption of clean indoor air laws (CIALs). We used an error-correction econometric method to estimate the cigarette sales adjustment path in response to changes in prices and CIAL coverage in the United States by utilizing scanner data from supermarkets. Finding from this study indicates that smokeless tobaccos are not perfect substitutes for cigarettes, but increases in the price of cigarettes are associated with an increase in smokeless tobacco sales. The error-correction econometric method suggest that the demand for cigarettes and smokeless tobacco is related to each other; a price increase in either product leads to an increase in demand for the other product. However, the adjustment paths are quite different; an increase in cigarette prices lowers cigarette sales in relatively faster rate than decreases in smokeless tobacco prices or adoption of smoke-free laws. Changes in cigarette demand in response to changes in cigarette prices occur relatively quickly; but the full effects of smokeless tobacco price change and the adoption of 100% smoke-free laws on cigarette demand take a longer time.
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    Effect of Jet Inclination Angle and Hole Exit Shape on Vortical Flow Structures in Low-Reynolds Number Jet in Cross-Flow (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-03
    Description: Numerical studies have been performed to visualize vortical flow structures emerged from jet cross-flow interactions. A single square jet issuing perpendicularly into a cross-flow was simulated first, followed by two additional scenarios, that is, inclined square jet at angles of 30° and 60° and round and elliptic jets at an angle of 90°, respectively. The simulation considers a jet to cross-flow velocity ratio of 2.5 and a Reynolds number of 225, based on the free-stream flow quantities and the jet exit width in case of square jet or minor axis length in case of elliptic jet. For the single square jet, the vortical flow structures simulated are in good qualitative agreement with the findings by other researchers. Further analysis reveals that the jet penetrates deeper into the cross-flow field for the normal jet, and the decrease of the jet inclination angle weakens the cross-flow entrainment in the near-wake region. For both noncircular and circular jet hole shapes, the flow field in the vicinity of the jet exit has been dominated by large-scale dynamic flow structures and it was found that the elliptic jet hole geometry has maximum “lifted-off” effect among three hole configurations studied. This finding is also in good qualitative agreement with existing experimental observations.
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    Some New Insights into Trade Potential between the EU and Its Mediterranean Partners (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-08-31
    Description: This paper provides new insights into the calculation of trade potential between the EU and its Southern and Eastern Mediterranean partners (MPs). It is based on an econometric specification which takes into account some new explanatory variables which are not included simultaneously in the previous studies. These include trade costs (tariffs, NTBs, and logistics costs), factor movement (migration and FDI), as well as governance. In addition, specific estimators are implemented in order to account for zero trade flows, endogeneity and dynamics. The main conclusion of this study is that contrary to some results found in previous studies, MPs have reached their export potential with the EU. It is also shown that there is no specificity of the MP-EU trade potential in comparison with the other main PTAs (NAFTA, MERCOSUR, and ASEAN) which have also reached their trade potential. These results have strong policy implications.
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    Stock Prices’ Variability around Earnings Announcement Dates at Karachi Stock Exchange (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-08-30
    Description: The purpose of this study is to investigate how earnings announcement event affects stock returns at Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE). For this purpose we use the KSE-100 Index as our sample. We use the CAR Analysis to analyze the impact of earnings announcement over the stock returns around announcement dates. Our results suggest that KSE experiences abnormal stock returns around earnings announcement dates for the overall market and for different categories which indicate that efficient market hypothesis does not hold in Pakistani market and point out the presence of informational dissemination inefficiencies in the market.
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    Investigating the Impacts of Intraregional Trade and Aid on Per Capita Income in Africa: Case Study of the ECOWAS (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-08-17
    Description: In the past 50 years, a striking stylized fact has been the downward—or flat—trend of intra-African trade as a share of Africa’s total trade, while official development assistance (ODA) has experienced a noticeable expansion. During the same period, economic growth performances have not been consistent and robust enough to put a dent in the poverty level across the African continent in general and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in particular. Using a two-stage least square (TSLS) estimation technique, this paper finds out that intra-ECOWAS trade stimulates per capita income growth substantially more than foreign aid, which rather constitutes an impediment to that growth in most specifications. Additionally, comparable results are obtained when the scope of the study is expanded to include trade of ECOWAS members with the rest of the world. As a result, it becomes appropriate to suggest policy recommendations encouraging increased cooperation among member states in an attempt to (i) expand and build new cross-states infrastructures, aimed at boosting communications and telecommunications networks, (ii) accelerate the trade facilitation process by addressing administrative red tapes that balloon both transaction costs and delays in the flows of goods across borders, seaports, and airports, and (iii) develop and diversify the industrial base in member states.
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    Sequence Complexity of Chromosome 3 in Caenorhabditis elegans (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-07-21
    Description: The nucleotide sequences complexity in chromosome 3 of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is studied. The complexity of these sequences is compared with some random sequences. Moreover, by using some parameters related to complexity such as fractal dimension and frequency, indicator matrix is given a first classification of sequences of C. elegans. In particular, the sequences with highest and lowest fractal value are singled out. It is shown that the intrinsic nature of the low fractal dimension sequences has many common features with the random sequences.
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    Maximum Recommended Dosage of Lithium for Pregnant Women Based on a PBPK Model for Lithium Absorption (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Treatment of bipolar disorder with lithium therapy during pregnancy is a medical challenge. Bipolar disorder is more prevalent in women and its onset is often concurrent with peak reproductive age. Treatment typically involves administration of the element lithium, which has been classified as a class D drug (legal to use during pregnancy, but may cause birth defects) and is one of only thirty known teratogenic drugs. There is no clear recommendation in the literature on the maximum acceptable dosage regimen for pregnant, bipolar women. We recommend a maximum dosage regimen based on a physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) model. The model simulates the concentration of lithium in the organs and tissues of a pregnant woman and her fetus. First, we modeled time-dependent lithium concentration profiles resulting from lithium therapy known to have caused birth defects. Next, we identified maximum and average fetal lithium concentrations during treatment. Then, we developed a lithium therapy regimen to maximize the concentration of lithium in the mother’s brain, while maintaining the fetal concentration low enough to reduce the risk of birth defects. This maximum dosage regimen suggested by the model was 400 mg lithium three times per day.
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    BRASERO: A Resource for Benchmarking RNA Secondary Structure Comparison Algorithms (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The pairwise comparison of RNA secondary structures is a fundamental problem, with direct application in mining databases for annotating putative noncoding RNA candidates in newly sequenced genomes. An increasing number of software tools are available for comparing RNA secondary structures, based on different models (such as ordered trees or forests, arc annotated sequences, and multilevel trees) and computational principles (edit distance, alignment). We describe here the website BRASERO that offers tools for evaluating such software tools on real and synthetic datasets.
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    A Topology-Based Metric for Measuring Term Similarity in the Gene Ontology (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The wide coverage and biological relevance of the Gene Ontology (GO), confirmed through its successful use in protein function prediction, have led to the growth in its popularity. In order to exploit the extent of biological knowledge that GO offers in describing genes or groups of genes, there is a need for an efficient, scalable similarity measure for GO terms and GO-annotated proteins. While several GO similarity measures exist, none adequately addresses all issues surrounding the design and usage of the ontology. We introduce a new metric for measuring the distance between two GO terms using the intrinsic topology of the GO-DAG, thus enabling the measurement of functional similarities between proteins based on their GO annotations. We assess the performance of this metric using a ROC analysis on human protein-protein interaction datasets and correlation coefficient analysis on the selected set of protein pairs from the CESSM online tool. This metric achieves good performance compared to the existing annotation-based GO measures. We used this new metric to assess functional similarity between orthologues, and show that it is effective at determining whether orthologues are annotated with similar functions and identifying cases where annotation is inconsistent between orthologues.
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    Structural Basis for Species Selectivity in the HIV-1 gp120-CD4 Interaction: Restoring Affinity to gp120 in Murine CD4 Mimetic Peptides (2012)
    Hindawi
    Details
    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The first step of HIV-1 infection involves interaction between the viral glycoprotein gp120 and the human cellular receptor CD4. Inhibition of the gp120-CD4 interaction represents an attractive strategy to block HIV-1 infection. In an attempt to explore the known lack of affinity of murine CD4 to gp120, we have investigated peptides presenting the putative gp120-binding site of murine CD4 (mCD4). Molecular modeling indicates that mCD4 protein cannot bind gp120 due to steric clashes, while the larger conformational flexibility of mCD4 peptides allows an interaction. This finding is confirmed by experimental binding assays, which also evidenced specificity of the peptide-gp120 interaction. Molecular dynamics simulations indicate that the mCD4-peptide stably interacts with gp120 via an intermolecular β-sheet, while an important salt-bridge formed by a C-terminal lysine is lost. Fixation of the C-terminus by introducing a disulfide bridge between the N- and C-termini of the peptide significantly enhanced the affinity to gp120.
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    ModEnzA: Accurate Identification of Metabolic Enzymes Using Function Specific Profile HMMs with Optimised Discrimination Threshold and Modified Emission Probabilities (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Various enzyme identification protocols involving homology transfer by sequence-sequence or profile-sequence comparisons have been devised which utilise Swiss-Prot sequences associated with EC numbers as the training set. A profile HMM constructed for a particular EC number might select sequences which perform a different enzymatic function due to the presence of certain fold-specific residues which are conserved in enzymes sharing a common fold. We describe a protocol, ModEnzA (HMM-ModE Enzyme Annotation), which generates profile HMMs highly specific at a functional level as defined by the EC numbers by incorporating information from negative training sequences. We enrich the training dataset by mining sequences from the NCBI Non-Redundant database for increased sensitivity. We compare our method with other enzyme identification methods, both for assigning EC numbers to a genome as well as identifying protein sequences associated with an enzymatic activity. We report a sensitivity of 88% and specificity of 95% in identifying EC numbers and annotating enzymatic sequences from the E. coli genome which is higher than any other method. With the next-generation sequencing methods producing a huge amount of sequence data, the development and use of fully automated yet accurate protocols such as ModEnzA is warranted for rapid annotation of newly sequenced genomes and metagenomic sequences.
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    Designing Efficient Spaced Seeds for SOLiD Read Mapping (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies constituted a major advance in genomic studies, offering new prospects in a wide range of applications.We propose a rigorous and flexible algorithmic solution to mapping SOLiD color-space reads to a reference genome. The solution relies on an advanced method of seed design that uses a faithful probabilistic model of read matches and, on the other hand, a novel seeding principle especially adapted to read mapping. Our method can handle both lossy and lossless frameworks and is able to distinguish, at the level of seed design, between SNPs and reading errors. We illustrate our approach by several seed designs and demonstrate their efficiency.
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    A Topological Description of Hubs in Amino Acid Interaction Networks (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: We represent proteins by amino acid interaction networks. This is a graph whose vertices are the proteins amino acids and whose edges are the interactions between them. Once we have compared this type of graphs to the general model of scale-free networks, we analyze the existence of nodes which highly interact, the hubs. We describe these nodes taking into account their position in the primary structure to study their apparition frequency in the folded proteins. Finally, we observe that their interaction level is a consequence of the general rules which govern the folding process.
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    Protein Bioinformatics Infrastructure for the Integration and Analysis of Multiple High-Throughput “omics” Data (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: High-throughput “omics” technologies bring new opportunities for biological and biomedical researchers to ask complex questions and gain new scientific insights. However, the voluminous, complex, and context-dependent data being maintained in heterogeneous and distributed environments plus the lack of well-defined data standard and standardized nomenclature imposes a major challenge which requires advanced computational methods and bioinformatics infrastructures for integration, mining, visualization, and comparative analysis to facilitate data-driven hypothesis generation and biological knowledge discovery. In this paper, we present the challenges in high-throughput “omics” data integration and analysis, introduce a protein-centric approach for systems integration of large and heterogeneous high-throughput “omics” data including microarray, mass spectrometry, protein sequence, protein structure, and protein interaction data, and use scientific case study to illustrate how one can use varied “omics” data from different laboratories to make useful connections that could lead to new biological knowledge.
