1,229 research outputs found
Influence factor of Chinese elders' wealth management behaviour: an empirical study
The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the influential demographic variables of elders’ wealth management behaviour. Purpose sampling for 122 older consumers (aged over 65) who participate in wealth management programme with instrument, was conducted in April 2007 in China (Taiwan area). Regression was performed for the data analysis. The results showed gender, educational background, and living location being key factors affecting elder consumers’ wealth-management behaviours, including consumers’ familiarity with financial products/services, sources of professional information, sources of word-of-mouth information, investment intention, and investment confidence. The main contributions of this not only include enhancing existing literature concerning wealth management, marketing, and elder behaviours (especially for clarifying how the controversial factors work), but unveiling elders’ behaviour tendency in such a blooming emerging market. Practical implications to bank marketers are also given
Kana Vinaka Contemporary Island Cuisine
A product of generations of Pacific heritage and travel, Colin’s destiny has been fashioned by the unique blending of cultures in Hawaii, a passion for the food, produce and flavours of the Pacific, and island hospitality.
Recipes, techniques, knowledge and experiences about local produce, how it can be used in unique and tasty contemporary ways, utilising and producing culturally-based dishes for locals and visitors to enjoy
New records of florivory on dipterocarp flowers
Peer reviewedPreprin
Learning Hard Alignments with Variational Inference
There has recently been significant interest in hard attention models for
tasks such as object recognition, visual captioning and speech recognition.
Hard attention can offer benefits over soft attention such as decreased
computational cost, but training hard attention models can be difficult because
of the discrete latent variables they introduce. Previous work used REINFORCE
and Q-learning to approach these issues, but those methods can provide
high-variance gradient estimates and be slow to train. In this paper, we tackle
the problem of learning hard attention for a sequential task using variational
inference methods, specifically the recently introduced VIMCO and NVIL.
Furthermore, we propose a novel baseline that adapts VIMCO to this setting. We
demonstrate our method on a phoneme recognition task in clean and noisy
environments and show that our method outperforms REINFORCE, with the
difference being greater for a more complicated task
Exact Recursive Probabilistic Programming
Recursive calls over recursive data are widely useful for generating
probability distributions, and probabilistic programming allows computations
over these distributions to be expressed in a modular and intuitive way. Exact
inference is also useful, but unfortunately, existing probabilistic programming
languages do not perform exact inference on recursive calls over recursive
data, forcing programmers to code many applications manually. We introduce a
probabilistic language in which a wide variety of recursion can be expressed
naturally, and inference carried out exactly. For instance, probabilistic
pushdown automata and their generalizations are easy to express, and
polynomial-time parsing algorithms for them are derived automatically. We
eliminate recursive data types using program transformations related to
defunctionalization and refunctionalization. These transformations are assured
correct by a linear type system, and a successful choice of transformations, if
there is one, is guaranteed to be found by a greedy algorithm
Dielectrophoretic investigations of internal cell properties
Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is a term which describes the motion of polarisable particles
induced by a non-uniform electric field. It has been the subject of research into a variety of
fields including nanoassembly, particle filtration and biomedicine. The application of DEP to
the latter has gained significant interest in recent years, driven by the development of
microfluidic “Lab-on-a-chip” devices designed to perform sophisticated biochemical
processes. It provides the ability to characterise and selectively manipulate cells based on
their distinct dielectric properties in a manner which is non-invasive and label free, by using
electrodes which can be readily integrated with microfluidic channels.
Under appropriate conditions a biological cell will experience a DEP force directing it either
towards or away from concentrations in the electric field. At a so-called “crossover
frequency” the cell is effectively invisible to the field resulting in no DEP force, a response
typically observed in the 1 kHz to 1 MHz range. Its value is a function of cell membrane
dielectric properties and has been the subject of research directed at devices capable of using
it to both characterise and sort cells.
The aim of this work was to investigate the behaviour of a higher frequency crossover
referred to as fxo2, predicted to occur in the 1 MHz to 1 GHz range. At these frequencies the
electric field is expected to penetrate the cell membrane and behave as a function of
intracellular dielectric properties. Standard lithography techniques have been used to
fabricate electrodes carefully designed to operate at these frequencies. The existence of fxo2
was then confirmed in murine myeloma cells, in good agreement with dielectric models
derived from impedance spectroscopy. A temperature dependent decrease in its value was
observed with respect to the time that cells were suspended in a DEP solution. This decrease
is consistent with previous studies which indicated an efflux of intracellular ions under
similar conditions.
An analytical derivation of fxo2 demonstrates its direct proportionality to intracellular
conductivity. Direct control of the crossover was achieved by using osmotic stress to dilute
the intracellular compartment and thereby alter its conductivity. By using a fluorophore
which selectively binds to potassium, a strong relationship has been demonstrated between
the value of fxo2 and the concentration of intracellular potassium. Measurements of fxo2 for an
unfed culture demonstrated a correlation with viability and subtle shifts in its distribution
were caused by the early stages of chemically induced apoptosis
Spectral asymptotics of the Laplacian on supercritical bond-percolation graphs
We investigate Laplacians on supercritical bond-percolation graphs with
different boundary conditions at cluster borders. The integrated density of
states of the Dirichlet Laplacian is found to exhibit a Lifshits tail at the
lower spectral edge, while that of the Neumann Laplacian shows a van Hove
asymptotics, which results from the percolating cluster. At the upper spectral
edge, the behaviour is reversed.Comment: 16 pages, typos corrected, to appear in J. Funct. Ana
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