The State of Illinois Manufacturing

The strength of the manufacturing sector is fundamental to the overall economic performance of Illinois and the U.S. as a whole. The manufacturing sector in Illinois create large numbers of jobs that pay high wages to workers, purchases more goods and services from within the state than any other sector, and constitutes a main component of the state export economy. For these and other reasons, manufacturing needs be at the center of all government discussions on economic policy.The Center for Labor and Community Research (CLCR) was commissioned by the Illinois Manufacturers' Association to analyze the condition of the Illinois manufacturing sector. We found that Illinois manufacturing is essential to Illinois' economy, and although it is among the top manufacturing states in the country, it faces a number of challenges. This report demonstrates why and how Illinois manufacturing matters, explains the current challenges it faces, and recommends actions to overcome some of these challenges. In addition to looking at manufacturing as a whole, this report looks at four key manufacturing sectors, or clusters, that together account for 64% of manufacturing employment in the state. These are the metals, electrical, printing, and food manufacturing sectors.A few key findings that CLCR uncovered in this study include the following: Manufacturing is vital to the state's economy and workers. Manufacturing exports create significant employment opportunities in Illinois, and the state's manufacturing workers are the most productive in the nation by far.Like other U.S. states, Illinois faces increasing competition from low-wage producers in the developing world as well as from highly skilled producers in developed countries. In order to remain competitive into the future, the sector requires increased investments in its infrastructure and workers and an improved workforce development system in order to increase the value-added component of their products.The Illinois manufacturing sector needs a "High Road" partnership with government and labor to increase investment in infrastructure and workforce development, to support the sector by creating specialized service centers that provide assistance to Illinois companies, and to effectively using public subsidies to reward and assist those companies that are pursuing High Road strategies of innovation and development

Nonlinear Modeling and Verification of a Heaving Point Absorber for Wave Energy Conversion

Although the heaving Point Absorber (PA) concept is well known in wave energy conversion research, few studies focus on appropriate modelling of non-linear fluid viscous and mechanical friction dynamics. Even though these concepts are known to have non-linear effects on the hydrodynamic system, most research studies consider linearity as a starting point and in so doing have a weak approach to modelling the true dynamic behaviour, particularly close to resonance. The sole use of linear modelling leads to limited ability to develop control strategies capable of true power capture optimisation and suitable device operation. Based on a 1/50 scale cylindrical heaving PA, this research focuses on a strategy for hydrodynamic model development and experimental verification. In this study, nonlinear dynamics are considered, including the lumped effect of the fluid viscous and mechanical friction forces. The excellent correspondence between the derived non-linear model and wave tank tested PA behaviours provides a strong background for wave energy tuning and control system design

Global Shipbuilding, Who Will be the Leader? South Korea or China?

Shipbuilding is an industry that most developing countries strategically choose as a long term development plan. South Korea has also developed the shipbuilding industry as a part of governmental plan. Since 2000, South Korea has kept the leading position in the industry and seems to be dominant until in the middle of the 2010’s. South Korea’s biggest strength is design capability and technological superiority which should enable them to promptly reflect customer needs. In addition, a relatively abundant workforce, openness to innovation, strong R&D investment and the development of the related industries will also play key roles to remaining competitive in the industry. Meanwhile, China has become the second largest shipbuilder in the industry since 2006. A China’s soaring economic growth has been a big push for the shipbuilding and related industries as well. As of January 2007, China has 51% of orders place worldwide, which includes an 81% share of the low end vessel market. China is now threatening not only South Korea but also all shipbuilding countries with its price competitiveness, aggressive capacity expansion and technological cooperation with western countries. However, there are factors that may impact the two countries in a severe manner. World shipbuilding overcapacity is clearly forecast which may cause fierce price competition and a lack of a skilled workforce is expected to be a negative impact in the future. In spite of this, the future outlook for the industry is still positive. An expected boom in the LNG market is a good sign for both South Korea and China. The cruise ship market is another opportunity for South Korea to remain competitive in the future. Consequently, South Korea and China may have bright futures. The intense competition may start from the middle of the 2010’s and the key to survive and to be more competitive through technology development. A country with superior technology will be more likely to lead the shipbuilding industry in the future

Regional economic status inference from information flow and talent mobility

Novel data has been leveraged to estimate socioeconomic status in a timely manner, however, direct comparison on the use of social relations and talent movements remains rare. In this letter, we estimate the regional economic status based on the structural features of the two networks. One is the online information flow network built on the following relations on social media, and the other is the offline talent mobility network built on the anonymized resume data of job seekers with higher education. We find that while the structural features of both networks are relevant to economic status, the talent mobility network in a relatively smaller size exhibits a stronger predictive power for the gross domestic product (GDP). In particular, a composite index of structural features can explain up to about 84% of the variance in GDP. The result suggests future socioeconomic studies to pay more attention to the cost-effective talent mobility data.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Changes of dependency structure in East Asia from 1990 to 2000:Analysis by intermediate input according to sector

This paper attempts to interpret the situation surrounding the development of regional economy integration in East Asia by examining the degree of self-dependency and dependency on foreign countries in this region by using the International Input-Output (IIO) approach. We show that the economic interdependency in East Asia grew stronger from 1990 to 2000, with a strong upturn of the interdependency on China and Korea, and a downturn of dependency on Japan in this region. Moreover, our analysis suggests that dependency on foreign countries is increasing and self-dependency is decreasing. ASEAN4 was largely dependent on Japan, China and Korea, whereas Japan, China and Korea were largely dependent on other countries.From the fall of self-dependency in the heavy industries sectors and the decrease of dependency in sectors like the iron and steel, we can know that the economic effect of ASEAN4, China, Korea and Japan is seeping into other regions. Therefore, strong efforts should be made to strengthen the economic cooperation in this region in the future

A One-Class Support Vector Machine Calibration Method for Time Series Change Point Detection

It is important to identify the change point of a system's health status, which usually signifies an incipient fault under development. The One-Class Support Vector Machine (OC-SVM) is a popular machine learning model for anomaly detection and hence could be used for identifying change points; however, it is sometimes difficult to obtain a good OC-SVM model that can be used on sensor measurement time series to identify the change points in system health status. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for calibrating OC-SVM models. The approach uses a heuristic search method to find a good set of input data and hyperparameters that yield a well-performing model. Our results on the C-MAPSS dataset demonstrate that OC-SVM can also achieve satisfactory accuracy in detecting change point in time series with fewer training data, compared to state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. In our case study, the OC-SVM calibrated by the proposed model is shown to be useful especially in scenarios with limited amount of training data

Is Y(4008)Y(4008) possibly a 1−−1^{--} ψ(33S1)\psi(3^3S_1) state?

The strong decays of the radially excited $\psi(3^3S_1)$ state are studied within the $^3P_0$ model. As a believed $\psi(3^3S_1)$, some strong decay widths and relevant ratios of $\psi(4040)$ are calculated in the model. The theoretical results are consistent with experiments. In a similar way, as a possible $\psi(3^3S_1)$, the same strong decay widths and relevant ratios of $Y(4008)$ are presented. Our study indicates that $Y(4008)$ is hard to be identified with a $\psi(3^3S_1)$ charmonium once it is confirmed under the $D^*\bar{D}^*$ threshold, but it is very possibly a $\psi(3^3S_1)$ charmonium once it is confirmed above the $D^*\bar{D}^*$ threshold by experiment.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 6 tables, RevTe