The first evidence of asymmetric upward and downward persistence in the global sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) is revealed from the observations with the asymmetric detrended fluctuation analysis (A-DFA) method. Global distributions of the scaling exponents which quantify the degree of...

Managed care substantially transformed the U.S. healthcare sector in the last two decades of the twentieth century, injecting price competition among hospitals for the first time in history. However, total HMO enrollment has declined since 2000. This study addresses whether managed care and...

The implications of an electronic coupling model in high TC superconductors of YBCO are discussed in which the pairing mechanism is based upon the ionic bonding. Specifically,the bonding reaction Cu + O [rlhar2] Cu-- resonates at a frequency of I2πh̵; in the CuO planes, where I = 0.4 eV is the...

The correlation between the void ratio of swelled montmorillonite and the vertical overburden pressure can be expressed as ${e}_{{\rm m}} = Kp_{{\rm s}}^{{D}_{{\rm s}}-3}$. The surface fractal dimension Ds of five bentonites were estimated from the swelling deformation tests according to this...

Lifetimes of modern mechanic or electronic units usually exhibit bathtub-shaped failure rates. An appropriate probability distribution to model such data is the modified Weibull distribution proposed by Lai et al. [15]. This distribution has both the two-parameter Weibull and type-1 extreme...