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    Finding Biomarker Signatures in Pooled Sample Designs: A Simulation Framework for Methodological Comparisons (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Detection of discriminating patterns in gene expression data can be accomplished by using various methods of statistical learning. It has been proposed that sample pooling in this context would have negative effects; however, pooling cannot always be avoided. We propose a simulation framework to explicitly investigate the parameters of patterns, experimental design, noise, and choice of method in order to find out which effects on classification performance are to be expected. We use a two-group classification task and simulated gene expression data with independent differentially expressed genes as well as bivariate linear patterns and the combination of both. Our results show a clear increase of prediction error with pool size. For pooled training sets powered partial least squares discriminant analysis outperforms discriminance analysis, random forests, and support vector machines with linear or radial kernel for two of three simulated scenarios. The proposed simulation approach can be implemented to systematically investigate a number of additional scenarios of practical interest.
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    PROCARB: A Database of Known and Modelled Carbohydrate-Binding Protein Structures with Sequence-Based Prediction Tools (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Understanding of the three-dimensional structures of proteins that interact with carbohydrates covalently (glycoproteins) as well as noncovalently (protein-carbohydrate complexes) is essential to many biological processes and plays a significant role in normal and disease-associated functions. It is important to have a central repository of knowledge available about these protein-carbohydrate complexes as well as preprocessed data of predicted structures. This can be significantly enhanced by tools de novo which can predict carbohydrate-binding sites for proteins in the absence of structure of experimentally known binding site. PROCARB is an open-access database comprising three independently working components, namely, (i) Core PROCARB module, consisting of three-dimensional structures of protein-carbohydrate complexes taken from Protein Data Bank (PDB), (ii) Homology Models module, consisting of manually developed three-dimensional models of N-linked and O-linked glycoproteins of unknown three-dimensional structure, and (iii) CBS-Pred prediction module, consisting of web servers to predict carbohydrate-binding sites using single sequence or server-generated PSSM. Several precomputed structural and functional properties of complexes are also included in the database for quick analysis. In particular, information about function, secondary structure, solvent accessibility, hydrogen bonds and literature reference, and so forth, is included. In addition, each protein in the database is mapped to Uniprot, Pfam, PDB, and so forth.
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    Long Memory Process in Asset Returns with Multivariate GARCH Innovations (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The main purpose of this paper is to consider the multivariate GARCH (MGARCH) framework to model the volatility of a multivariate process exhibiting long-term dependence in stock returns. More precisely, the long-term dependence is examined in the first conditional moment of US stock returns through multivariate ARFIMA process, and the time-varying feature of volatility is explained by MGARCH models. An empirical application to the returns series is carried out to illustrate the usefulness of our approach. The main results confirm the presence of long memory property in the conditional mean of all stock returns.
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    Would an Increase in High-Skilled Immigration in Canada Benefit Workers? (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: This study examines the economic and welfare effects of raising the number of high-skilled immigrants in Canada. It uses a life-cycle applied general equilibrium model with endogenous time allocation decisions between work, education, and leisure. According to the simulation results, raising the number of high-skilled immigrants would boost productive capacity and labour productivity but could lower real GDP per capita. In addition, by raising the supply of high-skilled workers, more high-skilled immigrants would reduce the skill premium and the return to human capital. This in turn would lower incentives for young adults to invest in human capital and have a dampening effect on the domestic supply of skilled workers. Finally, it is found that more high-skilled immigrants would be welfare enhancing for medium- and low-skilled workers but welfare decreasing for high-skilled workers.
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    Oligopolistic Banks, Bounded Rationality, and the Credit Cycle (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-07-20
    Description: This paper studies how boundedly rational default expectations affect the credit cycle. I propose a simple model of oligopolistic bank competition which serves to compare situations with just a portion of boundedly rational banks to situations where either all banks are rational or all banks are boundedly rational. When all banks are boundedly rational, the credit cycle is most amplified relative to the situation where all banks are rational. However, the amplifying effect of bounded rationality on the side of banks largely remains even when only a portion of banks are boundedly rational. Hence, the interest rate decisions of a minority of boundedly rational banks induce the more rational competitors to aggravate the credit cycle.
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    Macromodel of Precise Signal-Phase Meter (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-13
    Description: This paper presents a precise macromodel of a signal-phase meter, which allows continuous phase measurement during simulation. It has been developed as a support tool during the design process of a signal-conditioning circuit for incremental position encoders. The development of a signal conditioning circuit requires precise measurements of small signal phases, amplitudes and offsets using the analog/digital circuit simulator. The phase measurement cannot be performed directly with a simulator, therefore an appropriate macro-model is needed for a circuit simulator. The structure of the signal-phase meter is based on the conventional signal-phase measuring method and is intended for the measuring of a cosine-signal phase with a known frequency. It recommends that the time variations of an input signal’s parameters (amplitude, phase, frequency, and offset voltage) are slow and small as possible. Rapid change of a signal’s parameters decreases the simulation result’s accuracy. A macro-model’s precision mainly depends on the chosen parameters for the macro-model and for the simulation. We show that with the proposed meter’s model, the phase angle can be measured with an accuracy of more than ±0,02%.
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    A High-Throughput Computational Framework for Identifying Significant Copy Number Aberrations from Array Comparative Genomic Hybridisation Data (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-14
    Description: Reliable identification of copy number aberrations (CNA) from comparative genomic hybridization data would be improved by the availability of a generalised method for processing large datasets. To this end, we developed swatCGH, a data analysis framework and region detection heuristic for computational grids. swatCGH analyses sequentially displaced (sliding) windows of neighbouring probes and applies adaptive thresholds of varying stringency to identify the 10% of each chromosome that contains the most frequently occurring CNAs. We used the method to analyse a published dataset, comparing data preprocessed using four different DNA segmentation algorithms, and two methods for prioritising the detected CNAs. The consolidated list of the most commonly detected aberrations confirmed the value of swatCGH as a simplified high-throughput method for identifying biologically significant CNA regions of interest.
