A natural disaster is a major adverse event resulting from the earth’s natural forces. We can now take advantage of information technology (IT) devices to make migration decisions and hazard analysis. The range of IT applications is very wide, and could include robot manufacturing, remote...

Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) are employed in a wide range of behavioral, biomedical, psychosocial, and health care related research for assessing reliability of continuous outcomes. The linear mixed-effects model (LMM) is the most popular approach for inference about the ICC....

Outliers are commonly observed in psychosocial research, generally resulting in biased estimates when comparing group differences using popular mean-based models such as the analysis of variance model. Rank-based methods such as the popular Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon (MWW) rank sum test are more...

In this paper, we study cluster synchronization in general bi-directed networks of nonidentical clusters, where all nodes in the same cluster share an identical map. Based on the transverse stability analysis, we present sufficient conditions for local cluster synchronization of networks. The...

As the carbon nanotubes (CNTs) films are applied to the field emission cathodes in the vacuum devices, heat treatment in the range of 400°C–500°C is often conducted during the device sealing process, especially for glass-based devices. The annealing temperature effect on the field emission...

Polycrystalline silicon carbide (P-SiC) films containing SiC nanoparticles and Er were prepared by r.f. reactive magnetron co-sputtering technique with SiC and Er targets on low-temperature silicon (111) and silicon dioxide substrates with the mixed gas of pure argon, methane, and hydrogen....

We performed dynamic light-scattering (DLS) monitoring and a rheological study to characterize the formation and destruction of a transient (limited lifetime) gel formed from the biopolymers chitosan and gelatin. Gel formation, initiated by the enzyme tyrosinase, is followed by spontaneous gel...

This article provides finite sample conditions for the ratio of permanent to total inequality based on methods of Gottschalk and Moffitt (1994) to be equivalent to the Shorrocks <italic>R</italic> constructed with a Theil General Entropy Index. A simple test emerges of whether the two measures can be seen as...

<title>Abstract</title> This paper explores the external costs of domestic container transportation in Taiwan by analysing the origin and destination of current container cargoes. After reviewing an extensive literature survey of methods of external cost, a comparison of external costs between trucking and...