21,983 research outputs found
The concept of social pharmacy
The 13th International Social Pharmacy Workshop will be held in Malta in July 2004. The Social Pharmacy Workshops are international conferences for research in social and behavioural pharmacy. Meetings are held every second year and participation has grown steadily since the first Workshop was held in Helsinki, Finland, in 1980. Following the successful 2002 conference in Sydney, Australia, the 2004 meeting in Malta will be the first one held in the Mediterranean area!peer-reviewe
The Devil is in the Detail: Hints for Practical Optimisation
Finding the minimum of an objective function, such as a least squares or negative log-likelihood function, with respect to the unknown model parameters is a problem often encountered in econometrics. Consequently, students of econometrics and applied econometricians are usually well-grounded in the broad differences between the numerical procedures employed to solve these problems. Often, however, relatively little time is given to understanding the practical subtleties of implementing these schemes when faced with illbehaved problems. This paper addresses some of the details involved in practical optimisation, such as dealing with constraints on the parameters, specifying starting values, termination criteria and analytical gradients, and illustrates some of the general ideas with several instructive examples.gradient algorithms, unconstrained optimisation, generalised method of moments.
Discrete time-series models when counts are unobservable
Count data in economics have traditionally been modeled by means of integer-valued autoregressive models. Consequently, the estimation of the parameters of these models and their asymptotic properties have been well documented in the literature. The models comprise a description of the survival of counts generally in terms of a binomial thinning process and an independent arrivals process usually specified in terms of a Poisson distribution. This paper extends the existing class of models to encompass situations in which counts are latent and all that is observed is the presence or absence of counts. This is a potentially important modification as many interesting economic phenomena may have a natural interpretation as a series of 'events' that are driven by an underlying count process which is unobserved. Arrivals of the latent counts are modeled either in terms of the Poisson distribution, where multiple counts may arrive in the sampling interval, or in terms of the Bernoulli distribution, where only one new arrival is allowed in the same sampling interval. The models with latent counts are then applied in two practical illustrations, namely, modeling volatility in financial markets as a function of unobservable 'news' and abnormal price spikes in electricity markets being driven by latent 'stress'.Integer-valued autoregression, Poisson distribution, Bernoulli distribution, latent factors, maximum likelihood estimation
On R-duals and the duality principle in Gabor analysis
The concept of R-duals of a frame was introduced by Casazza, Kutyniok and
Lammers in 2004, with the motivation to obtain a general version of the duality
principle in Gabor analysis. For tight Gabor frames and Gabor Riesz bases the
three authors were actually able to show that the duality principle is a
special case of general results for R-duals. In this paper we introduce various
alternative R-duals, with focus on what we call R-duals of type II and III. We
show how they are related and provide characterizations of the R-duals of type
II and III. In particular, we prove that for tight frames these classes
coincide with the R-duals by Casazza et el., which is desirable in the sense
that the motivating case of tight Gabor frames already is well covered by these
R-duals. On the other hand, all the introduced types of R-duals generalize the
duality principle for larger classes of Gabor frames than just the tight frames
and the Riesz bases; in particular, the R-duals of type III cover the duality
principle for all Gabor frames
Lattice vibrations and structural instability in Cesium near the cubic to tetragonal transition
Under pressure cesium undergoes a transition from a high-pressure fcc phase
(Cs-II) to a collapsed fcc phase (Cs-III) near 4.2GPa. At 4.4GPa there follows
a transition to the tetragonal Cs-IV phase. In order to investigate the lattice
vibrations in the fcc phase and seek a possible dynamical instability of the
lattice, the phonon spectra of fcc-Cs at volumes near the III-IV transition are
calculated using Savrasov's density functional linear-response LMTO method.
Compared with quasiharmonic model calculations including non-central
interatomic forces up to second neighbours, at the volume (
is the experimental volume of bcc-Cs with =6.048{\AA}), the
linear-response calculations show soft intermediate wavelength
phonons. Similar softening is also observed for
short wavelength and phonons and intermediate
wavelength phonons. The Born-von K\'{a}rm\'{a}n analysis of
dispersion curves indicates that the interplanar force constants exhibit
oscillating behaviours against plane spacing and the large softening of
intermediate wavelength phonons results from a
negative (110)-interplanar force-constant . The frequencies of the
phonons with around 1/3 become imaginary
and the fcc structure becomes dynamically unstable for volumes below .
It is suggested that superstructures corresponding to the
soft mode should be present as a precursor of tetragonal Cs-IV structure.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure
Examining the crossover from hadronic to partonic phase in QCD
It is argued that, due to the existence of two vacua -- perturbative and
physical -- in QCD, the mechanism for the crossover from hadronic to partonic
phase is hard to construct. The challenge is: how to realize the transition
between the two vacua during the gradual crossover of the two phases. A
possible solution of this problem is proposed and a mechanism for crossover,
consistent with the principle of QCD, is constructed. The essence of this
mechanism is the appearance and growing up of a kind of grape-shape
perturbative vacuum inside the physical one. A dynamical percolation model
based on a simple dynamics for the delocalization of partons is constructed to
exhibit this mechanism. The crossover from hadronic matter to sQGP as well as
the transition from sQGP to wQGP in the increasing of temperature is
successfully described by using this model with a temperature dependent
parameter.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Stellar Oscillations Network Group
Stellar Oscillations Network Group (SONG) is an initiative aimed at designing
and building a network of 1m-class telescopes dedicated to asteroseismology and
planet hunting. SONG will have 8 identical telescope nodes each equipped with a
high-resolution spectrograph and an iodine cell for obtaining precision radial
velocities and a CCD camera for guiding and imaging purposes. The main
asteroseismology targets for the network are the brightest (V<6) stars. In
order to improve performance and reduce maintenance costs the instrumentation
will only have very few modes of operation. In this contribution we describe
the motivations for establishing a network, the basic outline of SONG and the
expected performance.Comment: Proc. Vienna Workshop on the Future of Asteroseismology, 20 - 22
September 2006. Comm. in Asteroseismology, Vol. 150, in the pres
77Se NMR Investigation of the K(x)Fe(2-y)Se(2) High Tc Superconductor (Tc=33K)
We report a comprehensive 77Se NMR study of the structural, magnetic, and
superconducting properties of a single crystalline sample of the newly
discovered FeSe-based high temperature superconductor K(x)Fe(2-y)Se(2) (Tc=33K)
in a broad temperature range up to 290 K. We will compare our results with
those reported for FeSe (Tc=9K) and FeAs-based high Tc systems.Comment: Final versio
Integral field spectroscopy of QSO host galaxies
We describe a project to study the state of the ISM in ~20 low redshift
(z<0.3) QSO host galaxies observed with the PMAS integral field spectrograph.
We describe method developement to access the stellar and gas component of the
spectrum without the strong nuclear emission to access the host galaxy
properties also in the central region. It shows that integral field
spectroscopy promises to be very efficient to study the gas distribution and
its velocity field, and also spatially resolved stellar population in the host
galaxies also of luminous AGN.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, Euro3D Science Workshop, Cambridge, May 2003, AN,
accepte
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