The Winner's Choice: Sustainable Economic Strategies for Successful 21st Century Regions

Throughout the second half of the 20th Century, urbanization, new technologies, rapid labor-saving productivity growth in primary industries, and improved highways combined to create large-scale rural-urban functionally integrated regions. These forces have raised the stakes for regions in their pursuit of economic development and growth, making successful regional policy even more important. Changes to the governance structures consistent with the increased interdependence within broad rural-urban regions will improve the region's competitiveness; adopting fad-based approaches and policies aimed at “picking winners” will be less fruitful. Going forward, continuing globalization and environmental sustainability have the potential to fundamentally reshape relative regional attractiveness.Regional Policy, Rural Development

Generalised Mixability, Constant Regret, and Bayesian Updating

Mixability of a loss is known to characterise when constant regret bounds are achievable in games of prediction with expert advice through the use of Vovk's aggregating algorithm. We provide a new interpretation of mixability via convex analysis that highlights the role of the Kullback-Leibler divergence in its definition. This naturally generalises to what we call $\Phi$-mixability where the Bregman divergence $D_\Phi$ replaces the KL divergence. We prove that losses that are $\Phi$-mixable also enjoy constant regret bounds via a generalised aggregating algorithm that is similar to mirror descent.Comment: 12 page

Raw Multi-Channel Audio Source Separation using Multi-Resolution Convolutional Auto-Encoders

Supervised multi-channel audio source separation requires extracting useful spectral, temporal, and spatial features from the mixed signals. The success of many existing systems is therefore largely dependent on the choice of features used for training. In this work, we introduce a novel multi-channel, multi-resolution convolutional auto-encoder neural network that works on raw time-domain signals to determine appropriate multi-resolution features for separating the singing-voice from stereo music. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve multi-channel audio source separation without the need for hand-crafted features or any pre- or post-processing

The design of an airfoil for a high-altitude, long-endurance remotely piloted vehicle

Airfoil design efforts are studied. The importance of integrating airfoil and aircraft designs was demonstrated. Realistic airfoil data was provided to aid future high altitude, long endurance aircraft preliminary design. Test cases were developed for further validation of the Eppler program. Boundary layer, not pressure distribution or shape, was designed. Substantial improvement was achieved in vehicle performance through mission specific airfoil designed utilizing the multipoint capability of the Eppler program

Relic density and CMB constraints on dark matter annihilation with Sommerfeld enhancement

We calculate how the relic density of dark matter particles is altered when their annihilation is enhanced by the Sommerfeld mechanism due to a Yukawa interaction between the annihilating particles. Maintaining a dark matter abundance consistent with current observational bounds requires the normalization of the s-wave annihilation cross section to be decreased compared to a model without enhancement. The level of suppression depends on the specific parameters of the particle model, with the kinetic decoupling temperature having the most effect. We find that the cross section can be reduced by as much as an order of magnitude for extreme cases. We also compute the mu-type distortion of the CMB energy spectrum caused by energy injection from such Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation. Our results indicate that in the vicinity of resonances, associated with bound states, distortions can be large enough to be excluded by the upper limit |mu|<9.0x10^(-5) found by the COBE/FIRAS experiment.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review D. Corrections to eqs. 9,10,14 and 16. Figures updated accordingly. No major changes to previous results. Website with online tools for Sommerfeld-related calculations can be found at http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~vogelsma/sommerfeld

Imaged sub-stellar companions: not as eccentric as they appear? The effect of an unseen inner mass on derived orbits

Increasing numbers of sub-stellar companions are now being discovered via direct imaging. Orbital elements for some of these objects have been derived using star--companion astrometry, and several of these appear to have eccentricities significantly greater than zero. We show that stellar motion caused by an undetected inner body may result in the companion elements derived in such a way being incorrect, which could lead to an overestimation of the eccentricity. The magnitude of this effect is quantified in several regimes and we derive the maximum eccentricity error a third body could introduce in a general form, which may be easily applied to any imaged system. Criteria for identifying systems potentially susceptible to this scenario are presented, and we find that around half of the planets/companion brown dwarfs currently imaged could be liable to these errors when their orbital elements are derived. In particular, this effect could be relevant for systems within 100 pc with companions at >50 AU, if they also harbour an unseen $\sim$ 10 Jupiter mass object at $\sim$ 10 AU. We use the Fomalhaut system as an example and show that a 10% error could be induced on the planet's eccentricity by an observationally allowed inner mass, which is similar in size to the current error from astrometry.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

Crystallization of a quasi-two-dimensional granular fluid

We experimentally investigate the crystallization of a uniformly heated quasi-2D granular fluid as a function of filling fraction. Our experimental results for the Lindemann melting criterion, the radial distribution function, the bond order parameter and the statistics of topological changes at the particle level are the same as those found in simulations of equilibrium hard disks. This direct mapping suggests that the study of equilibrium systems can be effectively applied to study non-equilibrium steady states like those found in our driven and dissipative granular system.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Susceptibility of White Spruce Seed Sources to Yellowheaded Spruce Sawfly, \u3ci\u3ePikonema Alaskensis,\u3c/i\u3e(Hymenoptera: Tenthredinidae)

A field caging technique was used to test the susceptibility of 25 white spruce, Picea glauca (Moench) Voss, seed sources to attack by Pikonema alaskensis (Rohwer). No sig- nificant differences were found in the number of eggs laid, number of dessicated eggs, or number of egg slits. Percent oviposition differed significantly within a tree, the south side having more eggs. Bud size differed significantly within trees and between trees but not between seed sources. The number of sawfly eggs laid on a bud could not be related to bud size. There was no significant difference in susceptibility of the seed sources studied to Pikonema alaskensis

Bridging the gap between social tagging and semantic annotation: E.D. the Entity Describer

Semantic annotation enables the development of efficient computational methods for analyzing and interacting with information, thus maximizing its value. With the already substantial and constantly expanding data generation capacity of the life sciences as well as the concomitant increase in the knowledge distributed in scientific articles, new ways to produce semantic annotations of this information are crucial. While automated techniques certainly facilitate the process, manual annotation remains the gold standard in most domains. In this manuscript, we describe a prototype mass-collaborative semantic annotation system that, by distributing the annotation workload across the broad community of biomedical researchers, may help to produce the volume of meaningful annotations needed by modern biomedical science. We present E.D., the Entity Describer, a mashup of the Connotea social tagging system, an index of semantic web-accessible controlled vocabularies, and a new public RDF database for storing social semantic annotations