Status and Multiple Growth Regimes

In order to explain multiple growth regimes, one of the working hypotheses is based on initial conditions. Using a standard optimal growth with the status effect represented by wealth a la Friedman (1953), this paper obtains multiple growth regimes based on initial conditions without reliance on other assumptions such as nonlinearities of production or consumption functions and heterogeneous agents/savings behavior. With the status effect, the resulting equilibrium distribution is characterized by a group with a lower level of income and another group with a higher level of income. Globally, a sufficiently strong monetary policy may be an instrument in order for an economy in poverty traps to take off and become wealthy in the long run. Locally, our model sheds light on the relationship between money/inflation and capital in the long run that, given general cash-in-advance constraints on investment relative to consumption, is determined by the curvature of the utilities of wealth and consumption.one-sector growth model, wealth effect, CIA constraint, takeoff

Inflation and Growth: Impatience and a Qualitative Equivalence

This paper studies the role of an endogenous time preference on the relationship between inflation and growth in the long run in both the money-in-utility-function (MIUF) and transaction costs (TC) models. We establish a qualitative equivalence between the two models in a setup without a labor-leisure tradeoff. When the time preference is decreasing (or increasing) in consumption and real balances, both the MIUF and TC models are qualitatively equivalent in terms of predicting a negative (or positive) relationship between inflation and growth in a steady state. Both a decreasing and an increasing time preference in consumption are consistent with the arguments in the literature. While a decreasing time preference in real balances corroborates with empirical evidence, there is no evidence in support of an increasing time preference in real balances.endogenous time preferences, superneutrality, qualitative equivalence

Decision making environments in the meeting planning industry

This was a pilot study on the decision making environments in the meeting planning industry. A critical incident questionnaire which was developed by Boone & Kilmann (1988) and later used by Janet Barnard (1992) in her research Decision Environments of Small Firms was adapted. The questionnaires were mailed to 210 samples which were randomly chosen from members of Meeting Planners International in four states, and there were 30 valid responses received. Among those 30 respondents, the majority (70%) are female meeting planners. Most of the participants are over 30 years old, and their years of experience in the meeting planning area mostly spread in 4-15 years, while 50% of the participants have been working for 4-8 years in current organizations. In the first part of the questionnaire, each respondent was asked to consider and briefly describe a work related decision in which he/she was recently involved. There were 15 participants (50%) answered this question and site selection was the most common answer. Part II of the questionnaire was a set of 32 items randomly arranged and could be divided into 6 factors. As the result of the general responses, the ranking of the six factors was: 1 . factor 1 -Inputs, 2. factor 2-Problems, 3. factor 4- Teamwork, 4. factor 6-Resources, 5. factor 3-Rewards, and 6. factor 5-Politics. The answers of the 32 items were also grouped according to respondents\u27 positions, geographic locations, and organization styles. Two-sample t-tests of a 0.95 confidence interval were used to identify if there was any significance. In the t-tests, four significant differences were found. The first one was between the respondents who work for corporations and the respondents who work for independent meeting planning companies regarding factor 5-Bureaucratic Block & Politics. The second significance was also concerning factor 5 and was found between respondents who work as CEOs and respondents who work as meeting planners. The third one was concerning factor 6-Resource Adequacy and was found between respondents who work as meeting planners and respondents who work as administrators. The last one was about factor 5 and was found between respondents who work for independent meeting planning companies and the 30 general respondents. Part III of the questionnaire was concerning the top five probable problem areas, and \u27finance\u27 was the most concerned problem area. However, respondents from different organizations show differences, for example, respondents from independent meeting planning companies showed special concern on liability while others did not. A comparison about the ranking of the six factors between this study and Barnard\u27s study on small firms showed that the meeting industry regards Inputs as the most important factor and Politics as the least important one, while in Barnard\u27s study Politics is the most important one and Inputs is the least important one. This study proves that the meeting planning industry has its own concern about decision environments. Even within the industry, the organization styles and the positions would affect the perspectives. It is recommended to adapt the instrument and conduct further researches for a better understanding and also to help to improve the industry\u27s decision environment

Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process in the Selection of Educational Supervisors

