The acceleration in U.S. total productivity after 1995: the role of information technology

Under standard conditions, total factor productivity (TFP) growth measures the pace of innovation or technological change in the economy. This article focuses on the period since the mid-1990s, when TFP accelerated. The authors find that most of the acceleration is accounted for by industries that use, rather than sectors that produce, information technology.Productivity ; Information technology ; Labor productivity

A new approach to the design of time varying control systems with application to the space shuttle booster

A general approach toward the analysis and design of closed loop control for slowly time-varying linear systems was investigated. The approach is by the method of generalized multiple scales, in which slow and fast dynamics are systematically separated by employing different clocks which measure time at varying rates. The clocks, which are necessarily nonlinear functions of time, so that the system dynamics are asymptotically invariant with respect to the new time scale. A transfer function relating the output to the input for general linear slowly time-varying systems is developed and represents the actual system under certain conditions. The clock functions are shown to satisfy an algebraic characteristic equation and can be determined in general in terms of the coefficients

QDEE: Question Difficulty and Expertise Estimation in Community Question Answering Sites

In this paper, we present a framework for Question Difficulty and Expertise Estimation (QDEE) in Community Question Answering sites (CQAs) such as Yahoo! Answers and Stack Overflow, which tackles a fundamental challenge in crowdsourcing: how to appropriately route and assign questions to users with the suitable expertise. This problem domain has been the subject of much research and includes both language-agnostic as well as language conscious solutions. We bring to bear a key language-agnostic insight: that users gain expertise and therefore tend to ask as well as answer more difficult questions over time. We use this insight within the popular competition (directed) graph model to estimate question difficulty and user expertise by identifying key hierarchical structure within said model. An important and novel contribution here is the application of "social agony" to this problem domain. Difficulty levels of newly posted questions (the cold-start problem) are estimated by using our QDEE framework and additional textual features. We also propose a model to route newly posted questions to appropriate users based on the difficulty level of the question and the expertise of the user. Extensive experiments on real world CQAs such as Yahoo! Answers and Stack Overflow data demonstrate the improved efficacy of our approach over contemporary state-of-the-art models. The QDEE framework also allows us to characterize user expertise in novel ways by identifying interesting patterns and roles played by different users in such CQAs.Comment: Accepted in the Proceedings of the 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018). June 2018. Stanford, CA, US

Information technology and the U.S. productivity acceleration

Information technology ; Productivity

Why a relatively unknown guru movement is attracting Sri Lankan Tamils in Britain

The move from Sri Lanka to Britain signalled a breakaway from past associations of identity and rootedness which Tamil Hindus had to contend with. The quest for Eelam is now thrust into the makings of a new guru movement striving to gain traction, writes Dhruv Ramnath

Molecular Pathogenesis of Fibulin-4 Associated Aortic Aneurysms

__Abstract__ Aortic disease represents one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality in the industrialized society. Approximately 2% of all deaths are caused by aortic aneurysm and dissections [1]. Aneurysms are defined as a local widening of the artery with more than 50 percent of the normal diameter [2]. An aneurysm can result in a fatal aortic rupture or in an aortic dissection, which is a tear in the wall of the artery that causes blood to flow between the layers of the wall and forces the layers apart [3]. Dissections involving the ascending aorta, Stanford type A dissections, have a mortality rate of 1-2% per hour and should be immediately treated surgically [4], while dissections occurring in the descending aorta are usually treated medically and have an in-hospital mortality of about 10% [5]. However, an acute aortic dissect

Characterizing Driving Context from Driver Behavior

Because of the increasing availability of spatiotemporal data, a variety of data-analytic applications have become possible. Characterizing driving context, where context may be thought of as a combination of location and time, is a new challenging application. An example of such a characterization is finding the correlation between driving behavior and traffic conditions. This contextual information enables analysts to validate observation-based hypotheses about the driving of an individual. In this paper, we present DriveContext, a novel framework to find the characteristics of a context, by extracting significant driving patterns (e.g., a slow-down), and then identifying the set of potential causes behind patterns (e.g., traffic congestion). Our experimental results confirm the feasibility of the framework in identifying meaningful driving patterns, with improvements in comparison with the state-of-the-art. We also demonstrate how the framework derives interesting characteristics for different contexts, through real-world examples.Comment: Accepted to be published at The 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017

Physicochemical and Pollen Analysis of Western Ghats Honey of Karnataka, South India

The present investigation was undertaken to determine the physicochemical properties and pollen analysis of 30 honey samples collected from different locations of Western Ghats of Karnataka, South India, out of which 8 samples were found to be unifloral and 22 were multifloral. In unifloral honey samples,Sapindus laurifolia,Areca catechu, Acaciasp.,Mangifera indica, Terminalia bellerica, Syzygiumsp.,Pongamia pinnata, and Eucalyptussp., were predominant pollen types. These samples were also analyzed for several physicochemical parameters such as moisture, ash, pH, total acidity, total sugar, proteins, alkaloids, and phenols. This type of physicochemical and pollen analysis of honey samples favors the possibility of utilizing the rich flora of Western Ghats for good quality hone