Regional Recovery Modeling and Postdisaster Model Updating: The Case of the 2010 Kraljevo Earthquake in Serbia

Modeling disaster consequences and postdisaster recovery is a key enabler of holistic community disaster resilience planning and implementation. An important step toward the application of such models in practice consists in ensuring that model parameters can be reliably estimated, building trust in model outputs, as well as reducing output uncertainty. This study aims to tackle these issues first by constructing a regional housing recovery model and validating its results for a real event, the 2010 Kraljevo, Serbia earthquake, and second, by presenting how regional recovery models can be updated following a disaster using early-arriving damage inspection data to reduce output uncertainty. The model outputs are updated postevent using 600 building damage assessment reports, reducing the uncertainty in recovery time predictions. The results confirm the practical applicability of the proposed regional recovery model and postevent updating, while identifying its main shortcomings, such as the lack of consideration for the weather conditions affecting the recovery process and the need for better methods to estimate the communitys ability to mobilize its recovery resources.ISSN:0733-9445ISSN:1943-541

Santa Claus meets Makespan and Matroids: Algorithms and Reductions

In this paper we study the relation of two fundamental problems in scheduling and fair allocation: makespan minimization on unrelated parallel machines and max-min fair allocation, also known as the Santa Claus problem. For both of these problems the best approximation factor is a notorious open question; more precisely, whether there is a better-than-2 approximation for the former problem and whether there is a constant approximation for the latter. While the two problems are intuitively related and history has shown that techniques can often be transferred between them, no formal reductions are known. We first show that an affirmative answer to the open question for makespan minimization implies the same for the Santa Claus problem by reducing the latter problem to the former. We also prove that for problem instances with only two input values both questions are equivalent. We then move to a special case called ``restricted assignment'', which is well studied in both problems. Although our reductions do not maintain the characteristics of this special case, we give a reduction in a slight generalization, where the jobs or resources are assigned to multiple machines or players subject to a matroid constraint and in addition we have only two values. This draws a similar picture as before: equivalence for two values and the general case of Santa Claus can only be easier than makespan minimization. To complete the picture, we give an algorithm for our new matroid variant of the Santa Claus problem using a non-trivial extension of the local search method from restricted assignment. Thereby we unify, generalize, and improve several previous results. We believe that this matroid generalization may be of independent interest and provide several sample applications. As corollaries, we obtain a polynomial-time (2−1/nǫ)-approximation for two-value makespanminimization for every ǫ > 0, improving on the previous (2 − 1/m) approximation, and a polynomial-time (1.75 + ǫ)-approximation for makespan minimization in the restricted assignment case with two values, improving the previous best rate of 1 + 2/√ 5 + ǫ ≈ 1.8945

Free boundary partial regularity in the thin obstacle problem

ISSN:0010-3640ISSN:1097-031

Quality assessment of gene repertoire annotations with OMArk

In the era of biodiversity genomics, it is crucial to ensure that annotations of protein-coding gene repertoires are accurate. State-of-the-art tools to assess genome annotations measure the completeness of a gene repertoire but are blind to other errors, such as gene overprediction or contamination. We introduce OMArk, a software package that relies on fast, alignment-free sequence comparisons between a query proteome and precomputed gene families across the tree of life. OMArk assesses not only the completeness but also the consistency of the gene repertoire as a whole relative to closely related species and reports likely contamination events. Analysis of 1,805 UniProt Eukaryotic Reference Proteomes with OMArk demonstrated strong evidence of contamination in 73 proteomes and identified error propagation in avian gene annotation resulting from the use of a fragmented zebra finch proteome as a reference. This study illustrates the importance of comparing and prioritizing proteomes based on their quality measures.ISSN:1546-1696ISSN:1087-015

First-in-human administration of terbium-161-labelled somatostatin receptor subtype 2 antagonist ([¹⁶¹Tb]Tb-DOTA-LM3) in a patient with a metastatic neuroendocrine tumour of the ileum

ISSN:1619-7070ISSN:1619-708

Editorial: T cell specificity and cross-reactivity - implications in physiology and pathology

ISSN:1664-322