Distributed Information Management with Mobile Agents

With more users taking advantage of publicly accessible networks, such as corporate intranets and the Internet, larger amounts of information is becoming electronically distributed and disseminated. Distributed information management is an emerging technology for dealing with the problems of managing information that is spread across networks, users and applications. We present four categories that we consider being necessary to developing tools to undertake distributed information management tasks. To help model the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of a user's distributed information, we advocate the use of agents and agent technologies when building distributed information management applications. We present an agent-oriented architecture which is based around a concept of mobile agents, since they provide a convenient abstraction for modelling distributed applications

Towards a Framework for Developing Mobile Agents for Managing Distributed Information Resources

Distributed information management tools allow users to author, disseminate, discover and manage information within large-scale networked environments, such as the Internet. Agent technology provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to develop such distributed information management applications. We present a layered organisation that is shared by the specific applications that we build. Within this organisation we describe an architecture where mobile agents can move across distributed environments, integrate with local resources and other mobile agents, and communicate their results back to the user

Sounding the Alarm on Inflation Indexing and Strict Inflation Targeting

Unanticipated inflation or deflation causes one party of a nominal contract to gain at the expense of the other party, an effect absent in macroeconomic models with one representative consumer or with consumers having identical consumption. In this paper's general dynamic and stochastic equilibrium model, diverse consumers maximize risk-averse utility and rent labor and land to profit-maximizing firms. Both inflation indexing and strict inflation targeting are Pareto inefficient. When Pareto sharing of changes of aggregate supply is proportional, nominal contracts under perfect nominal income targeting are Pareto efficient, while quasi-real contracts are Pareto efficient regardless.inflation indexing, inflation targeting, quasi-real indexing, nominal income targeting

Quasi-Real Indexing-- The Pareto-Efficient Solution to Inflation Indexing

In a pure-exchange economy with one good, stochastic aggregate demand and supply, and consumers having the same relative-risk aversion, Pareto efficiency requires each individual’s consumption to be proportional to aggregate supply. While neither nominal contracts nor pure inflation- indexed contracts provide this proportionality, quasi-real contracts do. Quasi-real contracts adjust for aggregate-demand-caused inflation but not for aggregate-supply-caused inflation, causing their real obligations to be proportional to aggregate supply. When consumers differ in their relative risk aversion, or experience stochastic utility or endowment shocks, they will need insurance and other risk-transfer contracts in addition to quasi-real contracts.inflation indexing, quasi-real indexing

Relative ages of lava flows at Alba Patera, Mars

Many large lava flows on the flanks of Alba Patera are astonishing in their volume and length. As a suite, these flows suggest tremendously voluminous and sustained eruptions, and provide dimensional boundary conditions typically a factor of 100 larger than terrestrial flows. One of the most striking features associated with Alba Patera is the large, radially oriented lava flows that exhibit a variety of flow morphologies. These include sheet flows, tube fed and tube channel flows, and undifferentiated flows. Three groups of flows were studied; flows on the northwest flank, southeast flank, and the intracaldera region. The lava flows discussed probably were erupted as a group during the same major volcanic episode as suggested by the data presented. Absolute ages are poorly constrained for both the individual flows and shield, due in part to disagreement as to which absolute age curve is representative for Mars. A relative age sequence is implied but lacks precision due to the closeness of the size frequency curves

Dual Frame (Landline and Cell RDD) Estimation in a National Survey of Latinos

Explores the implications of conducting surveys by both landline and cell phones for issues of survey bias and undercoverage of Latinos, among whom the cell phone-only population is growing. Discusses sampling and weighting methods

Small Changes - Big Difference: Bournemouth University Library and its learning community

The design of The Sir Michael Cobham Library at Bournemouth University (BU) represents an holistic approach to meeting student expectations. This paper will consider how the latest innovations in Library design are shaped by technology and learning. Parallels will be drawn with the libraries of the ancient world, printing revolution of the fifteenth century and their impact on learning. Best practice was used in the design of BU Library and continues to inform enhancements to the learning space. The big differences made by small changes are discussed; especially the changes in the boundary between group social and silent study space to ensure that library buildings are still seen as relevant in an increasingly digital world. The student experience at BU is enhanced by innovative pedagogical frameworks that bring together learning activities and academically- led quality e-resources within the unit of study. In this environment the JISC (2007) description of ICT “fading into the foreground” becomes a reality as students embrace new technologies and own the library space in which they are available

The first neural machine translation system for the Erzya language

We present the first neural machine translation system for translation between the endangered Erzya language and Russian and the dataset collected by us to train and evaluate it. The BLEU scores are 17 and 19 for translation to Erzya and Russian respectively, and more than half of the translations are rated as acceptable by native speakers. We also adapt our model to translate between Erzya and 10 other languages, but without additional parallel data, the quality on these directions remains low. We release the translation models along with the collected text corpus, a new language identification model, and a multilingual sentence encoder adapted for the Erzya language. These resources will be available at https://github.com/slone-nlp/myv-nmt.Comment: Accepted to the Field Matters workshop at the COLING 2022 conferenc