'Variation' : 32 short performances

'Variation' consists of 32 short performances varying in length from 35 seconds to 6 minutes and 4 seconds. The performances occured at 1.30pm on 32 consecutive weekdays in the foyer space at Back Hill, London

Understanding distributions of chess performances

This paper presents evidence for several features of the population of chess players, and the distribution of their performances measured in terms of Elo ratings and by computer analysis of moves. Evidence that ratings have remained stable since the inception of the Elo system in the 1970’s is given in several forms: by showing that the population of strong players fits a simple logistic-curve model without inflation, by plotting players’ average error against the FIDE category of tournaments over time, and by skill parameters from a model that employs computer analysis keeping a nearly constant relation to Elo rating across that time. The distribution of the model’s Intrinsic Performance Ratings can hence be used to compare populations that have limited interaction, such as between players in a national chess federation and FIDE, and ascertain relative drift in their respective rating systems

China's creative industries : clusters and performances

A working paper submitted to the Annual Conference of the Chinese Economist Association held at Cambridge University from 1st to 2nd April 2008Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Actuation performances of anisotropic gels

We investigated the actuation performances of anisotropic gels driven by mechanical and chemical stimuli, in terms of both deformation processes and stroke--curves, and distinguished between the fast response of gels before diffusion starts and the asymptotic response attained at the steady state. We also showed as the range of forces that an anisotropic hydrogel can exert when constrained is especially wide;indeed, changing fiber orientation allows to induce shear as well as transversely isotropic extensions.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure

IBIS/PICsIT in-flight performances

PICsIT (Pixellated Imaging CaeSium Iodide Telescope) is the high energy detector of the IBIS telescope on-board the INTEGRAL satellite. PICsIT operates in the gamma-ray energy range between 175 keV and 10 MeV, with a typical energy resolution of 10% at 1 MeV, and an angular resolution of 12 arcmin within a \~100 square degree field of view, with the possibility to locate intense point sources in the MeV region at the few arcmin level. PICsIT is based upon a modular array of 4096 independent CsI(Tl) pixels, ~0.70 cm^2 in cross-section and 3 cm thick. In this work, the PICsIT on-board data handling and science operative modes are described. This work presents the in-flight performances in terms of background count spectra, sensitivity limit, and imaging capabilities.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication on A&A, special issue on First Science with INTEGRA

Empirical Comparison of Chirp and Multitones on Experimental UWB Software Defined Radar Prototype

This paper proposes and tests an approach for an unbiased study of radar waveforms' performances. Using the ultrawide band software defined radar prototype, the performances of Chirp and Multitones are compared in range profile and detection range. The architecture was implemented and has performances comparable to the state of the art in software defined radar prototypes. The experimental results are consistent with the simulations

Risk-adjusted performances of world equity indices

This paper investigates whether equity indices of 24 emerging and 28 developed markets compensate their investors equally after taking risk into account. We place special emphasis on downside risk by calculating both nonparametric and parametric value at risk. We find that when all 52 markets are ranked based on their alternative reward-to-risk ratios, almost all of the countries in the top quartile are emerging markets whereas almost all of the countries in the bottom quartile are developed markets. These results are supported by the finding that pooled means of the reward-to-risk ratios are significantly higher for emerging markets compared to those of developed markets. Focusing on the period after the initiation of the recent financial crisis reveals that, although both developed and emerging markets suffered in terms of generating higher returns per unit risk, emerging markets continued to outperform developed markets and the outperformance became more pronounced

Multiproduct Uniform Polar Quantizer

The aim of this paper is to reduce the complexity of the unrestricted uniform polar quantizer (UUPQ), keeping its high performances. To achieve this, in this paper we propose the multiproduct uniform polar quantizer (MUPQ), where several consecutive magnitude levels are joined in segments and within each segment the uniform product quantization is performed (i.e. all levels within one segments have the same number of phase levels). MUPQ is much simpler for realization than UUPQ, but it achieves similar performances as UUPQ. Since MUPQ has low complexity and achieves much better performances than the scalar uniform quantizer, it can be widely used instead of scalar uniform quantizers to improve performances, for any signal with the Gaussian distribution