Freeway drivers’ willingness to pay for speeding fines

Taiwanese drivers, like most drivers, often exceed the legal speed limit and expose themselves to the risk of a fine. Given the propensity to exceed the legal speed limit is common in many counties, it is of interest to understand the amount that drivers are willing to pay for driving faster than the law permits. This may provide useful guidance on the extent to which current fines are adequate as a deterrent to speeding. In this paper we use the contingent valuation method to measure drivers’ preferences and to estimate econometric models to determine Taiwanese drivers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for driving faster than the law allows. Given the high incidence of a zero willingness to pay, we use a spike model to capture this phenomenon. The study identifies some key influences on WTP such as personal income, the presence/absence of past violations, the risk tolerance of the driver, and the proportion of times spent on the roads where the driver was exceeding the speeding limit last year. On average, we find that freeway drivers in various locations in Taiwan were willing to pay between $US43 and$US51 for driving faster than the law allows

Toward an e-commerce strategy: Impact of family dynamics

This is an accepted manuscript of a book chapter published by Edward Elgar in Innovation, Growth, and Succession in Asian Family Enterprises in March 2021, available online: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/innovation-growth-and-succession-in-asian-family-enterprises-9781839104329.html The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version. The material cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher, and is for private use only

Accelerating polygon beam with peculiar features

We report on a novel kind of accelerating beams that follow parabolic paths in free space. In fact, this accelerating peculiar polygon beam (APPB) is induced by the spectral phase symmetrization of the regular polygon beam (RPB) with five intensity beam (RPB) with five intensity peaks, and it preserves a peculiar symmetric structure during propagation. Specially, such beam not only exhibits autofocusing property, but also possesses two types of accelerating intensity maxima, i.e., the cusp and spot-point structure, which does not exist in the previously reported accelerating beams. We also provide a detailed insight into the theoretical origin and characteristics of this spatially accelerating beam through catastrophe theory. Moreover, an experimental scheme based on a digital micromirror device (DMD) with the binary spectral hologram is proposed to generate the target beam by precise modulation, and a longitudinal needle-like focus is observed around the focal region. The experimental results confirm the peculiar features presented in the theoretical findings. Further, the APPB is verified to exhibit self-healing property during propagation with either obstructed cusp or spot intensity maxima point reconstructing after a certain distance. Hence, we believe that the APPB will facilitate the applications in the areas of particle manipulation, material processing and optofludics

Generation, Purification and Transplantation of Photoreceptors Derived from Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Background: Inherited and acquired retinal degenerations are frequent causes of visual impairment and photoreceptor cell replacement therapy may restore visual function to these individuals. To provide a source of new retinal neurons for cell based therapies, we developed methods to derive retinal progenitors from human ES cells. Methodology/Physical Findings: In this report we have used a similar method to direct induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) from human fibroblasts to a retinal progenitor fate, competent to generate photoreceptors. We also found we could purify the photoreceptors derived from the iPS cells using fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) after labeling photoreceptors with a lentivirus driving GFP from the IRBP cis-regulatory sequences. Moreover, we found that when we transplanted the FACS purified iPSC derived photoreceptors, they were able to integrate into a normal mouse retina and express photoreceptor markers. Conclusions: This report provides evidence that enriched populations of human photoreceptors can be derived from iPS cells

A New Global Router for Modern Designs

Abstract -In this paper, we present a new global router, NTHU-Route, for modern designs. NTHU-Route is based on iterative rip-ups and reroutes, and several techniques are proposed to enhance our global router. These techniques include (1) a history based cost function which helps to distribute overflow during iterative rip-ups and reroutes, (2) an adaptive multi-source multi-sink maze routing method to improve the wirelength of maze routing, (3) a congested region identification method to specify the order for nets to be ripped up and rerouted, and (4) a refinement process to further reduce overflow when iterative history based rip-ups and reroutes reach bottleneck. Compared with two state-of-the-art works on ISPD98 benchmarks, NTHU-Route outperforms them in both overflow and wirelength. For the much larger designs from the ISPD07 benchmark suite, our solution quality is better than or comparable to the best results reported in the ISPD07 routing contest. I Introduction In the recent years, feature size continues to shrink. Although the device becomes smaller and faster, the shrinkage increases the wire resistance and hence interconnect delay. Interconnect delay has replaced transistor delay as the main determinant of chip performance. Therefore the routing problem is becoming even more important in VLSI design. Typically, the routing problem can be divided into two steps due to the problem complexity: global routing and detailed routing. During global routing, nets are connected on a coarse-grain grid graph with capacity constraints. Then detailed routing follows the solution in global routing to find the exact routing solution. The quality of global routing affects timing, power and density in the chip area, and thus global routing is a very important stage in the design cycle. Recent global routing techniques can be roughly categorized into two classes: multicommodity flow based techniques and rip-up and reroute techniques. Multicommodity flow based techniques Rip-up and reroute approach starts by routing each net without considering congestion. After routing all nets, congested areas can be identified and the nets in those areas are ripped up and rerouted to find less congested routes. This approach is a sequential one since the net to be ripped up and rerouted has to follow a specific order. Therefore the routing order in rip-up and reroute techniques affects the solution quality a lot. Chi Dispersion In this paper, we present a new global router, NTHU-Route, for modern designs. NTHU-Route is based on iterative rip-ups and reroutes, and several techniques are proposed to enhance our global router. These techniques include (1) a history based cost function which helps to distribute overflow during iterative rip-ups and reroutes, (2) an adaptive multi-source multi-sink maze routing method to improve the wirelength of maze routing, (3) a congested region identification method to specify the order for nets to be ripped up and rerouted, and (4) a refinement process to further reduce overflow when iterative history based rip-ups and reroutes reach bottleneck. We compare our results with two state-of-the-art works, BoxRouter and FastRoute, on ISPD98 benchmarks. Our global router solves all benchmarks without any overflow and respectively reduces the wirelength over BoxRouter and FastRoute by 1.93% and 2.59% on average. We also perform our router on ISPD07 benchmarks which contain multi-layer designs with larger size. The experiments show that our router obtains the solution with least overflow when comparing with the best results reported in the ISPD07 global routing contest. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II gives the preliminaries including the problem formulation and introduction for some routing techniques. In section III, we present our global router in detail. Section IV provides the experimental results and we conclude the paper in section V

Poly[diaquabis­(μ4-fumarato-κ4 O 1:O 1′:O 4:O 4′)(μ4-fumarato-κ6 O 1:O 1,O 1′:O 4:O 4,O 4′)(μ2-fumaric acid-κ2 O 1:O 4)dipraseodymium(III)]

The title complex, [Pr2(C4H2O4)3(C4H4O4)(H2O)2]n, was synthesized by reaction of praseodymium(III) nitrate hexa­hydrate with fumaric acid in a water–ethanol (4:1) solution. The asymmetric unit comprises a Pr3+ cation, one and a half fumarate dianions (L 2−), one half-mol­ecule of fumaric acid (H2L) and one coordinated water mol­ecule. The carboxyl­ate groups of the fumarate dianion and fumaric acid exhibit different coordination modes. In one fumarate dianion, two carboxyl­ate groups are chelating with two Pr3+ cations, and the other two O atoms each coordinate a Pr3+ cation. Each O atom of the second fumarate dianion binds to a different Pr3+ cation. The fumaric acid employs one O atom at each end to bridge two Pr3+ cations. The Pr3+ cation is coordinated in a distorted tricapped trigonal–prismatic environment by eight O atoms of fumarate dianion or fumaric acid ligands and one water O atom. The PrO9 coordination polyhedra are edge-shared through one carboxyl­ate O atom and two carboxyl­ate groups, generating infinite praseodymium–oxygen chains, which are further connected by the ligands into a three-dimensional framework. The crystal structure is stabilized by O—H⋯O hydrogen-bond inter­actions between the coordin­ated water mol­ecule and the carboxyl­ate O atoms

Trisomy Correction in Down Syndrome Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

SummaryHuman trisomies can alter cellular phenotypes and produce congenital abnormalities such as Down syndrome (DS). Here we have generated induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from DS fibroblasts and introduced a TKNEO transgene into one copy of chromosome 21 by gene targeting. When selecting against TKNEO, spontaneous chromosome loss was the most common cause for survival, with a frequency of ∼10−4, while point mutations, epigenetic silencing, and TKNEO deletions occurred at lower frequencies in this unbiased comparison of inactivating mutations. Mitotic recombination events resulting in extended loss of heterozygosity were not observed in DS iPSCs. The derived, disomic cells proliferated faster and produced more endothelia in vivo than their otherwise isogenic trisomic counterparts, but in vitro hematopoietic differentiation was not consistently altered. Our study describes a targeted removal of a human trisomy, which could prove useful in both clinical and research applications