Wages and Utilities in a Closed Economy

The broad objective of this paper is to propose a mathematical model for the study of causes of wage inequality and relate it to choices of consumption, the technologies of production, and the composition of labor in an economy. The paper constructs a Simple Closed Model, or an SCM, for short, for closed economies, in which the consumption and the production parts are clearly separated and yet coupled. The model is established as a specialization of the Arrow-Debreu model and its equilibria correspond directly with those of the general Arrow-Debreu model. The formulation allows us to identify the combinatorial data which link parameters of the economic system with its equilibria, in particular, the impact of consumer preferences on wages. The SCM model also allows the formulation and explicit construction of the consumer choice game, where expressed utilities of various labor classes serve as strategies with total or relative wages as the pay-offs. We illustrate, through examples, the mathematical details of the consumer choice game. We show that consumer preferences, expressed through modified utility functions, do indeed percolate through the economy, and influence not only prices but also production and wages. Thus, consumer choice may serve as an effective tool for wage redistribution

Building Reliable Air-Travel Infrastructure Using Empirical Data and Stochastic Models of Airline Networks

Flight delays have been a growing issue and they have reached an all-time high in recent years, with the airlines’ on-time performance at its worst level in 2007 since 1995. The goal of this paper is to build stochastic models of airline networks and utilize publicly available data to answer the following policy questions: Which are the bottleneck airports in the US air-travel infrastructure? How would increasing airport capacity at these airports alleviate delay propagation? What are the appropriate metrics for measuring the robustness of airline schedules? How could these schedules be made more robust? Which flight in an aircraft rotation is a bottleneck flight? The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we develop stochastic models, using empirical data, to analyze the propagation of delays through air-transportation networks. Second, our analysis enables us to make policy recommendations regarding managing bottleneck resources in the air-travel infrastructure

Specific Energy Absorption Improvement of Rear Crash Attenuator by Numerical Modelling for Various Angles of Impact

This research* aims on developing a reliable finite element framework to investigate the Specific Energy Absorption (SEA) of the rear crash attenuator of an open-wheel type Indycar vehicle. A meshed model representing the crash structure was designed and its failure behaviour was learnt on the basis of various non-linear finite element modelling techniques to simulate a crash as per regulations from the governing body of Indycar. All the numerical analysis was performed utilizing the LS-DYNA software with the Progressive Failure Model (PFM) and Continuum Damage Model (CDM) of MAT058_LAMINATED_COMPOSITE_FABRIC card. The sandwich structure material characterization for the tuning of the material model was done by the means of a correlation with experimental data and adjusting the non-physical input parameters in the software. Post calibration, the development of the rear impact attenuator was performed with the model. A combined failure mode was observed with a gradual crushing phenomenon during the analysis on head-on impacts (0°) while in case of oblique impacts performed at 30° off axis shows the structure failing at its rear attachment points to the bulkhead. The specific energy absorption was determined at different configurations of impact of this reinforced sandwich structure by evaluating the force over a crushed displacement. The layup was adjusted, the sensitive points at the attachments were stiffened, and the core thickness was varied throughout the structure to improve the overall specific energy absorption by 27.8% with a gradual deceleration value to that of the prescribed. Finally, the results were compared to the previous Indycar structure and the rear crash attenuator was redesigned with highlights of the refreshed results

Providing accurate course/video recommendations in E-Learning environment using association rule mining and collaborative filtering

Internet has huge number of learning resources, reason why students fail to take benefit of those is because they don't know where to look for resources, and more importantly which of these will be ideal for their respective academics. To provide related content to students most of the institutes uses different E-Learning solutions which acts as a repository of learning resources for students.These E-learning solutions often don't provide personalized recommendations to users. We propose an E-Learning solution which provides users with recommendations based on his/her preferences and content consumed by similar students, further more system we propose provide all the facilities like course sharing between two universities, online tests, analytics etc. in one software. Collaborative filtering and its modifications is one of the most commonly used recommendation algorithm. Collaborative Filtering find people with similar interests, analyze their behavior derived from their ratings, and recommend target user the same items. As online social networks are growing, users can now make friends, share thoughts, images etc. on the Internet and express different level of trust on their web friends. Recommendations generated by the trusted friends are more relevant than other users. This paper proposes a video recommendation system that generates recommendations from the collaboration of trusted friends of the target user and uses association rule mining to capture current trends of users in the network

Acanthamoeba Encephalitis in Patient with Systemic Lupus, India

We report a fatal case of encephalitis caused by Acanthamoeba in a 24-year-old woman from India with systemic lupus erythematosus. Diagnosis was made by identification of amebas in brain sections by immunofluorescence analysis and confirmed by demonstrating Acanthamoeba mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene DNA in brain tissue sections

Interaction of Rep and DnaB on DNA

Genome duplication requires not only unwinding of the template but also the displacement of proteins bound to the template, a function performed by replicative helicases located at the fork. However, accessory helicases are also needed since the replicative helicase stalls occasionally at nucleoprotein complexes. In Escherichia coli, the primary and accessory helicases DnaB and Rep translocate along the lagging and leading strand templates, respectively, interact physically and also display cooperativity in the unwinding of model forked DNA substrates. We demonstrate here that this cooperativity is displayed only by Rep and not by other tested helicases. ssDNA must be exposed on the leading strand template to elicit this cooperativity, indicating that forks blocked at protein–DNA complexes contain ssDNA ahead of the leading strand polymerase. However, stable Rep–DnaB complexes can form on linear as well as branched DNA, indicating that Rep has the capacity to interact with ssDNA on either the leading or the lagging strand template at forks. Inhibition of Rep binding to the lagging strand template by competition with SSB might therefore be critical in targeting accessory helicases to the leading strand template, indicating an important role for replisome architecture in promoting accessory helicase function at blocked replisomes

Optimal video sensing strategy and performance analysis for wireless video sensors under delay constraints

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file viewed on (July 17, 2006)Includes bibliographical references.Thesis (M.S.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2005.Dissertations, Academic -- University of Missouri--Columbia -- Electrical engineering.[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a system of spatially distributed sensors that capture, process and transmit information over a mobile wireless ad-hoc network. In wireless video sensor network (WVSN), each sensor, equipped with video capture and processing capabilities, is tasked to capture digital video information about the target event or situation, and deliver the video data to the remote control unit (RCU) for further information analysis and decision making. Very little research has been done to analyze the application-level performance of the individual sensor node. Unlike the conventional types of sensors, the video sensor needs to perform complex data compression, and the video data has large bandwidth requirement and stringent delay constraint, and is highly error sensitive. Therefore, it is necessary to develop theories and technologies to analyze, control, and optimize the complex behavior of individual sensors in the WVSN. In this work, we will analyze the video sensing behavior of the individual nodes and explore its performance limit. We try to develop an answer for the following research question: given a video sensor with an initial resource configuration, what is the maximum application-level performance it can achieve, and what is the optimum video sensing strategy to achieve this performance? In this work, we will develop a framework to analyze the performance of a mobile wireless video sensor under the delay constraint. We will analyze the R-D behavior of the video encoder and study the impact of packet loss on the decoded picture quality. Based on the concept of effective capacity, we will analyze the queuing behavior of the transmission buffer when the channel service rate is time varying. Based on the R-D model for source coding, the transmission distortion for wireless transmission, and the effective capacity model for queuing analysis, we will formulate the end-to-end distortion minimization problem, and determine the optimum operational bit rate for the video encoder