The creative response in economic development: the case of information processing technologies in US manufacturing, 1870-1930

This paper presents a theoretical framework along "Classical" lines in which Schumpeter's concept of "Creative Response" is linked to a theory of induced innovation and the concept of technological regimes. We devote particular attention to the role of indivisibilities between factors of production. On the basis of this framework, we study the adoption of early information technologies, such as typewriters, calculators or Hollerith machines in US manufacturing in the period between 1870 and 1930. We show how the presence of a distinct bias in technical change in US manufacturing led to the opening of a window of opportunity for early information technologies, and how the presence of this bias influenced the technological search and adoption process of firms and how this found its final reflection in the rules and heuristics of the new regimemulation is found.Technological regimes; systemic innovation; adoption of technologies; path dependence; information technology 1870-1930

The Parallelism Motifs of Genomic Data Analysis

Genomic data sets are growing dramatically as the cost of sequencing continues to decline and small sequencing devices become available. Enormous community databases store and share this data with the research community, but some of these genomic data analysis problems require large scale computational platforms to meet both the memory and computational requirements. These applications differ from scientific simulations that dominate the workload on high end parallel systems today and place different requirements on programming support, software libraries, and parallel architectural design. For example, they involve irregular communication patterns such as asynchronous updates to shared data structures. We consider several problems in high performance genomics analysis, including alignment, profiling, clustering, and assembly for both single genomes and metagenomes. We identify some of the common computational patterns or motifs that help inform parallelization strategies and compare our motifs to some of the established lists, arguing that at least two key patterns, sorting and hashing, are missing

Financial crises and bank failures: a review of prediction methods

In this article we analyze financial and economic circumstances associated with the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and the global financial turmoil that has led to severe crises in many countries. We suggest that the level of cross-border holdings of long-term securities between the United States and the rest of the world may indicate a direct link between the turmoil in the securitized market originated in the United States and that in other countries. We provide a summary of empirical results obtained in several Economics and Operations Research papers that attempt to explain, predict, or suggest remedies for financial crises or banking defaults; we also extensively outline the methodologies used in them. The intent of this article is to promote future empirical research for preventing financial crises.Subprime mortgage ; Financial crises

Financial crises and bank failures: a review of prediction methods

In this article we provide a summary of empirical results obtained in several economics and operations research papers that attempt to explain, predict, or suggest remedies for financial crises or banking defaults, as well as outlines of the methodologies used. We analyze financial and economic circumstances associated with the US subprime mortgage crisis and the global financial turmoil that has led to severe crises in many countries. The intent of the article is to promote future empirical research that might help to prevent bank failures and financial crises.financial crises; banking failures; operations research; early warning methods; leading indicators; subprime markets

The Iray Light Transport Simulation and Rendering System

While ray tracing has become increasingly common and path tracing is well understood by now, a major challenge lies in crafting an easy-to-use and efficient system implementing these technologies. Following a purely physically-based paradigm while still allowing for artistic workflows, the Iray light transport simulation and rendering system allows for rendering complex scenes by the push of a button and thus makes accurate light transport simulation widely available. In this document we discuss the challenges and implementation choices that follow from our primary design decisions, demonstrating that such a rendering system can be made a practical, scalable, and efficient real-world application that has been adopted by various companies across many fields and is in use by many industry professionals today

Algorithm Libraries for Multi-Core Processors

By providing parallelized versions of established algorithm libraries, we ease the exploitation of the multiple cores on modern processors for the programmer. The Multi-Core STL provides basic algorithms for internal memory, while the parallelized STXXL enables multi-core acceleration for algorithms on large data sets stored on disk. Some parallelized geometric algorithms are introduced into CGAL. Further, we design and implement sorting algorithms for huge data in distributed external memory

Entropy-scaling search of massive biological data

Many datasets exhibit a well-defined structure that can be exploited to design faster search tools, but it is not always clear when such acceleration is possible. Here, we introduce a framework for similarity search based on characterizing a dataset's entropy and fractal dimension. We prove that searching scales in time with metric entropy (number of covering hyperspheres), if the fractal dimension of the dataset is low, and scales in space with the sum of metric entropy and information-theoretic entropy (randomness of the data). Using these ideas, we present accelerated versions of standard tools, with no loss in specificity and little loss in sensitivity, for use in three domains---high-throughput drug screening (Ammolite, 150x speedup), metagenomics (MICA, 3.5x speedup of DIAMOND [3,700x BLASTX]), and protein structure search (esFragBag, 10x speedup of FragBag). Our framework can be used to achieve "compressive omics," and the general theory can be readily applied to data science problems outside of biology.Comment: Including supplement: 41 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables, 1 bo

