Expectations Formation and Forecasting of Vehicle Demand: An Empirical Study of the Vehicle Quota Auctions in Singapore

This paper studies the expectations formation and forecasting of vehicle demand in Singapore under the vehicle quota system. Under the system, a car buyer must first bid for a vehicle license in monthly auctions in order to purchase a new car. We construct an econometric model to test the hypothesis that past bid distributions of the license auctions contain information that car buyers can use to update their expectations about the intensity of market demand, forecast the license premiums and formulate their bidding strategies in future auctions. Our empirical analysis indicates that past bid distributions have a good degree of predictive power for the license premiums.quota licenses, vehicle demand, learning, expectations formation

Tabular Expression-Based Testing Strategies: A Comparison

NSPEC Accession Number: 9909859Tabular expressions were proposed as a documentation tool that can be used to document software precisely and unambiguously. This paper explores the applications of four testing strategies in tabular expression-based specifications and further compares the strategies on a mathematical basis. © 2007 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Neutralizing antibody vaccine for pandemic and pre-emergent coronaviruses

Betacoronaviruses (betaCoVs) caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreaks, and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic1–4. Vaccines that elicit protective immunity against SARS-CoV-2 and betaCoVs circulating in animals have the potential to prevent future betaCoV pandemics. Here, we show that macaque immunization with a multimeric SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain (RBD) nanoparticle adjuvanted with 3M-052/Alum elicited cross-neutralizing antibody (cross-nAb) responses against batCoVs, SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and SARS-CoV-2 variants B.1.1.7, P.1, and B.1.351. Nanoparticle vaccination resulted in a SARS-CoV-2 reciprocal geometric mean neutralization ID50 titer of 47,216, and protection against SARS-CoV-2 in macaque upper and lower respiratory tracts. Importantly, nucleoside-modified mRNA encoding a stabilized transmembrane spike or monomeric RBD also induced SARS-CoV-1 and batCoV cross-nAbs, albeit at lower titers. These results demonstrate current mRNA vaccines may provide some protection from future zoonotic betaCoV outbreaks, and provide a platform for further development of pan-betaCoV vaccines

The Cancer Genome Atlas Comprehensive Molecular Characterization of Renal Cell Carcinoma

Renal cell carcinoma(RCC) is not a single disease, but several histologically defined cancers with different genetic drivers, clinical courses, and therapeutic responses. The current study evaluated 843 RCC from the three major histologic subtypes, including 488 clear cell RCC, 274 papillary RCC, and 81 chromophobe RCC. Comprehensive genomic and phenotypic analysis of the RCC subtypes reveals distinctive features of each subtype that provide the foundation for the development of subtype-specific therapeutic and management strategies for patients affected with these cancers. Somatic alteration of BAP1, PBRM1, and PTEN and altered metabolic pathways correlated with subtype-specific decreased survival, while CDKN2A alteration, increased DNA hypermethylation, and increases in the immune-related Th2 gene expression signature correlated with decreased survival within all major histologic subtypes. CIMP-RCC demonstrated an increased immune signature, and a uniform and distinct metabolic expression pattern identified a subset of metabolically divergent (MD) ChRCC that associated with extremely poor survival

Metamorphic Robustness Testing: Exposing Hidden Defects in Citation Statistics and Journal Impact Factors

We propose a robustness testing approach for software systems that process large amounts of data. Our method usesmetamorphic relations to check software output for erroneous input in the absence of a tangible test oracle. We use this technique to testtwo major citation database systems: Scopus and the Web of Science. We report a surprising finding that the inclusion of hyphensin paper titles impedes citation counts, and that this is a result of the lack of robustness of the citation database systems in handlinghyphenated paper titles. Our results are valid for the entire literature as well as for individual fields such as chemistry. We further finda strong and significant negative correlation between the journal impact factor (JIF) of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering(TSE) and the percentage of hyphenated paper titles published in TSE. Similar results are found for ACM Transactions on SoftwareEngineering and Methodology. A software engineering field-wide study reveals that the higher JIF-ranked journals are publishing a lowerpercentage of papers with hyphenated titles. Our results challenge the common belief that citation counts and JIFs are reliable measuresof the impact of papers and journals, as they can be distorted simply by the presence of hyphens in paper titles

Towards a Formal Foundation for DeMarco Data Flow Diagrams

In this paper, we describe a proposal for formalizing data flow diagrams through extended Petri nets. We illustrate the usefulness of the approach by describing how it can be used to analyse the consistency of requirements specifications