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    An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Simulation Using Linear Quadratic Servo Based on Open Control Platform (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-14
    Description: This paper presents an optimal regulator for depth control simulation of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) using a new approach of decentralized system environment called open control platform (OCP). Simulation results are presented to demonstrate performance of the proposed method.
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    CFD Prediction and Experimental Measurement of Blade Water Coverage in a Diesel Turbocharger (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-13
    Description: A turbocharger unit for diesel engine is often equipped with a built-in online water washing system and its performance is not always satisfactory because of efficiency declination due to deposit accumulated on blade surfaces not being washed away. In this study, a systematic approach of using experimental measurements and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is adopted to analyse liquid/gas two-phase flow associated with a turbocharger water washing system, in order to understand the underlying flow physics. A medium-sized diesel engine turbocharger configuration is chosen for this purpose. Experiments are focussed on blade surface temperature measurements, while CFD modelling with a coupled Eulerian/Lagrangian method is used for capturing the complex gas/liquid two-phase flow behaviours inside the induction duct and the blade passage. It was found that numerical predictions are in a good agreement with experimental data in terms of temperature distributions of the blade leading edge region and water coverage over the blade ring. Other flow features such as the water droplet trajectories and the particle size distributions are also explored and analysed in further details, and they are useful for understanding the deposit removal mechanism.
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    A Survey of Methods for Gas-Lift Optimization (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-13
    Description: This paper presents a survey of methods and techniques developed for the solution of the continuous gas-lift optimization problem over the last two decades. These range from isolated single-well analysis all the way to real-time multivariate optimization schemes encompassing all wells in a field. While some methods are clearly limited due to their neglect of treating the effects of inter-dependent wells with common flow lines, other methods are limited due to the efficacy and quality of the solution obtained when dealing with large-scale networks comprising hundreds of difficult to produce wells. The aim of this paper is to provide an insight into the approaches developed and to highlight the challenges that remain.
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    Gap Detection for Genome-Scale Constraint-Based Models (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-11
    Description: Constraint-based metabolic models are currently the most comprehensive system-wide models of cellular metabolism. Several challenges arise when building an in silico constraint-based model of an organism that need to be addressed before flux balance analysis (FBA) can be applied for simulations. An algorithm called FBA-Gap is presented here that aids the construction of a working model based on plausible modifications to a given list of reactions that are known to occur in the organism. When applied to a working model, the algorithm gives a hypothesis concerning a minimal medium for sustaining the cell in culture. The utility of the algorithm is demonstrated in creating a new model organism and is applied to four existing working models for generating hypotheses about culture media. In modifying a partial metabolic reconstruction so that biomass may be produced using FBA, the proposed method is more efficient than a previously proposed method in that fewer new reactions are added to complete the model. The proposed method is also more accurate than other approaches in that only biologically plausible reactions and exchange reactions are used.
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    Identification of Optimal Path in Power System Network Using Bellman Ford Algorithm (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-09-14
    Description: Power system network can undergo outages during which there may be a partial or total blackout in the system. In that condition, transmission of power through the optimal path is an important problem in the process of reconfiguration of power system components. For a given set of generation, load pair, there could be many possible paths to transmit the power. The optimal path needs to consider the shortest path (minimum losses), capacity of the transmission line, voltage stability, priority of loads, and power balance between the generation and demand. In this paper, the Bellman Ford Algorithm (BFA) is applied to find out the optimal path and also the several alternative paths by considering all the constraints. In order to demonstrate the capability of BFA, it has been applied to a practical 230 kV network. This restorative path search guidance tool is quite efficient in finding the optimal and also the alternate paths for transmitting the power from a generating station to demand.
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    The Real Economics of Climate Engineering (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-08-17
    Description: In 2008 Scott Barrett wrote a paper on “The incredible economics of geoengineering” in which he argued that the potentially low cost of climate engineering (CE) measures together with the quick response of the earth’s temperature to such interventions will change the whole debate about the mitigation of climate change. Whereas Barrett was mostly focusing on the cost of running CE measures, we point out that several determinants of overall economic cost like price or external effects are not yet sufficiently accounted for and that the question of dynamic efficiency is still unresolved. Combining the existing theoretical investigations about the topic from the literature, we show that even though these new measures provide new options to deal with climate change, several of them might also reduce our scope of action. Consequently, we suggest that economic research should shift its focus to portfolios of CE measures and put more emphasis on those measures which control atmospheric carbon concentration and therefore allow extending our scope of action. Additionally, economic research should address the question of phase-in and phase-out scenarios for measures which directly influence the radiation balance.
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    Polynomial Supertree Methods Revisited (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Supertree methods allow to reconstruct large phylogenetic trees by combining smaller trees with overlapping leaf sets into one, more comprehensive supertree. The most commonly used supertree method, matrix representation with parsimony (MRP), produces accurate supertrees but is rather slow due to the underlying hard optimization problem. In this paper, we present an extensive simulation study comparing the performance of MRP and the polynomial supertree methods MinCut Supertree, Modified MinCut Supertree, Build-with-distances, PhySIC, PhySIC_IST, and super distance matrix. We consider both quality and resolution of the reconstructed supertrees. Our findings illustrate the tradeoff between accuracy and running time in supertree construction, as well as the pros and cons of voting- and veto-based supertree approaches. Based on our results, we make some general suggestions for supertree methods yet to come.
