The Helicopter Antenna Radiation Prediction Code (HARP)

The first nine months effort in the development of a user oriented computer code, referred to as the HARP code, for analyzing the radiation from helicopter antennas is described. The HARP code uses modern computer graphics to aid in the description and display of the helicopter geometry. At low frequencies the helicopter is modeled by polygonal plates, and the method of moments is used to compute the desired patterns. At high frequencies the helicopter is modeled by a composite ellipsoid and flat plates, and computations are made using the geometrical theory of diffraction. The HARP code will provide a user friendly interface, employing modern computer graphics, to aid the user to describe the helicopter geometry, select the method of computation, construct the desired high or low frequency model, and display the results

Geographical patterns of unmet health care needs in Italy

In recent years, health care reforms and restrained budgets have risen concerns about accessibility to health services, even in countries with universal coverage health systems. Previous studies have explored the issue by using objective event-oriented measures such as those related to utilization of health care. Analyzing access through subjective process-oriented indicators allows to better disentangle the process of seeking care, to investigate self-perceived barriers to health services and to account for differences in individual health care preferences. In this paper, data from the 2006 Italian component of the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) are used to explore reasons and predictors of self-reported unmet needs for specialist and/or dental care among adult Italians aged 18 and over. Results reveal different patterns across socio-economic groups and geographical macro-areas. Evidence of income-related inequalities and violations of the horizontal equity principle are also found both at a national and regional level. Policies to address unmet health care needs should adopt a multidimensional approach and be tailored so as to consider such heterogeneities.Unmet health care needs; access to health care; inequality; inequity; Italy

Measuring Knowledge Spillovers Using Belgian EPO and USPTO Patent Data

This paper investigates two major issues of the patenting behavior of Belgian firms. Firstly, it studies the probabilistic distribution of the patent citations among several major sectors. Secondly, the firm-oriented data is studied to investigate the relationships between the Belgian firms’ size and their patent citation behavior. The modeling results conclude that there is evidence that the smaller firms tend to be more active in patent citation than larger ones. Analyzing the implications from the probabilistic models of citations the paper concludes, that there are different patterns of citation behavior in different sectors. Some sectors exhibit more openness toward inter-firm or inter-industry spillovers, while others do not. Moreover, different industrial sectors exhibit different relationships between the probability of a citation to occur in this sector and the relative time lag between the citing and cited patents.

Milk-Marketing: Impact of Perceived Quality on Consumption Patterns

Consumers use of quality characteristics to make milk purchase decisions reveal opportunities to create successful marketing strategies. Such a strategy could concern food quality. In this case, three core areas influence consumers quality perception: the perception process, the physical product itself and the communication about it (Grunert et al., 1996). Beyond this background, this article analyzes the impact of certain quality characteristics and socio-demographics on consumption patterns regarding whole fat milk, skim milk and organic milk. These milks were chosen because of the increasing awareness of different fat contents in the meaning of lower fat contents being healthier and the increasing importance of the organic food market. Steenkamps (1990) concept of perceived quality provides as theoretical background. To gather the data a consumer survey with 260 households took place in Germany in 2004. An ordered logit model and a cluster analysis were used for analyzing the data. We find clear differences in consumers perception of quality characteristics for the different milks. This information can be used to develop demand-oriented marketing activities (Kotler and Armstrong, 1994: 48).milk, marketing, consumption patterns, perceived quality, ordered logit, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing, D12, Q13, M3,

Generic and rhetorical structures of texts : two sides of the same coin?

Two major approaches to textual macro-structures have been developed during the last decades: Register & Genre Theory (R&GT) and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Both stress that textual structures co-occur with contextual relations involving social action and subject matter, role structure and symbolic organization. The approaches, however, significantly differ in their conceptions of textual organization. Whereas R&GT conceives of texts as goal-oriented staged (i.e. linearly progressing, while still allowing for prosodic and recursive realizations of stages) interactions, RST conceptualises them as hierarchically structured entities in which certain elements are foregrounded (nuclei) and others are backgrounded (satellites); Based on empirical analyses of Viennese university students' essays, we will discuss in what ways generic and rhetorical organizations of texts relate to each other and what advances a combination of these two approaches may offer for text analysis and text linguistics. Through such a combinatory approach to analyzing texts, it becomes possible to identify systematic patterns of textual features in context (using R&GT) and culturally influenced, semantic coherence relations (using RST). Central to our discussion are issues involving the relation between hierarchical versus linear perspectives on text organization and the relation between cohesion and coherence

Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

A Parsing Scheme for Finding the Design Pattern and Reducing the Development Cost of Reusable Object Oriented Software

Because of the importance of object oriented methodologies, the research in developing new measure for object oriented system development is getting increased focus. The most of the metrics need to find the interactions between the objects and modules for developing necessary metric and an influential software measure that is attracting the software developers, designers and researchers. In this paper a new interactions are defined for object oriented system. Using these interactions, a parser is developed to analyze the existing architecture of the software. Within the design model, it is necessary for design classes to collaborate with one another. However, collaboration should be kept to an acceptable minimum i.e. better designing practice will introduce low coupling. If a design model is highly coupled, the system is difficult to implement, to test and to maintain overtime. In case of enhancing software, we need to introduce or remove module and in that case coupling is the most important factor to be considered because unnecessary coupling may make the system unstable and may cause reduction in the system's performance. So coupling is thought to be a desirable goal in software construction, leading to better values for external software qualities such as maintainability, reusability and so on. To test this hypothesis, a good measure of class coupling is needed. In this paper, based on the developed tool called Design Analyzer we propose a methodology to reuse an existing system with the objective of enhancing an existing Object oriented system keeping the coupling as low as possible.Comment: 15 page