Value Recapture As A Source Of Funds To Finance Public Projects

The Rice Center for Community Design & Research in Houston, Texas, has undertaken to suggest alternatives to present methods of land acquisition and land use in order to: 1) lessen the ultimate financial burden on public agencies, and 2) increase the community benefits directly resulting from such projects. The Center has taken a proposed mass transit system for the City of Houston as its model. This Article, written by the participants principally responsible for the legal aspects of the study, summarizes existing law and suggests possible alternative methods of value recapture to benefit the publi

Using Synchronic and Diachronic Relations for Summarizing Multiple Documents Describing Evolving Events

In this paper we present a fresh look at the problem of summarizing evolving events from multiple sources. After a discussion concerning the nature of evolving events we introduce a distinction between linearly and non-linearly evolving events. We present then a general methodology for the automatic creation of summaries from evolving events. At its heart lie the notions of Synchronic and Diachronic cross-document Relations (SDRs), whose aim is the identification of similarities and differences between sources, from a synchronical and diachronical perspective. SDRs do not connect documents or textual elements found therein, but structures one might call messages. Applying this methodology will yield a set of messages and relations, SDRs, connecting them, that is a graph which we call grid. We will show how such a grid can be considered as the starting point of a Natural Language Generation System. The methodology is evaluated in two case-studies, one for linearly evolving events (descriptions of football matches) and another one for non-linearly evolving events (terrorist incidents involving hostages). In both cases we evaluate the results produced by our computational systems.Comment: 45 pages, 6 figures. To appear in the Journal of Intelligent Information System

New algorithms and technologies for the un-supervised reduction of Optical/IR images

This paper presents some of the main aspects of the software library that has been developed for the reduction of optical and infrared images, an integral part of the end-to-end survey system being built to support public imaging surveys at ESO. Some of the highlights of the new library are: unbiased estimates of the background, critical for deep IR observations; efficient and accurate astrometric solutions, using multi-resolution techniques; automatic identification and masking of satellite tracks; weighted co-addition of images; creation of optical/IR mosaics, and appropriate management of multi-chip instruments. These various elements have been integrated into a system using XML technology for setting input parameters, driving the various processes, producing comprehensive history logs and storing the results, binding them to the supporting database and to the web. The system has been extensively tested using deep images as well as images of crowded fields (e.g. globular clusters, LMC), processing at a rate of 0.5 Mega-pixels per second using a DS20E ALPHA computer with two processors. The goal of this presentation is to review some of the main features of this package.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, conferenc

The impossibility of non-signaling privacy amplification

Barrett, Hardy, and Kent have shown in 2005 that protocols for quantum key agreement exist the security of which can be proven under the assumption that quantum or relativity theory is correct. More precisely, this is based on the non-local behavior of certain quantum systems, combined with the non-signaling postulate from relativity. An advantage is that the resulting security is independent of what (quantum) systems the legitimate parties' devices operate on: they do not have to be trusted. Unfortunately, the protocol proposed by Barrett et al. cannot tolerate any errors caused by noise in the quantum channel. Furthermore, even in the error-free case it is inefficient: its communication complexity is Theta(1/epsilon) when forcing the attacker's information below epsilon, even if only a single key bit is generated. Potentially, the problem can be solved by privacy amplification of relativistic - or non-signaling - secrecy. We show, however, that such privacy amplification is impossible with respect to the most important form of non-local behavior, and application of arbitrary hash functions.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figure

Research Collaboration Analysis Using Text and Graph Features

Patterns of scientific collaboration and their effect on scientific production have been the subject of many studies. In this paper we analyze the nature of ties between co-authors and study collaboration patterns in science from the perspective of semantic similarity of authors who wrote a paper together and the strength of ties between these authors (i.e. how much have they previously collaborated together). These two views of scientific collaboration are used to analyze publications in the TrueImpactDataset [11], a new dataset containing two types of publications - publications regarded as seminal and publications regarded as literature reviews by field experts. We show there are distinct differences between seminal publications and literature reviews in terms of author similarity and the strength of ties between their authors. In particular, we find that seminal publications tend to be written by authors who have previously worked on dissimilar problems (i.e. authors from different fields or even disciplines), and by authors who are not frequent collaborators. On the other hand, literature reviews in our dataset tend to be the result of an established collaboration within a discipline. This demonstrates that our method provides meaningful information about potential future impacts of a publication which does not require citation information

Time to publication for NIHR HTA programme-funded research: a cohort study

ObjectiveTo assess the time to publication of primary research and evidence syntheses funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme published as a monograph in Health Technology Assessment and as a journal article in the wider biomedical literature.Study designRetrospective cohort study.SettingPrimary research and evidence synthesis projects funded by the HTA Programme were included in the cohort if they were registered in the NIHR research programmes database and was planned to submit the draft final report for publication in Health Technology Assessment on or before 9 December 2011.Main outcome measuresThe median time to publication and publication at 30?months in Health Technology Assessment and in an external journal were determined by searching the NIHR research programmes database and HTA Programme website.ResultsOf 458 included projects, 184 (40.2%) were primary research projects and 274 (59.8%) were evidence syntheses. A total of 155 primary research projects had a completion date; the median time to publication was 23?months (26.5 and 35.5?months to publish a monograph and to publish in an external journal, respectively) and 69% were published within 30?months. The median time to publication of HTA-funded trials (n=126) was 24?months and 67.5% were published within 30?months. Among the evidence syntheses with a protocol online date (n=223), the median time to publication was 25.5?months (28?months to publication as a monograph), but only 44.4% of evidence synthesis projects were published in an external journal. 65% of evidence synthesis studies had been published within 30.0?months.ConclusionsResearch funded by the HTA Programme publishes promptly. The importance of Health Technology Assessment was highlighted as the median time to publication was 9?months shorter for a monograph than an external journal article

Countercyclical Job Creation Programs of the Post-World War II Era

CRS_January_2003_Countercyclical_Job_Creation_Programs_of_the_Post_WWII_Era.pdf: 618 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Mutual learning in a tree parity machine and its application to cryptography

Mutual learning of a pair of tree parity machines with continuous and discrete weight vectors is studied analytically. The analysis is based on a mapping procedure that maps the mutual learning in tree parity machines onto mutual learning in noisy perceptrons. The stationary solution of the mutual learning in the case of continuous tree parity machines depends on the learning rate where a phase transition from partial to full synchronization is observed. In the discrete case the learning process is based on a finite increment and a full synchronized state is achieved in a finite number of steps. The synchronization of discrete parity machines is introduced in order to construct an ephemeral key-exchange protocol. The dynamic learning of a third tree parity machine (an attacker) that tries to imitate one of the two machines while the two still update their weight vectors is also analyzed. In particular, the synchronization times of the naive attacker and the flipping attacker recently introduced in [1] are analyzed. All analytical results are found to be in good agreement with simulation results