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    Systems Biology: The Next Frontier for Bioinformatics (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Biochemical systems biology augments more traditional disciplines, such as genomics, biochemistry and molecular biology, by championing (i) mathematical and computational modeling; (ii) the application of traditional engineering practices in the analysis of biochemical systems; and in the past decade increasingly (iii) the use of near-comprehensive data sets derived from ‘omics platform technologies, in particular “downstream” technologies relative to genome sequencing, including transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. The future progress in understanding biological principles will increasingly depend on the development of temporal and spatial analytical techniques that will provide high-resolution data for systems analyses. To date, particularly successful were strategies involving (a) quantitative measurements of cellular components at the mRNA, protein and metabolite levels, as well as in vivo metabolic reaction rates, (b) development of mathematical models that integrate biochemical knowledge with the information generated by high-throughput experiments, and (c) applications to microbial organisms. The inevitable role bioinformatics plays in modern systems biology puts mathematical and computational sciences as an equal partner to analytical and experimental biology. Furthermore, mathematical and computational models are expected to become increasingly prevalent representations of our knowledge about specific biochemical systems.
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    Modelling Nonstationary Gene Regulatory Processes (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: An important objective in systems biology is to infer gene regulatory networks from postgenomic data, and dynamic Bayesian networks have been widely applied as a popular tool to this end. The standard approach for nondiscretised data is restricted to a linear model and a homogeneous Markov chain. Recently, various generalisations based on changepoint processes and free allocation mixture models have been proposed. The former aim to relax the homogeneity assumption, whereas the latter are more flexible and, in principle, more adequate for modelling nonlinear processes. In our paper, we compare both paradigms and discuss theoretical shortcomings of the latter approach. We show that a model based on the changepoint process yields systematically better results than the free allocation model when inferring nonstationary gene regulatory processes from simulated gene expression time series. We further cross-compare the performance of both models on three biological systems: macrophages challenged with viral infection, circadian regulation in Arabidopsis thaliana, and morphogenesis in Drosophila melanogaster.
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    Neutropenia Prediction Based on First-Cycle Blood Counts Using a FOS-3NN Classifier (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Background. Delivery of full doses of adjuvant chemotherapy on schedule is key to optimal breast cancer outcomes. Neutropenia is a serious complication of chemotherapy and a common barrier to this goal, leading to dose reductions or delays in treatment. While past research has observed correlations between complete blood count data and neutropenic events, a reliable method of classifying breast cancer patients into low- and high-risk groups remains elusive. Patients and Methods. Thirty-five patients receiving adjuvant chemotherapy for early-stage breast cancer under the care of a single oncologist are examined in this study. FOS-3NN stratifies patient risk based on complete blood count data after the first cycle of treatment. All classifications are independent of breast cancer subtype and clinical markers, with risk level determined by the kinetics of patient blood count response to the first cycle of treatment. Results. In an independent test set of patients unseen by FOS-3NN, 19 out of 21 patients were correctly classified (Fisher’s exact test probability P<0.00023 [2 tailed], Matthews’ correlation coefficient +0.83). Conclusions. We have developed a model that accurately predicts neutropenic events in a population treated with adjuvant chemotherapy in the first cycle of a 6-cycle treatment.
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    Training Experimental Biologists in Bioinformatics (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Bioinformatics, for its very nature, is devoted to a set of targets that constantly evolve. Training is probably the best response to the constant need for the acquisition of bioinformatics skills. It is interesting to assess the effects of training in the different sets of researchers that make use of it. While training bench experimentalists in the life sciences, we have observed instances of changes in their attitudes in research that, if well exploited, can have beneficial impacts in the dialogue with professional bioinformaticians and influence the conduction of the research itself.
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    Features-Based Deisotoping Method for Tandem Mass Spectra (2012)
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: For high-resolution tandem mass spectra, the determination of monoisotopic masses of fragment ions plays a key role in the subsequent peptide and protein identification. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for deisotoping the bottom-up spectra. Isotopic-cluster graphs are constructed to describe the relationship between all possible isotopic clusters. Based on the relationship in isotopic-cluster graphs, each possible isotopic cluster is assessed with a score function, which is built by combining nonintensity and intensity features of fragment ions. The non-intensity features are used to prevent fragment ions with low intensity from being removed. Dynamic programming is adopted to find the highest score path with the most reliable isotopic clusters. The experimental results have shown that the average Mascot scores and F-scores of identified peptides from spectra processed by our deisotoping method are greater than those by YADA and MS-Deconv software.
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    Generation and Analysis of Large-Scale Data-Driven Mycobacterium tuberculosis Functional Networks for Drug Target Identification (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Technological developments in large-scale biological experiments, coupled with bioinformatics tools, have opened the doors to computational approaches for the global analysis of whole genomes. This has provided the opportunity to look at genes within their context in the cell. The integration of vast amounts of data generated by these technologies provides a strategy for identifying potential drug targets within microbial pathogens, the causative agents of infectious diseases. As proteins are druggable targets, functional interaction networks between proteins are used to identify proteins essential to the survival, growth, and virulence of these microbial pathogens. Here we have integrated functional genomics data to generate functional interaction networks between Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins and carried out computational analyses to dissect the functional interaction network produced for identifying drug targets using network topological properties. This study has provided the opportunity to expand the range of potential drug targets and to move towards optimal target-based strategies.
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    NovelSNPer: A Fast Tool for the Identification and Characterization of Novel SNPs and InDels (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Typically, next-generation resequencing projects produce large lists of variants. NovelSNPer is a software tool that permits fast and efficient processing of such output lists. In a first step, NovelSNPer determines if a variant represents a known variant or a previously unknown variant. In a second step, each variant is classified into one of 15 SNP classes or 19 InDel classes. Beside the classes used by Ensembl, we introduce POTENTIAL_START_GAINED and START_LOST as new functional classes and present a classification scheme for InDels. NovelSNPer is based upon the gene structure information stored in Ensembl. It processes two million SNPs in six hours. The tool can be used online or downloaded.
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    Data-Driven Compensation for Flow Cytometry of Solid Tissues (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Propidium Iodide is a fluorochrome that is used to measure the DNA content of individual cells, taken from solid tissues, with a flow cytometer. Compensation for spectral cross-over of this fluorochrome still leads to compensation results that are depending on operator experience. We present a data-driven compensation (DDC) algorithm that is designed to automatically compensate combined DNA phenotype flow cytometry acquisitions. The generated compensation values of the DDC algorithm are validated by comparison with manually determined compensation values. The results show that (1) compensation of two-color flow cytometry leads to comparable results using either manual compensation or the DDC method; (2) DDC can calculate sample-specific compensation trace lines; (3) the effects of two different approaches to calculate compensation values can be visualized within one sample. We conclude that the DDC algorithm contributes to the standardization of compensation for spectral cross-over in flow cytometry of solid tissues.
