Water utilization, evapotranspiration and soil moisture monitoring in the south east region of south Australia

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Change-Point Analysis of Asset Price Bubbles with Power-Law Hazard Function

We present a methodology to identify change-points in financial markets where the governing regime shifts from a constant rate-of-return, i.e. normal growth, to superexponential growth described by a power-law hazard rate. The latter regime corresponds, in our view, to financial bubbles driven by herding behaviour of market participants. Assuming that the time series of log-price returns of a financial index can be modelled by arithmetic Brownian motion, with an additional jump process with power-law hazard function to approximate the superexponential growth, we derive a threshold value of the hazard-function control parameter, allowing us to decide in which regime the market is more likely to be at any given time. An analysis of the Standard \& Poors 500 index over the last 60 years provides evidence that the methodology has merit in identifying when a period of herding behaviour begins, and, perhaps more importantly, when it ends

Summary report on excavations at Tell Khaiber, an administrative centre of the Sealand period, 2013-2017

Excavations at Tell Khaiber by the Ur Region Archaeological Project have revealed a substantial building (hereafter the Public Building) dating to the mid-second millennium BC. The results are significant for several reasons: they shed light on Babylonian provincial administration; they reveal a previously unknown type of fortified monumental building; and they produced a provenanced, dated archive of the little-understood Sealand Dynasty. Here we give a summary of the main results, including the architecture and the material culture. There are also comments on the historical background, and a discussion of the form and function of the Public Building

Ensemble Sales Forecasting Study in Semiconductor Industry

Sales forecasting plays a prominent role in business planning and business strategy. The value and importance of advance information is a cornerstone of planning activity, and a well-set forecast goal can guide sale-force more efficiently. In this paper CPU sales forecasting of Intel Corporation, a multinational semiconductor industry, was considered. Past sale, future booking, exchange rates, Gross domestic product (GDP) forecasting, seasonality and other indicators were innovatively incorporated into the quantitative modeling. Benefit from the recent advances in computation power and software development, millions of models built upon multiple regressions, time series analysis, random forest and boosting tree were executed in parallel. The models with smaller validation errors were selected to form the ensemble model. To better capture the distinct characteristics, forecasting models were implemented at lead time and lines of business level. The moving windows validation process automatically selected the models which closely represent current market condition. The weekly cadence forecasting schema allowed the model to response effectively to market fluctuation. Generic variable importance analysis was also developed to increase the model interpretability. Rather than assuming fixed distribution, this non-parametric permutation variable importance analysis provided a general framework across methods to evaluate the variable importance. This variable importance framework can further extend to classification problem by modifying the mean absolute percentage error(MAPE) into misclassify error. Please find the demo code at : https://github.com/qx0731/ensemble_forecast_methodsComment: 14 pages, Industrial Conference on Data Mining 2017 (ICDM 2017

Correction to: Wnt3a induces exosome secretion from primary cultured rat microglia

Correction to: BMC Neuroscience 2012, 13:144 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/13/14

Celebrate teaching and learning: A SoTL symposium at the University of the Pacific

This paper presents a faculty-driven teaching and learning celebration that fostered institutional cultural change. The symposium showcased exemplar instructional methods at an institution, whose mission is to to provide a superior, student-centered learning experience integrating liberal arts and professional education. The symposium was a grass-roots effort that attracted seventy-two faculty members from various disciplines to attend the four day symposium sessions to share, discuss, and learn about the best practices used by their colleagues. The overall evaluation and response to the symposium exceeded the expectations of the organizers. The paper contributes to both the scholarship of teaching and learning and institutional cultural change literature by providing an overview of the program, reflections on the endeavor, and four successful presentations that helped to foster an interdisciplinary community of practice committed to sustainable pedagogies

An assessment of practitioners approaches to forecasting in the presence of changepoints

A common challenge in time series is to forecast data that suffer from structural breaks or changepoints which complicate modeling. If we naively forecast using one model for the whole data, the model will be incorrect, and thus, our forecast error will be large. There are two common practices to account for these changepoints when the goal is forecasting: (1) preprocess the data to identify the changepoints, incorporating them as dummy variables in modeling the whole data, and (2) include the changepoint estimation into the model and forecast using the model fit to the last segment. This article examines these two practices, using the computationally exact Pruned Exact Linear Time (PELT) algorithm for changepoint detection, comparing and contrasting them in the context of an important Software Engineering application

Intercultural ethics: questions of methods in language and intercultural communication

This paper explores how questions of ethics and questions of method are intertwined and unavoidable in any serious study of language and intercultural communication. It argues that the focus on difference and solution orientations to intercultural conflict has been a fundamental driver for theory, data collection and methods in the field. These approaches, the paper argues, have created a considerable consciousness raising industry, with methods, trainings and ‘critical incidents’, which ultimately focus intellectual energy in areas which may be productive in terms of courses and publications but which have a problematic basis in their ethical terrain. Dieser Artikel untersucht wie ethische und methodische Fragen nicht nur ineinander greifen, sondern in keiner ernstzunehmenden Studie ueber Sprache und interkulturelle Kommunikation ausgelassen werden duerfen. Es wird hier argumentiert, dass der Schwerpunkt auf Verschiedenheit und Problemorientierung im interkulturellen Konflikt einen wesentlichen Einfluss auf theoretische Entwicklungen, Datenerhebung und Methoden in diesem Bereich hatte. Dieser Artikel legt auch dar, wie diese Ansaetze eine betraechtliche ‘Bewusstseinsbildungs – Branche' erzeugt haben, mit Methoden, Trainings, und ‘kritischen Interaktionssituationen’, welche letztendlich allen intellektuellen Arbeitseifer auf Bereiche konzentriert hat, die zwar ertragreich sind in Bezug auf Kurse und Publikationen, jedoch eine problematische Grundlage im ethischen Bereich aufweisen