In this study, through literature review and analytic hierarchy process, expert questionnaires were conducted to explore the dimensions and criteria for selecting educational supervisors, four evaluation dimensions and 22 evaluation criteria were constructed, and the weight and ranking of each criterion item were determined by using hierarchical analysis. Through systematic and scientific professional knowledge, we can find out the key factors that affect the selection of educational supervisors: professional ability is the most important, followed by leadership and personality traits. Experience, team spirit and professional knowledge are the three most important criteri

The multiple originator broadcasting problem in graphs

AbstractGiven a graph G and a vertex subset S of V(G), the broadcasting time with respect to S, denoted by b(G,S), is the minimum broadcasting time when using S as the broadcasting set. And the k-broadcasting number, denoted by bk(G), is defined by bk(G)=min{b(G,S)|S⊆V(G),|S|=k}.Given a graph G and two vertex subsets S, S′ of V(G), define d(v,S)=minu∈Sd(v,u), d(S,S′)=min{d(u,v)|u∈S, v∈S′}, and d(G,S)=maxv∈V(G)d(v,S) for all v∈V(G). For all k, 1⩽k⩽|V(G)|, the k-radius of G, denoted by rk(G), is defined as rk(G)=min{d(G,S)|S⊆V(G), |S|=k}.In this paper, we study the relation between the k-radius and the k-broadcasting numbers of graphs. We also give the 2-radius and the 2-broadcasting numbers of the grid graphs, and the k-broadcasting numbers of the complete n-partite graphs and the hypercubes

Functional analysis of conserved aromatic amino acids in the discoidin domain of Paenibacillus β-1,3-glucanase

The 190-kDa Paenibacillus β-1,3-glucanase (LamA) contains a catalytic module of the glycoside hydrolase family 16 (GH16) and several auxiliary domains. Of these, a discoidin domain (DS domain), present in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic proteins with a wide variety of functions, exists at the carboxyl-terminus. To better understand the bacterial DS domain in terms of its structure and function, this domain alone was expressed in Escherichia coli and characterized. The results indicate that the DS domain binds various polysaccharides and enhances the biological activity of the GH16 module on composite substrates. We also investigated the importance of several conserved aromatic residues in the domain's stability and substrate-binding affinity. Both were affected by mutations of these residues; however, the effect on protein stability was more notable. In particular, the forces contributed by a sandwiched triad (W1688, R1756, and W1729) were critical for the presumable β-sandwich fold

Scheduling Issues in Real-Time Systems

The most important objective of real-time systems is to fulfill time-critical missions in satisfying their application requirements and timing constraints. Software utilities can analyze real-time tasks and extract their characteristics and requirements for assisting the systems to guarantee schedulability. Real- time scheduling is the core of the real-time system design. It should allow real-time systems to exhibit predictable timing correctness regardless of possible uncertainty in run-time environments. In this dissertation, we study the problem of scheduling real-time tasks with resource and fault-tolerance requirements. For tasks with resource requirements, two types of platforms are examined: multiprocessor hard real-time systems and real-time database systems; for task with fault-tolerance requirements, we focus on hard real-time systems. We investigate preemptive priority-based scheduling for tasks with resource requirements in context of hard real-time systems. Rate-monotonic and earliest deadline first priority assignment strategies can meet deadlines if the schedulability conditions are satisfied. We propose resource control protocols, for these scheduling strategies, based on the concepts of priority inheritance and priority ceiling and describe schedulability conditions for meeting deadlines. Real-time database systems have different objectives for transaction scheduling. Minimizing miss ratio usually is the major concern. We study the significance of the knowledge of execution time in system performance and propose a class of optimistic concurrency control protocols using the knowledge of execution time. Our simulation results indicate that the knowledge of execution time substantially improve system performance. Fault-tolerance is an ability to maintain system in a safe and stable state such that the real-time application functions correctly and its timing constraints are satisfied even in the presence of faults. We develop a scheduling algorithm which attempts to build as many fault-tolerant tasks as possible into a schedule. We approximate system reliability by Markov chain models and illustrate the applicability of the proposed reliability models. We compare the proposed fault-tolerance scheduling approach with the basic fault-tolerance scheduling schemes and the simulation results show that our method provides better reliability than the basic scheduling schemes. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-73