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    A Signal Processing Method to Explore Similarity in Protein Flexibility (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Understanding mechanisms of protein flexibility is of great importance to structural biology. The ability to detect similarities between proteins and their patterns is vital in discovering new information about unknown protein functions. A Distance Constraint Model (DCM) provides a means to generate a variety of flexibility measures based on a given protein structure. Although information about mechanical properties of flexibility is critical for understanding protein function for a given protein, the question of whether certain characteristics are shared across homologous proteins is difficult to assess. For a proper assessment, a quantified measure of similarity is necessary. This paper begins to explore image processing techniques to quantify similarities in signals and images that characterize protein flexibility. The dataset considered here consists of three different families of proteins, with three proteins in each family. The similarities and differences found within flexibility measures across homologous proteins do not align with sequence-based evolutionary methods.
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    Prediction of Carbohydrate-Binding Proteins from Sequences Using Support Vector Machines (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Carbohydrate-binding proteins are proteins that can interact with sugar chains but do not modify them. They are involved in many physiological functions, and we have developed a method for predicting them from their amino acid sequences. Our method is based on support vector machines (SVMs). We first clarified the definition of carbohydrate-binding proteins and then constructed positive and negative datasets with which the SVMs were trained. By applying the leave-one-out test to these datasets, our method delivered 0.92 of the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. We also examined two amino acid grouping methods that enable effective learning of sequence patterns and evaluated the performance of these methods. When we applied our method in combination with the homology-based prediction method to the annotated human genome database, H-invDB, we found that the true positive rate of prediction was improved.
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    A Growth Curve Model with Fractional Polynomials for Analysing Incomplete Time-Course Data in Microarray Gene Expression Studies (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Identifying the various gene expression response patterns is a challenging issue in expression microarray time-course experiments. Due to heterogeneity in the regulatory reaction among thousands of genes tested, it is impossible to manually characterize a parametric form for each of the time-course pattern in a gene by gene manner. We introduce a growth curve model with fractional polynomials to automatically capture the various time-dependent expression patterns and meanwhile efficiently handle missing values due to incomplete observations. For each gene, our procedure compares the performances among fractional polynomial models with power terms from a set of fixed values that offer a wide range of curve shapes and suggests a best fitting model. After a limited simulation study, the model has been applied to our human in vivo irritated epidermis data with missing observations to investigate time-dependent transcriptional responses to a chemical irritant. Our method was able to identify the various nonlinear time-course expression trajectories. The integration of growth curves with fractional polynomials provides a flexible way to model different time-course patterns together with model selection and significant gene identification strategies that can be applied in microarray-based time-course gene expression experiments with missing observations.
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    Computational Design of a DNA- and Fc-Binding Fusion Protein (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Computational design of novel proteins with well-defined functions is an ongoing topic in computational biology. In this work, we generated and optimized a new synthetic fusion protein using an evolutionary approach. The optimization was guided by directed evolution based on hydrophobicity scores, molecular weight, and secondary structure predictions. Several methods were used to refine the models built from the resulting sequences. We have successfully combined two unrelated naturally occurring binding sites, the immunoglobin Fc-binding site of the Z domain and the DNA-binding motif of MyoD bHLH, into a novel stable protein.
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    A Comprehensive Study of Progressive Cytogenetic Alterations in Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma and a New Model for ccRCC Tumorigenesis and Progression (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: We present a comprehensive study of cytogenetic alterations that occur during the progression of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). We used high-density high-throughput Affymetrix 100 K SNP arrays to obtain the whole genome SNP copy number information from 71 pretreatment tissue samples with RCC tumors; of those, 42 samples were of human ccRCC subtype. We analyzed patterns of cytogenetic loss and gain from different RCC subtypes and in particular, different stages and grades of ccRCC tumors, using a novel algorithm that we have designed. Based on patterns of cytogenetic alterations in chromosomal regions with frequent losses and gains, we inferred the involvement of candidate genes from these regions in ccRCC tumorigenesis and development. We then proposed a new model of ccRCC tumorigenesis and progression. Our study serves as a comprehensive overview of cytogenetic alterations in a collection of 572 ccRCC tumors from diversified studies and should facilitate the search for specific genes associated with the disease.
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    An Assessment of the “Policy View” in Foreign Aid under Asymmetric Information (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The policy view, which argues that foreign aid is effective only in a good policy environment, suggests that aid ought to be given to countries with good policies. This has generated a lot of interest and controversy. We argue that the key recommendation of the policy view runs contrary to other prescriptions, particularly those that arise under asymmetric information. Inefficiencies that derive from information problems often require that policy makers do not base the amount of foreign assistance on the recipient's policy effort. This suggests that donors should be cautious in applying the policy view. We also briefly discuss problems that are likely to emerge in estimating aid's productivity given policy in the light of potential information problems.
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    Discount Rate for Health Benefits and the Value of Life in India (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: This study contributes to the literature by estimating discount rate for health benefits and value of statistical life of workers in India. The discount rate is imputed from wage-risk trade-offs in which workers decide whether to accept a risky job with higher wages. The estimated real discount rate varies across regions ranging 2.4–5.1 percent, which is closer to the financial market rate for the study period. The estimated value of a statistical life is Rs. 20 (US $ 1.107) million. The results thus provide no empirical support for utilizing a separate rate of discount for health benefits of life-saving policies in developing countries like India.
