Interjurisdictional Housing Prices and Spatial Amenities: Which Measures of Housing Prices Reflect Local Public Goods?

Understanding the spatial variation in housing prices plays a crucial role in topics ranging from the cost of living to quality-of-life indices to studies of public goods and household mobility. Yet analysts have not reached a consensus on the best source of such data, variously using self-reported values from the census, transactions values, tax assessments, and rental values. Additionally, while most studies use micro-level data, some have used summary statistics such as the median housing value. Assessing neighborhood price indices in Los Angeles, we find that indices based on transactions prices are highly correlated with indices based on self-reported values, but the former are better correlated with public goods. Moreover, rental values have a higher correlation with public goods and income levels than either asset-value measure. Finally, indices based on median values are poorly correlated with the other indices, public goods, and income.

Evaluation of distributed gas cooling of pressurized PAFC for utility power generation

A proof-of-concept test for a gas-cooled pressurized phosphoric acid fuel cell is described. After initial feasibility studies in short stacks, two 10 kW stacks are tested. Progress includes: (1) completion of design of the test stations with a recirculating gas cooling loop; (2) atmospheric testing of the baseline stack

Image Indexing and Retrieval

The amount of pictorial data has been growing enormously with the expansion of WWW. From the large number of images, it is very important for users to retrieve required images via an efficient and effective mechanism. To solve the image retrieval problem, many techniques have been devised addressing the requirement of different applications. Problem of the traditional methods of image indexing have led to the rise of interest in techniques for retrieving images on the basis of automatically derived features such as color, texture and shape… a technology generally referred as Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). After decade of intensive research, CBIR technology is now beginning to move out of the laboratory into the marketplace. However, the technology still lacks maturity and is not yet being used in a significant scale

An examination of the determinants of corporate ownership structure in an emerging market context / Omar Al Farooque

Using historical data, this study investigates the determinants of corporate ownership structure in an emerging economy in the context of two different but interactive policy directions (or reversal of policy) of market regulators. It also highlights the effectiveness of importing Anglo-Saxon governance models to emerging markets in the name of promoting ‘good corporate governance’. Based on established literature, a single equation approach is applied on a pooled sample of 490 observations listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange over eight years to identify whether measures of corporate performance and other governance factors do contribute in shaping ownership structure. The findings indicate that while there is support for reducing board ownership level, there is no such support for reducing Top 1 shareholder’s ownership level. It suggests that the ownership restriction imposed by the SEC is unjustified and detrimental to firm performance/growth in emerging countries like Bangladesh. The study has implications for stakeholders, regulators and policy makers to revisit their attempts to limit the founder-family ownership holdings

A sequent calculus with procedure calls

The proof of Cut-elimination is unfortunately bugged. It is repaired in "Sequent Calculi with procedure calls", hal-00779199, v4In this paper, we extend Miller-Liang's system LKF into a calculus LK(T), allowing calls to a decision procedure. We prove cut-elimination of LK(T)

Make Semantic Analysis of Opinions about social networking using Blog Search Engines

There is no consensus amongst the academic communities weather Social media is a boon or bane for the students.  Semantic analysis and blog search was used to get extracts opinions of the bloggers regarding various aspects of using social media in education and employment

Diplomacy and Democracy Avert Indo-Pak Crisis 1986-87

After a long break of almost 15 years, the world witnessed another crisis in1986-87 between two South Asian rivals but this time it was little bit different one. This crisis indicated a new dimension in Indo-Pak confrontations. The world embraced when the leaders of the two countries stated publicly that they are in a position to manufacture and use nuclear weapons. This article tries to look into 1986-87 crisis to know whether nuclear deterrence prevailed during the crisis or not.  The article finds that 1986-87 crisis was having the conventional dimension and didn’t have any nuclear dimension as India and Pakistan were not in a position to manufacture nuclear weapons at the times of crisis. Though the leaders of the two countries threatened each other with the use of nuclear weapons but these were only verbal threats but in fact both India and Pakistan knew that no one of them possessed nuclear weapons during the crisis. The article further finds that it was diplomacy and democracy which played a very important role in reducing the tension and averting crisis between India and Pakistan

Nuclear Deterrence: A complete failure at Kargil

There is a perception since long that the nuclear weapon states cannot opt for war against each other. The proponents of nuclear deterrence quote the example of the United States and Soviet Union to strengthen their view point that the two major world powers didn’t opt for direct confrontation during the cold war era. This concept failed to get its legitimacy after a limited war between the two South Asian nuclear weapon states in 1999. Kargil war directly challenged the proliferation optimists and forced them to change their perceptions on the nuclear deterrence theory. This article looks at the role of nuclear deterrence in averting war between India and Pakistan at Kargil. It finds that nuclear deterrence failed to avert Kargil war and the nuclearization of South Asia further contributed in the worsening of the crisis due to different understandings of the nuclear deterrence theory on the two sides. It also finds that it was international community’s pressure which forced the two states to bring their forces to normal positions

A bisimulation between DPLL(T) and a proof-search strategy for the focused sequent calculus

International audienceWe describe how the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland proced- ure DPLL is bisimilar to the goal-directed proof-search mechanism described by a standard but carefully chosen sequent calculus. We thus relate a procedure described as a transition system on states to the gradual completion of incomplete proof-trees. For this we use a focused sequent calculus for polarised clas- sical logic, for which we allow analytic cuts. The focusing mech- anisms, together with an appropriate management of polarities, then allows the bisimulation to hold: The class of sequent calculus proofs that are the images of the DPLL runs finishing on UNSAT, is identified with a simple criterion involving polarities. We actually provide those results for a version DPLL(T ) of the procedure that is parameterised by a background theory T for which we can decide whether conjunctions of literals are con- sistent. This procedure is used for Satisfiability Modulo Theor- ies (SMT) generalising propositional SAT. For this, we extend the standard focused sequent calculus for propositional logic in the same way DPLL(T ) extends DPLL: with the ability to call the de- cision procedure for T . DPLL(T ) is implemented as a plugin for P SYCHE, a proof- search engine for this sequent calculus, to provide a sequent- calculus based SMT-solver

Two simulations about DPLL(T)

In this paper we relate different formulations of the DPLL(T) procedure. The first formulation is based on a system of rewrite rules, which we denote DPLL(T). The second formulation is an inference system of, which we denote LKDPLL(T). The third formulation is the application of a standard proof-search mechanism in a sequent calculus LKp(T) introduced here. We formalise an encoding from DPLL(T) to LKDPLL(T) that was, to our knowledge, never explicitly given and, in the case where DPLL(T) is extended with backjumping and Lemma learning, never even implicitly given. We also formalise an encoding from LKDPLL(T) to LKp(T), building on Ivan Gazeau's previous work: we extend his work in that we handle the "-modulo-Theory" aspect of SAT-modulo-theory, by extending the sequent calculus to allow calls to a theory solver (seen as a blackbox). We also extend his work in that we handle advanced features of DPLL such as backjumping and Lemma learning, etc. Finally, we re fine the approach by starting to formalise quantitative aspects of the simulations: the complexity is preserved (number of steps to build complete proofs). Other aspects remain to be formalised (non-determinism of the search / width of search space)