Towards Economic Models for MOOC Pricing Strategy Design

MOOCs have brought unprecedented opportunities of making high-quality courses accessible to everybody. However, from the business point of view, MOOCs are often challenged for lacking of sustainable business models, and academic research for marketing strategies of MOOCs is also a blind spot currently. In this work, we try to formulate the business models and pricing strategies in a structured and scientific way. Based on both theoretical research and real marketing data analysis from a MOOC platform, we present the insights of the pricing strategies for existing MOOC markets. We focus on the pricing strategies for verified certificates in the B2C markets, and also give ideas of modeling the course sub-licensing services in B2B markets

Is PPARβ/δ a Retinoid Receptor?

The broad ligand-binding characteristic of PPARβ/δ has long hampered identification of physiologically-meaningful ligands for the receptor. The observations that the activity of PPARβ/δ is supported by fatty acid binding protein 5 (FABP5), which directly delivers ligands from the cytosol to the receptor, suggest that bona fide PPARβ/δ ligands both activate the receptor, and trigger the nuclear translocation of FABP5. Using these criteria, it was recently demonstrated that all-trans-retinoic acid (RA), the activator of the classical retinoic acid receptor RAR, also serves as a ligand for PPARβ/δ. Partitioning of RA between its two receptors was found to be regulated by FABP5, which delivers it to PPARβ/δ, and cellular RA binding protein II (CRABP-II), which targets it to RAR. Consequently, RA activates PPARβ/δ in cells that display a high FABP5/CRABP-II expression ratio. It remains to be clarified whether compounds other than RA may also serve as endogenous activators for this highly promiscuous protein

Genome-wide association study for calving performance using high-density genotypes in dairy and beef cattle

peer-reviewedBackground Calving difficulty and perinatal mortality are prevalent in modern-day cattle production systems. It is well-established that there is a genetic component to both traits, yet little is known about their underlying genomic architecture, particularly in beef breeds. Therefore, we performed a genome-wide association study using high-density genotypes to elucidate the genomic architecture of these traits and to identify regions of the bovine genome associated with them. Results Genomic regions associated with calving difficulty (direct and maternal) and perinatal mortality were detected using two statistical approaches: (1) single-SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) regression and (2) a Bayesian approach. Data included high-density genotypes on 770 Holstein-Friesian, 927 Charolais and 963 Limousin bulls. Several novel or previously identified genomic regions were detected but associations differed by breed. For example, two genomic associations, one each on chromosomes 18 and 2 explained 2.49 % and 3.13 % of the genetic variance in direct calving difficulty in the Holstein-Friesian and Charolais populations, respectively. Imputed Holstein-Friesian sequence data was used to refine the genomic regions responsible for significant associations. Several candidate genes on chromosome 18 were identified and four highly significant missense variants were detected within three of these genes (SIGLEC12, CTU1, and ZNF615). Nevertheless, only CTU1 contained a missense variant with a putative impact on direct calving difficulty based on SIFT (0.06) and Polyphen (0.95) scores. Using imputed sequence data, we refined a genomic region on chromosome 4 associated with maternal calving difficulty in the Holstein-Friesian population and found the strongest association with an intronic variant in the PCLO gene. A meta-analysis was performed across the three breeds for each calving performance trait to identify common variants associated with these traits in the three breeds. Our results suggest that a portion of the genetic variation in calving performance is common to all three breeds. Conclusion The genomic architecture of calving performance is complex and mainly influenced by many polymorphisms of small effect. We identified several associations of moderate effect size but the majority were breed-specific, indicating that breed-specific alleles exist for calving performance or that the linkage phase between genotyped allele and causal mutation varies between breeds

The REVERE project:Experiments with the application of probabilistic NLP to systems engineering

Despite natural language’s well-documented shortcomings as a medium for precise technical description, its use in software-intensive systems engineering remains inescapable. This poses many problems for engineers who must derive problem understanding and synthesise precise solution descriptions from free text. This is true both for the largely unstructured textual descriptions from which system requirements are derived, and for more formal documents, such as standards, which impose requirements on system development processes. This paper describes experiments that we have carried out in the REVERE1 project to investigate the use of probabilistic natural language processing techniques to provide systems engineering support

Torsion in Milnor fiber homology

In a recent paper, Dimca and Nemethi pose the problem of finding a homogeneous polynomial f such that the homology of the complement of the hypersurface defined by f is torsion-free, but the homology of the Milnor fiber of f has torsion. We prove that this is indeed possible, and show by construction that, for each prime p, there is a polynomial with p-torsion in the homology of the Milnor fiber. The techniques make use of properties of characteristic varieties of hyperplane arrangements.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol3/agt-3-16.abs.htm

State Regulation of Franchising: The Washington Experience Revisited

Thirty-six years ago, and one year after Washington became the second state in the nation to enact a statute regulating franchise relationships, Professor Donald S. Chisum wrote the seminal article on franchising in Washington, State Regulation of Franchising: The Washington Experience. Professor Chisum\u27s article has been one of the few reference sources for Washington franchise law, and it has been the primary source relied on by courts addressing claims under Washington\u27s Franchise Investment Protection Act (FIPA). Since Professor Chisum originally published his article, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has promulgated and amended regulations governing the sale of franchises nationally, and two different groups have drafted uniform franchise acts. In Washington, the legislature significantly amended FIPA in 1991, and courts have addressed some of the unresolved issues under the statute. This Article assesses the changed state of franchise law in Washington. Part II considers the economic impact of franchising and the need for a review of franchising in Washington. Part III reviews the historical foundation for Washington\u27s current franchise laws, the context in which they were created, and the changes to franchise law that drive our modem understanding of FIPA today. Part IV addresses the current regulatory scheme in Washington, including practical considerations such as franchise registration, disclosure, and state enforcement powers. Finally, Part V addresses civil liability for violations of FIPA\u27s registration, disclosure, and relationship provisions

Correlations of chaotic eigenfunctions: a semiclassical analysis

We derive a semiclassical expression for an energy smoothed autocorrelation function defined on a group of eigenstates of the Schr\"odinger equation. The system we considered is an energy-conserved Hamiltonian system possessing time-invariant symmetry. The energy smoothed autocorrelation function is expressed as a sum of three terms. The first one is analogous to Berry's conjecture, which is a Bessel function of the zeroth order. The second and the third terms are trace formulae made from special trajectories. The second term is found to be direction dependent in the case of spacing averaging, which agrees qualitatively with previous numerical observations in high-lying eigenstates of a chaotic billiard.Comment: Revtex, 13 pages, 1 postscript figur

Signatures of Classical Periodic Orbits on a Smooth Quantum System

Gutzwiller's trace formula and Bogomolny's formula are applied to a non--specific, non--scalable Hamiltonian system, a two--dimensional anharmonic oscillator. These semiclassical theories reproduce well the exact quantal results over a large spatial and energy range.Comment: 12 pages, uuencoded postscript file (1526 kb