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    Sharpe (Ratio) Thinking about the Investment Opportunity Set and CAPM Relationship (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: In the presence of a risk-free asset the investment opportunity set obtained via the Markowitz portfolio optimization procedure is usually characterized in terms of the vector of excess returns on individual risky assets and the variance-covariance matrix. We show that the investment opportunity set can alternatively be characterized in terms of the vector of Sharpe ratios of individual risky assets and the correlation matrix. This implies that the changes in the characteristics of individual risky assets that preserve the Sharpe ratios and the correlation matrix do not change the investment opportunity set. The alternative characterization makes it simple to perform a comparative static analysis that provides an answer to the question of what happens with the investment opportunity set when we change the risk-return characteristics of individual risky assets. We demonstrate the advantages of using the alternative characterization of the investment opportunity set in the investment practice. The Sharpe ratio thinking also motivates reconsidering the CAPM relationship and adjusting Jensen's alpha in order to properly measure abnormal portfolio performance.
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    R&D Direction and North-South Diffusion, Human Capital, Growth, and Wages (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: This paper highlights some recent components related to the endogenous growth literature; in particular, (i) research and development progress, direction, and diffusion; (ii) human-capital accumulation; (iii) wage inequality; (iv) nonscale economic growth, showing how each one has been treated by the existing seminal literature and the expected impact of bringing them together. The connection of the different components is mainly done by involving the leading literature on North-South technological-knowledge diffusion by imitation under trade, and the prevailing literature on intra- and intercountry wage inequality.
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    Gender Gaps in Human Capital in Developing Countries: An Empirical Assessment (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-07-03
    Description: This paper examines the impact of various determinants on gender gaps in human capital in developing countries. We find that female primary completion is dependent on per capita GDP growth, female employment in agriculture, in industry, and in services, and the interactions between per capita GDP growth and female employment in industry and in services. We are also able to show that the ratio of girls to boys’ enrollments in primary and secondary schools is a function of the poverty rate, the fraction of the population with access to an improved water source, and maternal mortality. In addition, we observe that girls’ mortality is dependent upon the fraction of the population having access to improved sanitation and water services, and ethnic fractionalization. Finally, we find that maternal mortality is a function of the fraction of the population with access to improved water services, the fraction of births attended by skilled staff, the fraction of women receiving prenatal care, and ethnic fractionalization. These statistical results can assist developing countries identify areas that need to be improved upon in order to reduce gender gaps in human capital—specifically those concerning female mortality and education.
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    What Are the Economic and Labour Market Effects of an Income Tax Reduction Targeted at Older Workers? (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-07-06
    Description: This paper explores the economic and labour market effects of implementing a tax reduction targeted at older workers. The analysis is conducted with a life-cycle computable general equilibrium model calibrated on Canadian data. The analysis shows that implementing a permanent income tax reduction for workers aged 60 and over has only small macroeconomic effects because the labour supply increase of older workers is partly offset by a reduction in the labour supply at core ages. This induced effect also discourages savings and generates crowding out through private investment but has a favourable impact on lifetime economic welfare. The macroeconomic impact is much larger when the income tax reduction is temporary because workers no longer reduce their hours at core ages and there is no reduction in savings. However, since only current middle-aged and older workers benefit from the tax cut, a temporary income tax cut reduces intergenerational equity.
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    Robust Adaptive Tracking Control of a Class of Robot Manipulators with Model Uncertainties (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-07-09
    Description: A robust tracking controller for robot manipulators measuring only the angular positions and considering model uncertainties is presented. It is considered that the model is uncertain; that is, the system parameters, nonlinear terms, external perturbations, and the friction effects in each robot joint are considered unknown. The controller is composed by two parts, a linearizing-like control feedback and a high-gain estimator. The main idea is to lump the uncertain terms into a new state which represents the dynamics of the uncertainties. This new state is then estimated in order to be compensated. In this way the resulting controller is robust. A numerical example for a RR robot manipulator is provided, in order to corroborate the results.
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    Predicting Flavonoid UGT Regioselectivity (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Machine learning was applied to a challenging and biologically significant protein classification problem: the prediction of avonoid UGT acceptor regioselectivity from primary sequence. Novel indices characterizing graphical models of residues were proposed and found to be widely distributed among existing amino acid indices and to cluster residues appropriately. UGT subsequences biochemically linked to regioselectivity were modeled as sets of index sequences. Several learning techniques incorporating these UGT models were compared with classifications based on standard sequence alignment scores. These techniques included an application of time series distance functions to protein classification. Time series distances defined on the index sequences were used in nearest neighbor and support vector machine classifiers. Additionally, Bayesian neural network classifiers were applied to the index sequences. The experiments identified improvements over the nearest neighbor and support vector machine classifications relying on standard alignment similarity scores, as well as strong correlations between specific subsequences and regioselectivities.
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    Cotranslational Protein Folding and Terminus Hydrophobicity (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Peptides fold on a time scale that is much smaller than the time required for synthesis, whence all proteins potentially fold cotranslationally to some degree (followed by additional folding events after release from the ribosome). In this paper, in three different ways, we find that cotranslational folding success is associated with higher hydrophobicity at the N-terminus than at the C-terminus. First, we fold simple HP models on a square lattice and observe that HP sequences that fold better cotranslationally than from a fully extended state exhibit a positive difference (N−C) in terminus hydrophobicity. Second, we examine real proteins using a previously established measure of potential cotranslationality known as ALR (Average Logarithmic Ratio of the extent of previous contacts) and again find a correlation with the difference in terminus hydrophobicity. Finally, we use the cotranslational protein structure prediction program SAINT and again find that such an approach to folding is more successful for proteins with higher N-terminus than C-terminus hydrophobicity. All results indicate that cotranslational folding is promoted in part by a hydrophobic start and a less hydrophobic finish to the sequence.
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    Role of Money in Smaller Pacific Island Countries (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Pacific island countries (PICs), which attained political independence, are open economies with very small manufacturing base and narrow range of exports of copra and tuna. They are highly dependent on imports ranging from food and mineral fuels to intermediate and capital goods and transport machinery. Four of the 14 PICs, namely Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu, have independent currencies with usual paraphernalia of central banks under fixed exchange rate regimes. Their financial sectors are small and with undeveloped money and capital markets. The nominal exchange rate as an anchor has served the four PICs well by keeping inflation low. The objective of the paper is to investigate whether money has played any significant part in output growth as well as determination of prices in PICs. The findings are that broad money (M2) and exchange rate have a long run as well as short-run casual relationship with both output and prices in all PICs.
