Factors Influencing Trade Area Capture in the Great Basin Area

International Relations/Trade,

Learning and Communication in Sender-Receiver Games: An Econometric Investigation

Learning and communication play important roles in coordinating activities. Game theory and experiments have made a significant contribution to our understanding and appreciation for the issues surrounding learning and communication in coordination. However, the results of past experimental studies provide conflicting results about the performance of learning models. Moreover, the interaction between learning and communication has not been systematically investigated. Our long run objective is to overcome the conflicting results and to provide a better understanding of the interaction. To this end, we econometrically investigate a sender-receiver game environment where communication is necessary for coordination and learning is essential for communication.

Implementing direct consumption taxes in developing countries

This report examines the possibility of using a direct tax on consumption as a replacement for an existing income tax within the context of a developing country. The structural differences between income and consumption taxes are described, and some simple examples are used to illustrate the basic differences in the taxation of businesses and individuals under the two approaches. The report includesa brief survey of the extensive literature on the choice between income and consumption as the basis for a system of direct taxation. After a detailed discussion of the choice between cash flow and tax prepayment treatment at the individual level under a direct consumption tax, the analysis concludes that for simplicity reasons the individual tax prepayment approach is the more appropriate one in the developing country context. The report then describes the structure and implementation of such a direct consumption tax. The discussion includes an examination of international and transitional issues, and also comments on the desirability and feasibility of supplementary wealth taxes and taxation on a presumptive basis.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism

Group velocity study in hot Rb vapor with buffer gas

We study the behavior of the group velocity of light under conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in a Doppler broadened medium. Specifically, we show how the group delay (or group velocity) of probe and generated Stokes fields depends on the one-photon detuning of drive and probe fields. We find that for atoms in a buffer gas the group velocity decreases with positive one-photon detuning of the drive fields, and increases when the fields are red detuned. This dependence is counter-intuitive to what would be expected if the one-photon detuning resulted in an interaction of the light with the resonant velocity subgroup.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

Method for comparing finite temperature field theory results with lattice data

The values of the presently available truncated perturbative expressions for the pressure of the quark-gluon plasma at finite temperatures and finite chemical potential are trustworthy only at very large energies. When used down to temperatures close to the critical one Tc, they suffer from large uncertainties due to the renormalization scale freedom. In order to reduce these uncertainties, we perform resummations of the pressure by applying Pade-related approximants to the available perturbation series for the short-distance and for the long-distance contributions. In the two contributions, we use two different renormalization scales which reflect different energy regions contributing to the different parts. Application of the obtained expressions at low temperatures is made possible by replacing the usual four-loop barMS beta function for alpha_s by its Borel-Pade resummation, eliminating thus the unphysical Landau singularities of alpha_s. The obtained results are remarkably insensitive to the chosen renormalization scale and can be compared with lattice results -- for the pressure (p), the chemical potential contribution (delta p) to the pressure, and various susceptibilities. A good qualitative agreement with the lattice results is revealed down to temperatures close to Tc.Comment: 24 pages, 17 figures, revtex4; Ref.[25] is new; the ordering of the references and grammatic and stylistic errors are corrected - version as it appears in PR

Investigation of the large scale coherent structure in a jet and its relevance to jet noise

A study was conducted to determine the causes of aircraft noise in large jet aircraft. It was determined that jet noise varies strongly with velocity and that significant pure tones are generated by rotor-stator interaction in the jet engines. An objective method for deducing the large eddy structure in a large jet is described. The provisions of lighthill's theory are analyzed and applied to investigating the nature of jet noise. There is considerable evidence that a large scale coherent structure exists in a jet and that this structure can play a major role in sound radiation. Mathematical models are developed to define the parameters of orthogonal decomposition, finite extent velocity field, homogeneous fields, and periodic velocity fields

Modeling human behavior in user-adaptive systems: recent advances using soft computing techniques

Adaptive Hypermedia systems are becoming more important in our everyday activities and users are expecting more intelligent services from them. The key element of a generic adaptive hypermedia system is the user model. Traditional machine learning techniques used to create user models are usually too rigid to capture the inherent uncertainty of human behavior. In this context, soft computing techniques can be used to handle and process human uncertainty and to simulate human decision-making. This paper examines how soft computing techniques, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy clustering and neuro-fuzzy systems, have been used, alone or in combination with other machine learning techniques, for user modeling from 1999 to 2004. For each technique, its main applications, limitations and future directions for user modeling are presented. The paper also presents guidelines that show which soft computing techniques should be used according to the task implemented by the application