Molecular pathology of Diamond Blackfan anaemia

Diamond-Blackfan anaemia (DBA) is one of a rare group of genetic disorders known as ‘inherited bone marrow failure (IBMF) syndromes with bone marrow failure, birth defects and higher propensity to cancer. It is arare autosomal dominant disorder with an incidence of 7 in 106 newborns, DBA is characterized by a defect in erythroid lineage development and a quantitative as well as a qualitative defect in erythroid progenitors. This disorder is inherited in 45% of cases and emerges as de novo in the remaining cases. Diagnosis of DBA is challenging as it is based on several clinical features shared by other IBMF syndromes. Diagnosis of this disorder has remained for many years a challenge. In recent years, the use of Next generation sequencing (NGS) of the 83 ribosomal protein (RP) genes has greatly improved the diagnosis and the future prospect of managing the disease. This new diagnostic approach provides several advantages over other conventional and classic approaches, last but not least that now over 65-80% of DBA cases have been identified to carry a genetic mutation of one of the 83 RP genes, while only few could be analyzed until recently. It also facilitates the analysis of DBA family members to facilitate both the selection of possible donors for transplant and to distinguish inherited from de novo mutations. RP gene mutations leading to reduced amounts of RPs (affecting both the 40S and 60S ribosomal subunits) interfere with the processing of rRNA. Until recently the different rRNA species in DBA patients could only be analyzed using Northern blot technique, with several limitations mainly due to the poor yield of RNA in these patients. To resolve some of these problems, in this study we designed primers specific for 32s rRNA intermediate, 18s, 28s, and 5s rRNA. We studied the relative expression of these genes in DBA compared to healthy controls. We studied rRNA defect in a cohort of forty-eight DBA patients from resting and stimulated T cells. rRNA profile study showed a significant difference in the resting and stimulated T cells from DBA patients compared to controls. We then applied CRISPR CAS 9 technology, electroporation, flowcytometry, and timed cell-sorting to validate two novel heterozygous mutations discovered in our Lab, the RPS17 c.3G>C and RPL11 c.475_476 del AA. We optimized a method to successfully introduce a heterozygous knock in mutation using CRISPR/Cas9 technology in K562 erythroleukemic cell line. Firstly, K562 cells were transfected with LentiCRISPRv2 plasmid that has a specific guide RNA (gRNA) ligated to it using the Amaxa nucleofection system. Seventy-two hours later, single green fluorescent protein (GFP) expressing K562 cells were sorted into 96 wells plates. After three weeks of growing these single clones, they were analyzed and the viability was shown to be 50%. Sanger sequencing was carried out to confirm the presence of heterozygous knock in of the specific mutation. Quantitative real time PCR studies using our designed primers (18S, 28S, 32S and 5.8S rRNA) revealed that both mutations resulted in rRNA processing defect in K562 cell line compared to control. In conclusion, our study lead to the characterization of newly established mutations and we demonstrated that such mutations were responsible and causative of a defect in the production of rRNA in an in vitro model.Open Acces

Closed orbit correction at synchrotrons for symmetric and near-symmetric lattices

This contribution compiles the benefits of lattice symmetry in the context of closed orbit correction. A symmetric arrangement of BPMs and correctors results in structured orbit response matrices of Circulant or block Circulant type. These forms of matrices provide favorable properties in terms of computational complexity, information compression and interpretation of mathematical vector spaces of BPMs and correctors. For broken symmetries, a nearest-Circulant approximation is introduced and the practical advantages of symmetry exploitation are demonstrated with the help of simulations and experiments in the context of FAIR synchrotrons

A CNN-ELM Classification Model for Automated Tomato Maturity Grading

Tomatoes are popular around the world due to their high nutritional value. Tomatoes are also one of the world’s most widely cultivated and profitable crops. The distribution and marketing of tomatoes depend highly on their quality. Estimating tomato ripeness is an essential step in determining shelf life and quality. With the abundant supply of tomatoes on the market, it is exceedingly difficult to estimate tomato ripeness using human graders. To address this issue and improve tomato quality inspection and sorting, automated tomato maturity classification models based on different features have been developed. However, current methods heavily rely on human-engineered or handcrafted features. Convolutional neural networks have emerged as the preferred technique for general object recognition problems because they can automatically detect and extract valuable features by directly working on input images. This paper proposes a CNN-ELM classification model for automated tomato maturity grading that combines CNNs’ automated feature learning capabilities with the efficiency of extreme learning machines to perform fast and accurate classification even with limited training data. The results showed that the proposed CNN-ELM model had a classification accuracy of 96.67% and an F1-score of 96.67% in identifying six maturity stages from the test data