Laboratory and field experiments were carried out along with numerical simulations in this paper to study the effects of porous media on thermal and salt diffusion of the solar ponds. From our laboratory experiments simulating heat transfer inside a solar pond, it is shown that the addition of...

Bioenergy is currently regarded as a renewable energy source with a high growth potential. Forest-based biodiesel, with the significant advantage of not competing with grain production on cultivated land, has been considered as a promising substitute for diesel fuel by many countries, including...

A practical model and an associated method are developed for providing consistent, deterministically correct responses to ad-hoc queries to a database containing a field of binary confidential data. COUNT queries, i.e., the number of selected subjects whose confidential datum is positive, are to...

We consider the problem of balancing two competing objectives in the pursuit of efficient management of operating rooms in a hospital: providing surgeons with predictable, reliable access to the operating room and maintaining high utilization of capacity. The common solution to the first problem...

Faced with the sustained problem of piracy that costs nearly $40 billion in annual revenue losses, the software industry has adopted a number of technical, legal, and economic strategies to curb piracy and stem the resulting losses. Our work complements and contributes to the existing literature...

Recent technological and market forces have profoundly impacted the music industry. Emphasizing threats from peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, the industry continues to seek sanctions against individuals who offer a significant number of songs for others to copy. Combining data on the performance...

We present a model of online music sharing that incorporates economic and technological incentives to sample, purchase, and pirate. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that lowering the cost of sampling music will propel more consumers to purchase music online as the total cost of...

Recent technological and market forces have profoundly impacted the music industry. Emphasizing threats from peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, the industry continues to seek sanctions against individuals who offer significant number of songs for others to copy. Yet there is little rigorous...

In this paper, we provide theoretical arguments and empirical evidence for how Genetic Algorithms (GA) can be used for efficient estimation of macro-level diffusion models. Using simulations we find that GA and Sequential Search-Based-Nonlinear Least Squares (SSB-NLS) provide comparable...