A community based land trust (CBLT) model for Saskatchewan agriculture

Non-Peer Reviewe

Multibeam Maser Survey of methanol and excited OH in the Magellanic clouds: new detections and maser abundance estimates

‘The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.’ Copyright Blackwell Publishing DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.12888.xPeer reviewe

Responding to the crisis: are policies aimed at a strong indigenous industrial base a necessary condition for sustainable economic growth?

peer-reviewedWe examine whether a strong indigenous manufacturing base is a necessary condition for sustainable economic growth in the case of two small, open economies, Ireland and Sweden. Sweden has been impacted by the economic crisis to a lesser degree than Ireland; we explore (through a manufacturing activity lens) the reasons for the asymmetric impacts and ask if the nature of the shock is related to 'Economic Sovereignty' and to the type of industrial policy. We argue Sweden was less affected given that its indigenous firms control the highly export-focused and technology-based engineering sector whereas in Ireland high-technology sectors are controlled by foreign firms. In terms of policy implications, we suggest that industrial policy should aim for sustainable economic activity and growth such that industrial activity within the economy should be able to minimise the impact of asymmetric shocks such as the current global economic recession.ACCEPTEDpeer-reviewe

Scale-free memory model for multiagent reinforcement learning. Mean field approximation and rock-paper-scissors dynamics

A continuous time model for multiagent systems governed by reinforcement learning with scale-free memory is developed. The agents are assumed to act independently of one another in optimizing their choice of possible actions via trial-and-error search. To gain awareness about the action value the agents accumulate in their memory the rewards obtained from taking a specific action at each moment of time. The contribution of the rewards in the past to the agent current perception of action value is described by an integral operator with a power-law kernel. Finally a fractional differential equation governing the system dynamics is obtained. The agents are considered to interact with one another implicitly via the reward of one agent depending on the choice of the other agents. The pairwise interaction model is adopted to describe this effect. As a specific example of systems with non-transitive interactions, a two agent and three agent systems of the rock-paper-scissors type are analyzed in detail, including the stability analysis and numerical simulation. Scale-free memory is demonstrated to cause complex dynamics of the systems at hand. In particular, it is shown that there can be simultaneously two modes of the system instability undergoing subcritical and supercritical bifurcation, with the latter one exhibiting anomalous oscillations with the amplitude and period growing with time. Besides, the instability onset via this supercritical mode may be regarded as "altruism self-organization". For the three agent system the instability dynamics is found to be rather irregular and can be composed of alternate fragments of oscillations different in their properties.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figur

Machine Learning in Automated Text Categorization

The automated categorization (or classification) of texts into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest in the last ten years, due to the increased availability of documents in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. In the research community the dominant approach to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts) are a very good effectiveness, considerable savings in terms of expert manpower, and straightforward portability to different domains. This survey discusses the main approaches to text categorization that fall within the machine learning paradigm. We will discuss in detail issues pertaining to three different problems, namely document representation, classifier construction, and classifier evaluation.Comment: Accepted for publication on ACM Computing Survey

Computer modeling of diabetes and Its transparency: a report on the Eighth Mount Hood Challenge

Objectives The Eighth Mount Hood Challenge (held in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in September 2016) evaluated the transparency of model input documentation from two published health economics studies and developed guidelines for improving transparency in the reporting of input data underlying model-based economic analyses in diabetes. Methods Participating modeling groups were asked to reproduce the results of two published studies using the input data described in those articles. Gaps in input data were filled with assumptions reported by the modeling groups. Goodness of fit between the results reported in the target studies and the groups’ replicated outputs was evaluated using the slope of linear regression line and the coefficient of determination (R2). After a general discussion of the results, a diabetes-specific checklist for the transparency of model input was developed. Results Seven groups participated in the transparency challenge. The reporting of key model input parameters in the two studies, including the baseline characteristics of simulated patients, treatment effect and treatment intensification threshold assumptions, treatment effect evolution, prediction of complications and costs data, was inadequately transparent (and often missing altogether). Not surprisingly, goodness of fit was better for the study that reported its input data with more transparency. To improve the transparency in diabetes modeling, the Diabetes Modeling Input Checklist listing the minimal input data required for reproducibility in most diabetes modeling applications was developed. Conclusions Transparency of diabetes model inputs is important to the reproducibility and credibility of simulation results. In the Eighth Mount Hood Challenge, the Diabetes Modeling Input Checklist was developed with the goal of improving the transparency of input data reporting and reproducibility of diabetes simulation model results