The Monetization of Business Tax Credits

This Article examines the history of the development of federal incentive tax credits, from the enactment of the investment credit in 1962 to the cash grant in lieu of credits regime introduced as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and methods for “monetizing” tax credits developed in the context of state tax credits as well as federal tax credits (and associated taxation issues). The principal thesis of the Article is that (1) the current array of federal business tax credits addressed in the Article are in the nature of subsidies rather than structural components of the computation of a “correct” tax; and (2) therefore constraining the monetization of these tax credits through the imposition of normative-based substantive requirements is inappropriate. As the Article states in conclusion, if the judgment is that tax expenditures of this kind play a useful role (i.e., they should not simply be repealed), then the articulation of the underlying goals and intended beneficiaries of current tax-based subsidies should be sharpened and our existing “delivery mechanisms” closely examined and possibly overhauled

Target prediction and a statistical sampling algorithm for RNA-RNA interaction

It has been proven that the accessibility of the target sites has a critical influence for miRNA and siRNA. In this paper, we present a program, rip2.0, not only the energetically most favorable targets site based on the hybrid-probability, but also a statistical sampling structure to illustrate the statistical characterization and representation of the Boltzmann ensemble of RNA-RNA interaction structures. The outputs are retrieved via backtracing an improved dynamic programming solution for the partition function based on the approach of Huang et al. (Bioinformatics). The $O(N^6)$ time and $O(N^4)$ space algorithm is implemented in C (available from \url{http://www.combinatorics.cn/cbpc/rip2.html})Comment: 7 pages, 10 figure

#Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast: Early Prediction of Popular Hashtag Compounds

Compounding of natural language units is a very common phenomena. In this paper, we show, for the first time, that Twitter hashtags which, could be considered as correlates of such linguistic units, undergo compounding. We identify reasons for this compounding and propose a prediction model that can identify with 77.07% accuracy if a pair of hashtags compounding in the near future (i.e., 2 months after compounding) shall become popular. At longer times T = 6, 10 months the accuracies are 77.52% and 79.13% respectively. This technique has strong implications to trending hashtag recommendation since newly formed hashtag compounds can be recommended early, even before the compounding has taken place. Further, humans can predict compounds with an overall accuracy of only 48.7% (treated as baseline). Notably, while humans can discriminate the relatively easier cases, the automatic framework is successful in classifying the relatively harder cases.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables, published in CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing) 2016. in Proceedings of 19th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2016

Convergence towards a European strategic culture? A constructivist framework for explaining changing norms.

The article contributes to the debate about the emergence of a European strategic culture to underpin a European Security and Defence Policy. Noting both conceptual and empirical weaknesses in the literature, the article disaggregates the concept of strategic culture and focuses on four types of norms concerning the means and ends for the use of force. The study argues that national strategic cultures are less resistant to change than commonly thought and that they have been subject to three types of learning pressures since 1989: changing threat perceptions, institutional socialization, and mediatized crisis learning. The combined effect of these mechanisms would be a process of convergence with regard to strategic norms prevalent in current EU countries. If the outlined hypotheses can be substantiated by further research the implications for ESDP are positive, especially if the EU acts cautiously in those cases which involve norms that are not yet sufficiently shared across countries

Targeting a Versatile Actuator for EU-DEMO: Real Time Monitoring of Pellet Delivery to Facilitate Burn Control

Core particle fueling, an essential task in the European demonstration fusion power plant EU-DEMO, relies on adequate pellet injection. However, pellets are fragile objects, and their delivery efficiency can hardly be assumed to be unity. Exploring kinetic control of the EU-DEMO1 scenario indicates that such missed-out pellets do cause a considerable problem for keeping a burning plasma. Missed-out pellets can cause a severe drop of plasma density that in turn results in a potential drastic loss of burn power. Efforts are under way at the ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) tokamak aiming to provide real-time monitoring of pellet arrival and announcement of missed-out cases to the control systems. To further optimize the controllers, system identification experiments have been performed to identify the dynamic response of the system to the actuator

Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch