Designing community care systems with AUML

This paper describes an approach to developing an appropriate agent environment appropriate for use in community care applications. Key to its success is that software designers collaborate with environment builders to provide the levels of cooperation and support required within an integrated agent–oriented community system. Agent-oriented Unified Modeling Language (AUML) is a practical approach to the analysis, design, implementation and management of such an agent-based system, whilst providing the power and expressiveness necessary to support the specification, design and organization of a health care service. The background of an agent-based community care application to support the elderly is described. Our approach to building agent–oriented software development solutions emphasizes the importance of AUML as a fundamental initial step in producing more general agent–based architectures. This approach aims to present an effective methodology for an agent software development process using a service oriented approach, by addressing the agent decomposition, abstraction, and organization characteristics, whilst reducing its complexity by exploiting AUML’s productivity potential. </p

Trends in Black-White Test-Score Differentials

Until the 1970s, there were few signs of change in the historic difference of one standard deviation between average ability or achievement test scores of blacks and whites in the United States. From about 1970 to the mid- to late 1980s, there was a substantial convergence of the average achievement test scores of black and white youth; however, from the mid- to late 1980s to 1992, test scores began to diverge again. Although we place the greatest weight on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the convergence also appeared in other test series. Herrnstein and Murray's highly visible work, The Bell Curve, stands almost alone in minimizing the importance of the convergent trend. We also find a longer-term trend of convergence between the verbal abilities of blacks and whites in data from the General Social Survey (GSS), which covers adult cohorts born since 1909.

Interacting non-minimally coupled canonical, phantom and quintom models of holographic dark energy in non-flat universe

Motivated by our recent work \cite{set1}, we generalize this work to the interacting non-flat case. Therefore in this paper we deal with canonical, phantom and quintom models, with the various fields being non-minimally coupled to gravity, within the framework of interacting holographic dark energy. We employ the holographic model of interacting dark energy to obtain the equation of state for the holographic energy density in non-flat (closed) universe enclosed by the event horizon measured from the sphere of horizon named $L$.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in IJMPD (2010

Adaptive Electricity Scheduling in Microgrids

Microgrid (MG) is a promising component for future smart grid (SG) deployment. The balance of supply and demand of electric energy is one of the most important requirements of MG management. In this paper, we present a novel framework for smart energy management based on the concept of quality-of-service in electricity (QoSE). Specifically, the resident electricity demand is classified into basic usage and quality usage. The basic usage is always guaranteed by the MG, while the quality usage is controlled based on the MG state. The microgrid control center (MGCC) aims to minimize the MG operation cost and maintain the outage probability of quality usage, i.e., QoSE, below a target value, by scheduling electricity among renewable energy resources, energy storage systems, and macrogrid. The problem is formulated as a constrained stochastic programming problem. The Lyapunov optimization technique is then applied to derive an adaptive electricity scheduling algorithm by introducing the QoSE virtual queues and energy storage virtual queues. The proposed algorithm is an online algorithm since it does not require any statistics and future knowledge of the electricity supply, demand and price processes. We derive several "hard" performance bounds for the proposed algorithm, and evaluate its performance with trace-driven simulations. The simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed electricity scheduling algorithm.Comment: 12 pages, extended technical repor

Thermodynamics of interacting entropy-corrected holographic dark energy in a non-flat FRW universe

A so-called "entropy-corrected holographic dark energy" (ECHDE), was recently proposed to explain the dark energy-dominated universe with the help of quantum corrections to the entropy-area relation in the setup of loop quantum cosmology. Using this new definition, we investigate its thermodynamical features including entropy and energy conservation. We describe the thermodynamical interpretation of the interaction between ECHDE and dark matter in a non-flat universe. We obtain a relation between the interaction term of the dark components and thermal fluctuation. Our study further generalizes the earlier works [M.R. Setare and E.C. Vagenas, Phys. Lett. B 666 (2008) 111; B. Wang et al., Phys. Lett. B 662 (2008) 1] in this direction.Comment: 14 pages, no figure, accepted by Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Understanding Internal Capital Markets and Corporate Policies

This study looks inside a large retail-banking group to understand how corporate politics affect internal capital allocation. The group consists of a headquarters organization and about 150 member banks which own the headquarters. Our data is from the firm’s managerial accounting system and covers all cash flows, internal capital transfers, and investments at the local member bank level. We first show that a member bank’s investment (net loan growth) is generally not fully independent from its own cash flow (net deposit growth). Then we show that such constraints are not apparent at more influential member banks, where influence is measured by the divergence of voting rights from ownership rights. The more influential banks are allocated more funds from the headquarters, but also show more restraints in investments when experiencing large deposit inflows. Influence matters more among member banks requiring more information exchanges with the headquarters as a result of more volatile funding requests. Influence also matters more for small business loans, which contain more soft information, than for standardized residential mortgage loans. These results suggest that corporate politics can be used to address allocation inefficiencies resulting from information asymmetries between the headquarters and divisions (member banks in our case).internal capital markets;capital markets;retail banking;corporate politics