Application of Market Models to Network Equilibrium Problems

We present a general two-side market model with divisible commodities and price functions of participants. A general existence result on unbounded sets is obtained from its variational inequality re-formulation. We describe an extension of the network flow equilibrium problem with elastic demands and a new equilibrium type model for resource allocation problems in wireless communication networks, which appear to be particular cases of the general market model. This enables us to obtain new existence results for these models as some adjustments of that for the market model. Under certain additional conditions the general market model can be reduced to a decomposable optimization problem where the goal function is the sum of two functions and one of them is convex separable, whereas the feasible set is the corresponding Cartesian product. We discuss some versions of the partial linearization method, which can be applied to these network equilibrium problems.Comment: 18 pages, 3 table

Governance structure and Operating Performance of Japanese Major Banks

近年，銀行の経営破綻が相次ぎ，金融システムの不安定性が高まっている。そのため，銀行のガバナンス構造を明らかにし，銀行経営の効率性を高めることは喫緊の課題である。ところで，非金融企業と異なり預金という特殊な負債を保有する銀行の場合，株主によるガバナンスが重要である。本稿では， 1990年から1998年をサンプル期間として，日本の大手銀行18行のパネル・データを用いて，株式所有構造の変化，株式所有構造と経営効率性および労働分配率との関係を分析した。その結果，①銀行の株式所有構造は経営効率性を重視する株主の保有比率が上昇する傾向にあること，②銀行経営に対して株主は経営効率性を高める方向で影響を与えていること，③株式保有比率が高いほど労働分配率が低下すること，すなわち株主への分配が多くなる傾向があること，の3点が明らかになった。従って，少なくとも1990年代において，銀行のガバナンス構造は株主への利益分配を重視する「新古典派型企業」としての性格を示していると言える

The effect of magnetic and electric fields on the processes of food freezing

The article summarizes the results of studies based on scientific publications on the effect of magnetic fields (MF) and electric fields (EF) on the kinetics of freezing processes applied onto biological tissue and on their properties. The processes of freezing food media on installations equipped with the Cells Alive System (CAS) magnetic system manufactured by ABI Co., Ltd., Japan are considered in this article. It is shown that the majority of researchers did not confirm the benefits claimed by the CAS system developers in comparison with the processes of fast freezing in the chambers without the magnetic field. In the case of using the alternating magnetic fields (AMF) with high field induction values, the effect is more pronounced. The application of strong static or alternating EF contributes to the creation of a fine-grained structure of ice, reduces the freezing duration and decreases mass loss during the food thawing

A Short Counterexample Property for Safety and Liveness Verification of Fault-tolerant Distributed Algorithms

Distributed algorithms have many mission-critical applications ranging from embedded systems and replicated databases to cloud computing. Due to asynchronous communication, process faults, or network failures, these algorithms are difficult to design and verify. Many algorithms achieve fault tolerance by using threshold guards that, for instance, ensure that a process waits until it has received an acknowledgment from a majority of its peers. Consequently, domain-specific languages for fault-tolerant distributed systems offer language support for threshold guards. We introduce an automated method for model checking of safety and liveness of threshold-guarded distributed algorithms in systems where the number of processes and the fraction of faulty processes are parameters. Our method is based on a short counterexample property: if a distributed algorithm violates a temporal specification (in a fragment of LTL), then there is a counterexample whose length is bounded and independent of the parameters. We prove this property by (i) characterizing executions depending on the structure of the temporal formula, and (ii) using commutativity of transitions to accelerate and shorten executions. We extended the ByMC toolset (Byzantine Model Checker) with our technique, and verified liveness and safety of 10 prominent fault-tolerant distributed algorithms, most of which were out of reach for existing techniques.Comment: 16 pages, 11 pages appendi

Reactant Jetting in Unstable Detonation

We note the common existence of a supersonic jet structure locally embedded within a surrounding transonic flow field in the hitherto unrelated phenomena of unstable gaseous detonation and hypervelocity blunt body shock wave interaction. Extending prior results that demonstrate the consequences of reduced endothermic reaction rate for the supersonic jet fluid in the blunt body case, we provide an explanation for observations of locally reduced OH PLIF signal in images of the keystone reaction zone structure of weakly unstable detonations. Modeling these flow features as exothermically reacting jets with similarly reduced reaction rates, we demonstrate a mechanism for jetting of bulk pockets of unreacted fluid with potentially differing kinetic pathways into the region behind the primary detonation front of strongly unstable mixtures. We examine the impact of mono-atomic and diatomic diluents on transverse structure. The results yield insight into the mechanisms of transition and characteristic features of both weakly and strongly unstable mixtures

Implementation of Fault-tolerant Quantum Logic Gates via Optimal Control

The implementation of fault-tolerant quantum gates on encoded logic qubits is considered. It is shown that transversal implementation of logic gates based on simple geometric control ideas is problematic for realistic physical systems suffering from imperfections such as qubit inhomogeneity or uncontrollable interactions between qubits. However, this problem can be overcome by formulating the task as an optimal control problem and designing efficient algorithms to solve it. In particular, we can find solutions that implement all of the elementary logic gates in a fixed amount of time with limited control resources for the five-qubit stabilizer code. Most importantly, logic gates that are extremely difficult to implement using conventional techniques even for ideal systems, such as the T-gate for the five-qubit stabilizer code, do not appear to pose a problem for optimal control.Comment: 18 pages, ioptex, many figure