A phosphate protective film was prepared on carbon steel. The structure of the film was analyzed with X-ray photoelectron spectra (XPS) and atomic is force microscope (AFM). AFM observed the full process of film formation clearly. XPS with rotation etch displayed multilayer structure of...

Bank customer churn prediction is one of the key businesses for modern commercial banks. Recently, various methods have been investigated to identify the customers who would leave away. This paper proposed a new framework based on feature clustering and classification technique to help...

TiCl4/MgCl2, TiCl4/MgCl2/donor catalysts and TiCl4/donor complexes were prepared in this experiment; the donors are EB, DNBP, DBPG, DBW, PPDE, and BMMF respectively. Chemical states of Ti on the surface of MgCl2-supported Z–N catalysts were analyzed with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS)....

To meet rising energy demands in a sustainable manner, the United States Renewable Fuel Standard 2 (RFS2) mandates the production of 3.78billion L (1billion gallons) of biomass-based biodiesel per year by 2020. Urban marginal lands, herein defined as lots with poor agricultural potential and...

Electricity industry is important for our society and the nation's economic strength, and this dissertation includes two important topics in the industry: electricity market auctioning, and short-term load forecasting. In the first part of this dissertation, an optimization algorithm to solve...

This dissertation examines how households should optimally allocate their portfolio choices between risky stocks and risk-free bonds over their lifetime. Traditional lifecycle models in previous work with normal-distributed stock returns suggest that the allocation toward stocks should start...

Abstract Understanding how people make decisions from risky choices has attracted increasing attention of researchers in economics, psychology and neuroscience. While economists try to evaluate individual’s risk preference through mathematical modeling, neuroscientists answer the question by...

As a function of time t, mean residual life is the remaining life expectancy of a subject given survival up to t. The proportional mean residual life model, proposed by Oakes & Dasu (1990), provides an alternative to the Cox proportional hazards model to study the association between survival...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision....