VIP-room Contractual System of Macau’s Traditional Casino Industry

This study provides a systematic analysis of the VIP-room contractual system of Macau’s traditional casino industry. It examines the system’s historical background, its organizational structure, its operational mechanisms, and its role in Macau’s casino industry. This analysis examines the evolving and likely future changes in the VIP-room sector—as well as the mass market sector—caused by the liberalization of Macau’s gaming laws in 2001 and the Free Individual Travelers Scheme, introduced by the Chinese government in 2003. This study develops a framework to explain how the two sectors’ market shares are determined by examining the economic and cultural forces at work. The existing structure of the VIP-room contractual system in Macau’s casino industry will not likely continue in its traditional way, and will be replaced by newly evolving systems consistent with the new competitive realities. However, the VIP business will likely continue in one form or another.Regulation, gambling, casinos, Macau, baccarat

Kinetic energy operator approach to the quantum three-body problem with Coulomb interactions

We present a non-variational, kinetic energy operator approach to the solution of quantum three-body problem with Coulomb interactions, based on the utilization of symmetries intrinsic to the kinetic energy operator, i.e., the three-body Laplacian operator with the respective masses. Through a four-step reduction process, the nine dimensional problem is reduced to a one dimensional coupled system of ordinary differential equations, amenable to accurate numerical solution as an infinite-dimensional algebraic eigenvalue problem. A key observation in this reduction process is that in the functional subspace of the kinetic energy operator where all the rotational degrees of freedom have been projected out, there is an intrinsic symmetry which can be made explicit through the introduction of Jacobi-spherical coordinates. A numerical scheme is presented whereby the Coulomb matrix elements are calculated to a high degree of accuracy with minimal effort, and the truncation of the linear equations is carried out through a systematic procedureComment: 56 pages, 11 figure

Large-scale Geometric Data Decomposition, Processing and Structured Mesh Generation

Mesh generation is a fundamental and critical problem in geometric data modeling and processing. In most scientific and engineering tasks that involve numerical computations and simulations on 2D/3D regions or on curved geometric objects, discretizing or approximating the geometric data using a polygonal or polyhedral meshes is always the first step of the procedure. The quality of this tessellation often dictates the subsequent computation accuracy, efficiency, and numerical stability. When compared with unstructured meshes, the structured meshes are favored in many scientific/engineering tasks due to their good properties. However, generating high-quality structured mesh remains challenging, especially for complex or large-scale geometric data. In industrial Computer-aided Design/Engineering (CAD/CAE) pipelines, the geometry processing to create a desirable structural mesh of the complex model is the most costly step. This step is semi-manual, and often takes up to several weeks to finish. Several technical challenges remains unsolved in existing structured mesh generation techniques. This dissertation studies the effective generation of structural mesh on large and complex geometric data. We study a general geometric computation paradigm to solve this problem via model partitioning and divide-and-conquer. To apply effective divide-and-conquer, we study two key technical components: the shape decomposition in the divide stage, and the structured meshing in the conquer stage. We test our algorithm on vairous data set, the results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework. The comparisons also show our algorithm outperforms existing partitioning methods in final meshing quality. We also show our pipeline scales up efficiently on HPC environment

Difficulties and Countermeasures on Fire Protection Design of Large Commercial Building

Large commercial building has gradually become the main trend in commercial buildings recently. In current national fire protection design specification, the lacking of targeted measures for the fire protection design on such building will bring obsession to building designers during the specific engineering design, and it can easily lead to non-compliance with national specification. Therefore, we propose relevant state departments to publish state technical standard on fire control against fire protection design of large commercial building. Based on the collected information, data and conducted experiments, standardize the fire protection design of such buildings, will effectively avoiding formation of major fire potential.

Identifying latent group structures in nonlinear panels

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Insights into the molecular mechanism of glucose metabolism regulation under stress in chicken skeletal muscle tissues

AbstractAs substantial progress has been achieved in modern poultry production with large-scale and intensive feeding and farming in recent years, stress becomes a vital factor affecting chicken growth, development, and production yield, especially the quality and quantity of skeletal muscle mass. The review was aimed to outline and understand the stress-related genetic regulatory mechanism, which significantly affects glucose metabolism regulation in chicken skeletal muscle tissues. Progress in current studies was summarized relevant to the molecular mechanism and regulatory pathways of glucose metabolism regulation under stress in chicken skeletal muscle tissues. Particularly, the elucidation of those concerned pathways promoted by insulin and insulin receptors would give key clues to the understanding of biological processes of stress response and glucose metabolism regulation under stress, as well as their later effects on chicken muscle development

A Novel Adaptive Search Range Algorithm for Motion Estimation Based on H.264

Motion estimation (ME) is very vital to video compression. Due to the adoption of the high precision of motion vector (MV) in H.264 encoder, the computational cost increases rapidly, and ME takes about 60% of the whole encoding time. In order to accommodate the new variable block size motion estimation strategy adopted in H.264, this paper proposes a novel adaptive search range(ASR) algorithm as a optimized part based on UMHexagonS. Not only we utilize the median_MVP and interframe information in our ASR algorithm but also a penalty function is included. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method reduces the computational complexity in a certain degree and enhances encoding efficiency but has few changes in the reconstructed image quality and bit rate

Homogeneity Pursuit in Panel Data Models: Theory and Applications

This paper studies estimation of a panel data model with latent structures where individuals can be classified into different groups where slope parameters are homogeneous within the same group but heterogeneous across groups. To identify the unknown group structure of vector parameters, we design an algorithm called Panel-CARDS which is a systematic extension of the CARDS procedure proposed by Ke, Fan, and Wu (2015) in a cross section framework. The extension addresses the problem of comparing vector coefficients in a panel model for homogeneity and introduces a new concept of controlled classification of multidimensional quantities called the segmentation net. We show that the Panel-CARDS method identifies group structure asymptotically and consistently estimates model parameters at the same time. External information on the minimum number of elements within each group is not required but can be used to improve the accuracy of classification and estimation in finite samples. Simulations evaluate performance and corroborate the asymptotic theory in several practical design settings. Two empirical economic applications are considered: one explores the effect of income on democracy by using cross-country data over the period 1961-2000; the other examines the effect of minimum wage legislation on unemployment in 50 states of the United States over the period 1988-2014. Both applications reveal the presence of latent groupings in these panel data

Properties of the Optimality Equation and Optimal Policies in Discrete Time Markov Decision Processes and Their Applications

This paper investigates properties of the optimaiity equation and optimal policies in discrete time Markov decision processes with expected discounted total rewards. Under conditions where the model is well defined and the optimaiity equation is true, it is shown that as a solution of the optimaiity equation, the solution called optimal value function is always the smallest one, and is also the unique one under another weak condition. Moreover, a structure of optimal policies is discussed. Finally, these properties are applied to state feedback control of discrete event systems with a numerical example

Non LOS Conditions in Millimeter Wave Band and Proposed Multi-hop Protocol

In this paper, a detailed investigation of millimeter wave Non LOS (line of sight) conditions and proposed multi-hop protocol is described. Ratio under received power threshold is calculated by measuring the complex permittivity of a used desk and propagation loss characteristics along the surface of a desk plane. This calculation result shows Non LOS conditions existence even though line of sight is secured on the desk environment. Visibility estimation in the typical Japanese office is calculated using light emission method and shows high rate of Non LOS condition. In order to minimized Non LOS conditions, multi hop protocol is proposed. Terminal BER profile is used for finding to the most suitable extension point (EP). The use of twin link communications and an automatic handover mechanism, which are minimized to Non LOS condition, are proposed