Financial Competitiveness of Macau in Comparison with Other Gaming Destinations

This paper analyzes the financial competitiveness of the Macau gaming industry visa- vis its counterparts in North America and Europe. The analysis covers casino product structure, revenue composition, assets productivity and financial returns of Macau versus those of gaming destinations in North America and Europe. The findings reveal that while Macau is advantageously positioned in terms of assets productivity and financial returns, its casino product structure and revenue composition seem at odds with today\u27s gaming trend. Macau is facing challenges from emerging competitors in Asia. To maintain a stable gaming revenue growth and retain its competitiveness, Macau must modify its casino product structure and revenue composition. Pursuing a more diversified market is a critical step towards the goal

RoadRunner: Infrastructure-less vehicular congestion control

RoadRunner is an in-vehicle app for traffic congestion control without costly roadside infrastructure, instead judiciously harnessing vehicle-to-vehicle communications, cellular connectivity, and onboard computation and sensing to enable large-scale traffic congestion control at higher penetration and finer granularity than previously possible. RoadRunner limits the number of vehicles in a congested region or road by requiring each to possess a token for entry. Tokens can circulate and be reused among multiple vehicles as vehicles move between regions. We built RoadRunner as an Android app utilizing LTE, 802.11p, and 802.11n radios, deployed it on 10 vehicles, and measured cellular access reductions of up to 84% and response time improvements of up to 80%. In a microscopic agent-based traffic simulator, RoadRunner achieved travel speed improvements of up to 7.7% over an industry-strength electronic road pricing system.Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and TechnologyAmerican Society for Engineering Education. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowshi

Isospin-Violating Dark Matter in the Sun

We consider the prospects for studying spin-independent isospin-violating dark matter-nucleon interactions with neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the Sun, with a focus on IceCube/DeepCore (IC/DC). If dark matter-nucleon interactions are isospin violating, IC/DC's reach in the spin-independent cross section may be competitive with current direct detection experiments for a wide range of dark matter masses. We also compare IC/DC's sensitivity to that of next generation argon, germanium, neon and xenon based detectors.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, PDFLaTeX, journal versio

Large-Scale Pairwise Sequence Alignments on a Large-Scale GPU Cluster

This paper presents design of a GPU kernel for performing pairwise sequence alignments for large-scale short sequence datasets generated by nextgeneration sequencers. This kernel principally performs batch Needleman– Wunsch global alignments. When used with its MPI-based host software, the kernel is scalable and is capable of achieving high throughput alignment when run on a CPU-GPU cluster