Manpower planning in Hong Kong

1. VTC has been using the Manpower Requirement Approach (MRA) for projecting disaggregate sectoral employment by skill/occupational group. The whole exercise comprises isolated studies of the 25 economic sectors based on employers’ perception of possible trends. 2. Labour Market Analysis (LMA) differs from MRA in terms of both focus and data requirements. LMA focuses on information from all players in the labour market, uses primary as well as other available secondary data, and analyzes data using also econometric models. 3. For consistency, the Task Force has conceptualized an LMA framework, outlined as: Level One Aggregate Economic Level. Level Two Aggregate Labour Market Level. Level Three Disaggregate Labour Market Level

Lex Luthor Wins: How the Termination Right Threatens to Tear the Man of Steel in Two

When Superman was created in 1938, there had never been a character quite like him. His arrival marked the first appearance of a superhero, setting off a trend that would come to dominate the comic book medium, one of the few distinctly American art forms, for the next seven decades. As befitting his larger than life adventures, the fictional character Superman spread across all communicative media, from the comic page to the radio serial, animation, live action television and motion pictures. Superman began as the brainchild of Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster, two like- minded sons of Jewish immigrants who met and befriended one another while attending the same Cleveland, Ohio high school. After many fitful stops and starts, and multiple interested publishers, Siegel and Shuster eventually brought the otherworldly Superman, the “last son of Krypton,” to Detective Comics, Inc. (“DC Comics” or “DC”), where he remains to this day. The “Man of Steel’s” colossal and unforeseen success has thrust DC and the Siegel and Shuster heirs (and the creators themselves, while they were still living) into a seemingly never-ending battle over the copyright to the character. Critical to this legal battle is the termination of transfer provision created in the Copyright Act of 1976, which grants the creators’ heirs the ability to recapture the rights the duo granted to DC over seventy years ago. The termination battle over Superman has thrown into sharp relief copyright law’s uncomfortable treatment of fictional characters and the protectability of such characters separate from the works in which they appear. Now that the Siegel heirs have successfully terminated the original Superman assignment, the heirs, along with DC, are co-owners of the copyright to Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman, through the Shuster interest that DC still possesses. But if and when the Shuster heirs’ termination becomes effective in 2013, the question will arise: what Superman property interests will the parties be left with after that date

Angular distribution of electrons following two-photon ionization of the Ar atom and two-photon detachment of the F\u3csup\u3e-\u3c/sup\u3e ion

Angular-distribution asymmetry parameters for photoelectrons produced by two-photon ionization of the Ar atom and two-photon detachment of the F- ion are calculated for photon energies below the thresholds for single-photon ionization and single-photon detachment, respectively. Effects of electron correlations are included by perturbative methods. Good agreement is obtained between our results and those of a recent experimental angular-distribution measurement of two-photon detachment of the F- ion at λ=532 nm [C. Blondel, M. Crance, C. Delsart, and A. Giraud (unpublished)]

Angular distribution of electrons following two-photon ionization of the Ar atom and two-photon detachment of the F\u3csup\u3e-\u3c/sup\u3e ion

Angular-distribution asymmetry parameters for photoelectrons produced by two-photon ionization of the Ar atom and two-photon detachment of the F- ion are calculated for photon energies below the thresholds for single-photon ionization and single-photon detachment, respectively. Effects of electron correlations are included by perturbative methods. Good agreement is obtained between our results and those of a recent experimental angular-distribution measurement of two-photon detachment of the F- ion at λ=532 nm [C. Blondel, M. Crance, C. Delsart, and A. Giraud (unpublished)]

Eliciting Risk Aversion with Inverse Reinforcement Learning via Interactive Questioning

This paper proposes a novel framework for identifying an agent's risk aversion using interactive questioning. Our study is conducted in two scenarios: a one-period case and an infinite horizon case. In the one-period case, we assume that the agent's risk aversion is characterized by a cost function of the state and a distortion risk measure. In the infinite horizon case, we model risk aversion with an additional component, a discount factor. Assuming the access to a finite set of candidates containing the agent's true risk aversion, we show that asking the agent to demonstrate her optimal policies in various environment, which may depend on their previous answers, is an effective means of identifying the agent's risk aversion. Specifically, we prove that the agent's risk aversion can be identified as the number of questions tends to infinity, and the questions are randomly designed. We also develop an algorithm for designing optimal questions and provide empirical evidence that our method learns risk aversion significantly faster than randomly designed questions in simulations. Our framework has important applications in robo-advising and provides a new approach for identifying an agent's risk preferences