A sector analysis for RFID technologies: fundamental and technical analysis for financial decision making problems

Automatic identification technologies have been used in a wide range of applications for reducing the amount of time and labor needed to input data and improving data accuracy. As an important automatic identification technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies allow contactless reading and these technologies are particularly successful in manufacturing and other environments where traditional identification technologies such as bar codes can not perform well. By integrating the RFID technology into their business models, companies may save time, lower labor cost, improve products quality and provide better service. RFID is the wireless technology that uses RF communication to identify, track and manage objects and collect and store data. RFID technology enables companies to develop applications that create value by tracking and identifying objects, animals or people. Business applications of RFID technology can be seen in areas such as manufacturing, supply chain management, software integration, security systems, asset tracking and many others. RFID technology was predicted to be one of the “top ten” technologies in 2004 by CNN. Although, the RFID market is less than five years old, it has been applied to many different industries, from retail industry to logistics, or from healthcare to service business industry – and it is still growing. Particularly, RFID has fundamental influences on today's retailing and supply chain management for applications like asset tracking the inventory control and management. RFID technology also finds major application in mobile phones and is widely used in toll collection of highways, for payments in restaurants, vending machines, retail and parking lots. There are a wide range of RFID systems currently being used or being developed. Examples to these systems include but not limited to the following; automatic vehicle and personnel access control for security (Simpson, 2006), airport passenger and baggage tracking (Ferguson, 2006), tracing blood for cutting down errors such as giving patients wrong blood types (Ranger, 2006), payment process systems (Ramachandran, 2006), production control in manufacturing (Liu & Miao, 2006), transfusion medicine (Knels, 2006) real-time inventory control by automated identification of items in warehouses, tracking and management of physical files, tracking of books in the libraries (Shadid, 2005). For some other applications, interested reader is referred to (Finkenzeller, 2003; Smith, 2004). RFID solution providers claim that their technology and solutions bring significant benefits and have valuable advantages in practice. As new RFID solutions being developed and more RFID tags and equipments being used, these solutions will become more cost effective and RFID businesses are expected to grow rapidly. Since RFID is fairly new, it’s difficult to measure resulting sales increases or heightened customer satisfaction quotients. On the other hand, according to IDC estimation (IDC is a subsidiary of International Data Group, a leading technology media, research, and events company and provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets), companies in the retail sector will spend nearly $1.3 billion on RFID in their supply chain operations in 2008, compared to about$91.5 million in 2003 which corresponds to annual growth rate of 70 percent. In a similar look; the Wireless Data Research Group projected that the global market for RFID increased from $1 billion in 2003 to$3 billion in 2007 (Asif & Mandviwalla, 2005). There are two major drivers of this growth. The first one is the adoption of RFID technology by major retailers and government agencies. The second one is the reduction in the price of RFID tags, readers, and IT systems required to deploy RFID. Given the huge potential of RFID technology, there has been a huge emergence of RFID specialty companies and the development of RFID practices within many market-leading companies. Due to huge emergence, it is desirable to make a sector analysis. In this study, we perform a sector analysis for RFID technologies for researchers and analysts. We investigate public RFID companies traded on the stock exchange markets, summarize their financial performance, describe their RF products, services, and applications, and perform fundamental and technical analysis

Genetic characterization and relatedness among autochthonous grapevine cultivars from Northeast Turkey by Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR)

25 autochthonous grapevine cultivars from Northeast Anatolia in Turkey together with two well-known standard cultivars, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot were fi ngerprinted using six pairs of SSR primers to assess their genetic diversity and relatedness. All six SSR primers produced successful amplifi cations and revealed DNA polymorphisms that were subsequently used to assess genetic relatedness of the cultivars. A total of 52 alleles were detected with a mean value of 8.67 alleles per locus indicating allele richness. The average expected heterozygosity (He) and observed heterozygosity (Ho) were 0.759 and 0.809, respectively. Considering the number of alleles generated, the highest number was observed in VVS2 loci (14 alleles/locus), while the lowest in VrZAG83 loci (5 alleles/locus). The Unweighted Pair-Group Method with Arithmetic mean (UPGMA) dendrogram constructed based on the SSR data yielded two main clusters. First cluster included only cv. Kibris and the second cluster included rest of the cultivars including Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. The results showed that SSR markers have proved to be an effi cient tool for fi ngerprinting grapevine cultivars and conducting genetic diversity studies in grapevine

A Survey About Nothing: Monitoring a Million Supergiants for Failed Supernovae

Extragalactic transient searches have historically been limited to looking for the appearance of new sources such as supernovae. It is now possible to carry out a new kind of survey that will do the opposite, that is, search for the disappearance of massive stars. This will entail the systematic observation of galaxies within a distance of 10 Mpc in order to watch ~10^6 supergiants. Reaching this critical number ensures that something will occur yearly, since these massive stars must end their lives with a core collapse within ~10^6 years. Using deep imaging and image subtraction it is possible to determine the fates of these stars whether they end with a bang (supernova) or a whimper (fall out of sight). Such a survey would place completely new limits on the total rate of all core collapses, which is critical for determining the validity of supernova models. It would also determine the properties of supernova progenitors, better characterize poorly understood optical transients, such as eta Carina-like mass ejections, find and characterize large numbers of Cepheids, luminous blue variables and eclipsing binaries, and allow the discovery of any new phenomena that inhabit this relatively unexplored parameter space.Comment: final version, 7 pages, 5 figures, ApJ in pres

Real-time lattice boltzmann shallow waters method for breaking wave simulations

We present a new approach for the simulation of surfacebased fluids based in a hybrid formulation of Lattice Boltzmann Method for Shallow Waters and particle systems. The modified LBM can handle arbitrary underlying terrain conditions and arbitrary fluid depth. It also introduces a novel method for tracking dry-wet regions and moving boundaries. Dynamic rigid bodies are also included in our simulations using a two-way coupling. Certain features of the simulation that the LBM can not handle because of its heightfield nature, as breaking waves, are detected and automatically turned into splash particles. Here we use a ballistic particle system, but our hybrid method can handle more complex systems as SPH. Both the LBM and particle systems are implemented in CUDA, although dynamic rigid bodies are simulated in CPU. We show the effectiveness of our method with various examples which achieve real-time on consumer-level hardware.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The identification of obstacles immersed in a steady incompressible viscous fluid

In this paper, the identification of immersed obstacles in a steady incompressible Navier-Stokes viscous fluid flow from fluid traction measurements is investigated. The solution of the direct problem is computed using the finite element method (FEM) implemented in the Freefem++ commercial software package. The solution of the inverse geometric obstacle problem (parameterized by a small set of unknown constants) is accomplished iteratively by minimizing the nonlinear least-squares functional using an adaptive moment estimation algorithm. The numerical results for the identification of an obstacle in a viscous fluid flowing in a channel with open ends, show that when the fluid traction is measured on the top, bottom and inlet boundaries, then the algorithm provides accurate and robust reconstructions of an obstacle parameterized by a small number of parameters in a Fourier trigonometric finite expansion. Stable reconstructions with respect to noise in the measured fluid traction data are also achieved, although for complicated shapes parameterized by larger degrees of freedom nonlinear Tikhonov regularization of the least-squares functional may need to be employed. Multiple-component obstacles may also be identified provided that a good initial guess is provided. In case of limited data being available only at the inlet boundary the pressure gradient provides more information for inversion than the fluid traction

Gratitude: Does it have a place within media-practice education?

Gratitude may be an important yet largely untapped aspect of media-practice education. This research uses an exploratory approach with media-practice academics and students in order to examine the evidence and nature of gratitude within media-practice education. Given the exploratory nature of the study, interim findings are reported. The research finds media-practice students to be open to gratitude having a place within their educational experiences, indeed students exclusively speak about situations in which they feel grateful, as positive aspects of their student experience. However academics see gratitude in a more varied way. For some, gratitude and its cyclical nature resonate; for others, gratitude is inappropriate and loaded with notions of power. These different perspectives may be partially explained by the different ways in which students and academics perceive gratitude. Whereas initial student voices suggest that gratitude is a positive emotion associated with a desire to reciprocate, academics’ interpretation seems to emphasise obligation. This mismatch may inhibit the current impact of gratitude within the media-practice learning context. The research suggests that gratitude may be a defining aspect of a functional, productive student experience which those working within media-practice education might usefully aim to generate

Role of IRAK-M in Alcohol Induced Liver Injury

Increasing evidence suggests that innate immunity plays an important role in alcohol-induced liver injury and most studies have focused on positive regulation of innate immunity. The main objective of this study was to investigate the negative regulator of innate immunity, IL-1/Toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling pathways and interleukin receptor-associated kinase-M (IRAK-M) in alcoholic liver injury. We established an alcohol-induced liver injury model using wild type and IRAK-M deficient B6 mice and investigated the possible mechanisms. We found that in the absence of IRAK-M, liver damage by alcohol was worse with higher alanine transaminase (ALT), more immune cell infiltration and increased numbers of IFNγ producing cells. We also found enhanced phagocytic activity in CD68+ cells. Moreover, our results revealed altered gut bacteria after alcohol consumption and this was more striking in the absence of IRAK-M. Our study provides evidence that IRAK-M plays an important role in alcohol-induced liver injury and IRAK-M negatively regulates the innate and possibly the adaptive immune response in the liver reacting to acute insult by alcohol. In the absence of IRAK-M, the hosts developed worse liver injury, enhanced gut permeability and altered gut microbiota

Early postzygotic mutations contribute to de novo variation in a healthy monozygotic twin pair

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Background: Human de novo single-nucleotide variation (SNV) rate is estimated to range between 0.82-1.70×10-8 mutations per base per generation. However, contribution of early postzygotic mutations to the overall human de novo SNV rate is unknown. Methods: We performed deep whole-genome sequencing (more than 30-fold coverage per individual) of the whole-blood-derived DNA samples of a healthy monozygotic twin pair and their parents. We examined the genotypes of each individual simultaneously for each of the SNVs and discovered de novo SNVs regarding the timing of mutagenesis. Putative de novo SNVs were validated using Sanger-based capillary sequencing. Results: We conservatively characterised 23 de novo SNVs shared by the twin pair, 8 de novo SNVs specific to twin I and 1 de novo SNV specific to twin II. Based on the number of de novo SNVs validated by Sanger sequencing and the number of callable bases of each twin, we calculated the overall de novo SNV rate of 1.31×10-8 and 1.01×10-8 for twin I and twin II, respectively. Of these, rates of the early postzygotic de novo SNVs were estimated to be 0.34×10-8 for twin I and 0.04×10-8 for twin II. Conclusions: Early postzygotic mutations constitute a substantial proportion of de novo mutations in humans. Therefore, genome mosaicism resulting from early mitotic events during embryogenesis is common and could substantially contribute to the development of diseases