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    Post-Communist Health Transitions in Central and Eastern Europe (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have gone through immense political and socioeconomic restructuring after the collapse of communism around 1990. Such transition has affected the lives of populations in these countries in many significant respects. A key aspect of life and wellbeing in any society is that of population health. This paper traces the transitions in population health—life expectancies and mortality rates for both males and females—in seven of the CEE countries during the two decades after the fall of communism. We estimate a series of panel data models to identify some of the common factors that would explain health transitions in these countries, while allowing for country-specific variability. Our findings indicate that the health transitions are strongly country specific. Moreover, income per capita and trade openness are statistically significant common contributors to health transitions.
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    Investigating the Determinants of Nonperforming Loans in the Romanian Banking System: An Empirical Study with Reference to the Greek Crisis (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: This paper aims to investigate the determinants of nonperforming loans in the Romanian banking sector by means of time series modelling. It is motivated by the hypothesis that macroeconomic-cyclical indicators, monetary aggregates, interest rates, financial markets, and bank-specific variables influence the nonperforming loans in the Romanian banking system. Using monthly series that span from December 2001 to November 2010, we cover both the booming period and the recent financial crisis. Given the significant presence of the Greek banks in Romania, the novelty of the paper lies in the introduction of variables that proxy the Greek crisis. Thus, we examine the existence of a potential transmission channel to the Romanian banking system by investigating the impact of the Greek crisis to the Romanian nonperforming loans. Our findings indicate that macroeconomic variables, specifically the construction and investment expenditure, the inflation and the unemployment rate, and the country's external debt to GDP and M2 jointly with Greek crisis-specific variables influence the credit risk of the Romanian banking system. The results have several implications for policymakers, regulators, and managers as the most recent published stress tests on the Romanian banking system are based on end 2008 data.
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    Addiction and the Utilization of Medical Care (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: We investigate the effect of different scales of addictive factors on the utilization of medical services in this paper using a two-part model. Data are from the 2005 National Health Interview Survey and the claims data in the National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan. The results show that personal addictive behavior is significantly associated with both outpatient and inpatient utilization. Moreover, our result implies that those who smoked at least 20 cigarettes per day might not visit a doctor until the illness was severe. It suggests that the government can accomplish these goals by promotion and education in order to increase public awareness of personal health.
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    Is Farmland As Good As Gold? (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: An analysis of Canadian farmland risk and its return on investment shows that a Farmland Real Estate Investment Trust (F-REIT) and gold would have significantly enhanced portfolio performance over the past 35 years. Investors who desire low-risk portfolios would not have benefited from an F-REIT or gold investment. However, investors in the medium-risk category could have improved the financial performance of their portfolios by including an F-REIT investment rather than gold. The financial gains from F-REIT result from a level of risk that is lower than gold, REITs, and stocks, an expected yield that is greater than for bonds, and a low correlation with other financial asset returns.
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    Consumer Spending and Customer Satisfaction: Untying the Knot (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The recession of 2007–2009 has led to renewed interest in forecasting discretionary consumer spending and whether marketing variables contain predictive content. Using the ACSI customer satisfaction index and both linear and nonlinear methods, this note suggests the index fails to enhance our understanding of the temporal evolution of discretionary spending.
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    Comparative Statics of Central Bank Liquidity Management: Some Insights (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The paper demonstrates the efficacy of liquidity management through both the rate and quantum channels. Using the concepts of autonomous and discretionary liquidity, the paper derives the optimal policy mix of instruments which can be used for stabilizing the price of liquidity. For effective liquidity management, the sufficient condition highlighted in the paper has important implications for developing market-related monetary policy instruments, particularly in emerging market economies.
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    Endogenous Fertility and Development Traps with Endogenous Lifetime (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: We extend the literature on endogenous lifetime and economic growth by Chakraborty (2004) and Bunzel and Qiao (2005) to endogenous fertility. We show that development traps due to underinvestments in health cannot appear when fertility is an economic decision variable and the costs of children are represented by a constant fraction of the parents' income used for their upbringing.
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    Empirical Evidence of Economic Bipolarization in Africa (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: This paper examines the degree of polarization in African countries' per capita GDP distribution between 1966 to 2004. We first use a nonparametric analysis and find that the countries tend to cluster in two classes of per capita GDP. Secondly, by using the Wolfson's bipolarization measure, the results reveal that bipolarization has been accelerating during the two first decades and is still growing. We relate the evolution of polarization during the period to the business sectors. We find that the specialization of the countries is the main factor explaining its evolution, namely, in agriculture and industry sectors.
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    Electronic Waste: A Growing Concern in Today's Environment (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: Over the recent past, the global market of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) has grown exponentially, while the lifespan of these products has become increasingly shorter. More of these products are ending up in rubbish dumps and recycling centers, posing a new challenge to policy makers. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the e-Waste problem and to put forward an estimation technique to calculate the growth of e-Waste.
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    Medical Cost and Motorcycle Helmet Law in Taiwan (2012)
    Hindawi
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    Publication Date: 2012-06-21
    Description: The objective of this study was to examine whether the implementation of the helmet law had reduced the likelihood of head injury and the associated medical cost in Taiwan. Data were taken from the 1996 and 1998 population-based data. In total, 888,179 and 921,058 effective samples were used in the study from the two years. Two different types of regression model were adopted to evaluate the impact of the motorcycle helmet use law on incidences of head injury and associated medical cost and hospital length of stay. The results reveal that medical cost is down by 11.5 percent and hospital LOS has fallen by 18.58 percent. Thus, with the introduction of the motorcycle helmet use law having had a demonstrably positive influence on motorcycle head injuries and fatalities, significant savings are clearly being achieved, not only in terms of economic and social costs, but also with regard to medical cost.
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