American Red Cross

The American Red Cross has been plagued with problems over the past two years from an antitrust lawsuit, repercussions from the distributions of funds from the Liberty Fund to the survivors of the World Trade Center disaster, problems with donated blood, a negative report from the Better Business Bureau, and a negative news report on CBS’s ’60 Minutes’.  This case study looks at the history of the Red Cross, provides information about the services provided by the organization, discusses the problems the American Red Cross has encountered over the past 3 years, and introduces Marsha Evans who took the position of CEO in August 2002

Component graphs of vector spaces and zero-divisor graphs of ordered sets

In this paper, nonzero component graphs and nonzero component union graphs of finite dimensional vector space are studied using the zero-divisor graph of specially constructed 0-1-distributive lattice and the zero-divisor graph of rings. Further, we define an equivalence relation on nonzero component graphs and nonzero component union graphs to deduce that these graphs are the graph join of zero-divisor graphs of Boolean algebras and complete graphs. In the last section, we characterize the perfect and chordal nonzero component graphs and nonzero component union graphs.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2205.0491

The Role of Context in the Evolution of a Serial Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurial research often focuses on the psychological traits of the entrepreneur but rarely on the notion that under certain circumstances entrepreneurship may be equally driven by external factors beyond the founder's control. This paper looks at the 40-year history of a serial entrepreneur and identifies five types of business ventures driven by contextual factors and the personal attributes of the entrepreneur. These five types are the “advised” venture, the “safe harbor” venture, the “accidental” venture, the “greener grass” venture, and the “passion” venture. The paper closes with a call for future research to include situational context in defining what creates and motivates entrepreneurs

On the Hamiltonian structure of Ermakov systems

A canonical Hamiltonian formalism is derived for a class of Ermakov systems specified by several different frequency functions. This class of systems comprises all known cases of Hamiltonian Ermakov systems and can always be reduced to quadratures. The Hamiltonian structure is explored to find exact solutions for the Calogero system and for a noncentral potential with dynamic symmetry. Some generalizations of these systems possessing exact solutions are also identified and solved

Snail Homing and Mating Search Algorithm: A Novel Bio-Inspired Metaheuristic Algorithm

In this paper, a novel Snail Homing and Mating Search (SHMS) algorithm is proposed. It is inspired from the biological behaviour of the snails. Snails continuously travels to find food and a mate, leaving behind a trail of mucus that serves as a guide for their return. Snails tend to navigate by following the available trails on the ground and responding to cues from nearby shelter homes. The proposed SHMS algorithm is investigated by solving several unimodal and multimodal functions. The solutions are validated using standard statistical tests such as two-sided and pairwise signed rank Wilcoxon test and Friedman rank test. The solution obtained from the SHMS algorithm exhibited superior robustness as well as search space exploration capabilities within the less computational cost. The real-world application of SHMS algorithm is successfully demonstrated in the engineering design domain by solving three cases of design and economic optimization shell and tube heat exchanger problem. The objective function value and other statistical results obtained using SHMS algorithm are compared with other well-known metaheuristic algorithms.Comment: 46 Pages, 11 Figures, 24 Table

Decrease in hyperosmotic stress-induced corneal epithelial cell apoptosis by L-carnitine

Purpose: To characterize the osmoprotective properties of L-carnitine on human corneal epithelial cell volume and apoptosis during hyperosmotic stress. Methods: Human corneal limbal epithelial (HCLE) cells were exposed to culture medium at 300 mOsm (isotonic) or 500 mOsm (hyperosmotic) with or without L-carnitine (10 mM). Induction of apoptosis was detected by quantifying the proteolytic activity of caspase-8, caspase-9, and caspase-3/7 using caspase activity assays, the expression of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and annexin V/propidium iodide staining of HCLE cells evaluated with confocal microscopy and flow cytometry. Cell volume changes in response to hyperosmotic stress were analyzed using flow cytometry. Results: After the HCLE cells were exposed to hyperosmotic medium (500 mOsm), the percentage of shrunken cells and damaged/dead cells (stained positively for annexin V and/or propidium iodide) was six- and three-fold, respectively, higher than that under isotonic conditions (300 mOsm). This was paralleled by an increase in TNF-α concentration in media and caspase-8, -9, and -3/7 activities (six-, four-, ten-, and twelve-fold, respectively; all showing p\u3c0.001). Addi­tion of L-carnitine during hyperosmotic stress partly restored cell volume and significantly reduced the concentration of TNF-α released (p=0.005) and caspase-9 activity (p=0.0125). Addition of L-carnitine reduced the percentage of hyperosmolarity-induced damaged/dead cells to levels observed under isotonic conditions

Thresholded Covering Algorithms for Robust and Max-Min Optimization

The general problem of robust optimization is this: one of several possible scenarios will appear tomorrow, but things are more expensive tomorrow than they are today. What should you anticipatorily buy today, so that the worst-case cost (summed over both days) is minimized? Feige et al. and Khandekar et al. considered the k-robust model where the possible outcomes tomorrow are given by all demand-subsets of size k, and gave algorithms for the set cover problem, and the Steiner tree and facility location problems in this model, respectively. In this paper, we give the following simple and intuitive template for k-robust problems: "having built some anticipatory solution, if there exists a single demand whose augmentation cost is larger than some threshold, augment the anticipatory solution to cover this demand as well, and repeat". In this paper we show that this template gives us improved approximation algorithms for k-robust Steiner tree and set cover, and the first approximation algorithms for k-robust Steiner forest, minimum-cut and multicut. All our approximation ratios (except for multicut) are almost best possible. As a by-product of our techniques, we also get algorithms for max-min problems of the form: "given a covering problem instance, which k of the elements are costliest to cover?".Comment: 24 page

On the complexity of reliable communication on the erasure channel

We discuss the complexity of achieving channel capacity on the binary erasure channel (BEC) in view of recent advances. We also extrapolate to conjecture complexity bounds on more general channels

Area distribution of two-dimensional random walks on a square lattice

The algebraic area probability distribution of closed planar random walks of length N on a square lattice is considered. The generating function for the distribution satisfies a recurrence relation in which the combinatorics is encoded. A particular case generalizes the q-binomial theorem to the case of three addends. The distribution fits the L\'evy probability distribution for Brownian curves with its first-order 1/N correction quite well, even for N rather small.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX 2e. Reformulated in terms of q-commutator