An extended 'Feder'' model of dualistic growth

Feder's (1982) model of dualistic growth is derived in levels, suitable for time-series analysis and (i) extended to contexts where aggregate input data are unavailable (ii) sectoral externalities and productivity differentials are generalised in a two- and three-sector (agriculture-manufacturing-services) context.

A Survey of Housing Equity Withdrawal and Injection in Australia

Over the past decade or so, aggregate data suggest a trend increase in housing equity withdrawal in Australia, potentially stimulating household spending. However, there has been little disaggregated information on how equity is being withdrawn and injected, the characteristics of households altering housing equity, and how funds from withdrawn equity are being used. This paper uses a survey of 4 500 households commissioned by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) to address these questions. The results suggest that, during 2004, the most common method of withdrawing equity was for a household to increase the level of debt secured against a property they already owned. In contrast, most of the value of equity withdrawn was associated with property transactions, with the typical property transaction resulting in a net equity withdrawal. Turnover in the property market is therefore likely to be an important driver of cycles in aggregate housing equity withdrawal. Bivariate and logit analysis suggests a significant life-cycle influence, with the bulk of equity withdrawal being undertaken by older households, while younger households typically inject, primarily through mortgage repayments or deposits for property purchase. Finally, the results suggest that the bulk of the value of withdrawn equity was used to increase non-housing assets, although a significant proportion of households used the funds for consumption expenditure.housing equity withdrawal; housing turnover; household debt

Dynamic CPU management for real-time, middleware-based systems

technical reportMany real-world distributed, real-time, embedded (DRE) systems, such as multi-agent military applications, are built using commercially available operating systems, middleware, and collections of pre-existing software. The complexity of these systems makes it difficult to ensure that they maintain high quality of service (QoS). At design time, the challenge is to introduce coordinated QoS controls into multiple software elements in a non-invasive manner. At run time, the system must adapt dynamically to maintain high QoS in the face of both expected events, such as application mode changes, and unexpected events, such as resource demands from other applications. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a CPU Broker for these types of DRE systems. The CPU Broker mediates between multiple real-time tasks and the facilities of a real-time operating system: using feedback and other inputs, it adjusts allocations over time to ensure that high application-level QoS is maintained. The broker connects to its monitored tasks in a non-invasive manner, is based on and integrated with industry-standard middleware, and implements an open architecture for new CPU management policies. Moreover, these features allow the broker to be easily combined with other QoS mechanisms and policies, as part of an overall end-to-end QoS management system. We describe our experience in applying the CPU Broker to a simulated DRE military system. Our results show that the broker connects to the system transparently and allows it to function in the face of run-time CPU resource contention

Expanding the CRISPR toolbox in Culicine mosquitoes: in vitro validation of Pol III promoters

CRISPR–Cas9-based “gene drive” technologies have been proposed as a novel and effective means of controlling human diseases vectored by mosquitoes. However, more complex designs than those demonstrated to date—and an expanded molecular toolbox with which to build them—will be required to overcome the issues of resistance formation/evolution and drive spatial/temporal limitation. Foreseeing this need, we assessed the sgRNA transcriptional activities of 33 phylogenetically diverse insect Polymerase III promoters using three disease-relevant Culicine mosquito cell lines (Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, and Culex quinquefasciatus). We show that U6 promoters work across species with a range of transcriptional activity levels and find 7SK promoters to be especially promising because of their broad phylogenetic activity. We further show that U6 promoters can be substantially truncated without affecting transcriptional levels. These results will be of great utility to researchers involved in developing the next generation of gene drives

Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for Visual Question Answering in Remote Sensing

With the new generation of satellite technologies, the archives of remote sensing (RS) images are growing very fast. To make the intrinsic information of each RS image easily accessible, visual question answering (VQA) has been introduced in RS. VQA allows a user to formulate a free-form question concerning the content of RS images to extract generic information. It has been shown that the fusion of the input modalities (i.e., image and text) is crucial for the performance of VQA systems. Most of the current fusion approaches use modality-specific representations in their fusion modules instead of joint representation learning. However, to discover the underlying relation between both the image and question modality, the model is required to learn the joint representation instead of simply combining (e.g., concatenating, adding, or multiplying) the modality-specific representations. We propose a multi-modal transformer-based architecture to overcome this issue. Our proposed architecture consists of three main modules: i) the feature extraction module for extracting the modality-specific features; ii) the fusion module, which leverages a user-defined number of multi-modal transformer layers of the VisualBERT model (VB); and iii) the classification module to obtain the answer. Experimental results obtained on the RSVQAxBEN and RSVQA-LR datasets (which are made up of RGB bands of Sentinel-2 images) demonstrate the effectiveness of VBFusion for VQA tasks in RS. To analyze the importance of using other spectral bands for the description of the complex content of RS images in the framework of VQA, we extend the RSVQAxBEN dataset to include all the spectral bands of Sentinel-2 images with 10m and 20m spatial resolution.Comment: Accepted in SPIE Remote Sensing (ESI22R