Consumer confidence indeces and short-term forecasting of consumption

Recently there has been growing interest in examining the potential shortterm link between survey-based confidence indicators and real economic activity, notably for macroeconomic policy making. This paper builds on previous studies to establish whether there is a short-term predictive relationship between measures of consumer confidence and actual consumption, that could be used for forecasting, in a range of major industrial countries. It then extends such previous analyses by assessing whether this relation has changed over time, and whether we can attribute any time-varying relation to structural developments in the economy, such as financial deepening and the increasing role of house prices in determination of consumption

Exploring The Value Of Folksonomies For Creating Semantic Metadata

Finding good keywords to describe resources is an on-going problem: typically we select such words manually from a thesaurus of terms, or they are created using automatic keyword extraction techniques. Folksonomies are an increasingly well populated source of unstructured tags describing web resources. This paper explores the value of the folksonomy tags as potential source of keyword metadata by examining the relationship between folksonomies, community produced annotations, and keywords extracted by machines. The experiment has been carried-out in two ways: subjectively, by asking two human indexers to evaluate the quality of the generated keywords from both systems; and automatically, by measuring the percentage of overlap between the folksonomy set and machine generated keywords set. The results of this experiment show that the folksonomy tags agree more closely with the human generated keywords than those automatically generated. The results also showed that the trained indexers preferred the semantics of folksonomy tags compared to keywords extracted automatically. These results can be considered as evidence for the strong relationship of folksonomies to the human indexer’s mindset, demonstrating that folksonomies used in the del.icio.us bookmarking service are a potential source for generating semantic metadata to annotate web resources

Consumer confidence indices and short-term forecasting of consumption

Recently there has been growing interest in examining the potential shortterm link between survey-based confidence indicators and real economic activity, notably for macroeconomic policy making. This paper builds on previous studies to establish whether there is a short-term predictive relationship between measures of consumer confidence and actual consumption, that could be used for forecasting, in a range of major industrial countries. It then extends such previous analyses by assessing whether this relation has changed over time, and whether we can attribute any time-varying relation to structural developments in the economy, such as financial deepening and the increasing role of house prices in determination of consumption

The design, kinematics and torque analysis of the self-bending soft contraction actuator

This article presents the development of a self-bending contraction actuator (SBCA) through analysis of its structure, kinematics, and torque formulas, and then explores its applications. The proposed actuator has been fabricated by two methods to prove the efficiency of the human body inspiration, which represents the covering of human bones by soft tissues to protect the bone and give the soft texture. The SBCA provides bending behaviour along with a high force to-weight ratio. As with the simple pneumatic muscle actuator (PMA), the SBCA is soft and easy to implement. Both the kinematics and the torque formula presented for the SBCA are scalable and can be used with different actuator sizes. The bending actuator has been tested under an air pressure up to 500 kPa, and the behaviour of its bending angle, parameters, dimensions, and the bending torques have been illustrated. On the other hand, the experiments showed the efficient performances of the actuator and validate the proposed kinematics. Therefore, the actuator can be used in many different applications, such as soft grippers and continuum arms

Creating structure from disorder: using folksonomies to create semantic metadata

This paper reports on an on-going research project to create educational semantic metadata out of folksonomies. The paper describes a simple scenario for the usage of the generated semantic metadata in teaching, and describes the ‘FolksAnnotation’ tool which applies an organization scheme to tags in a specific domain of interest. The contribution of this paper is to describe an evaluation framework which will allow us to validate our claim that folksonomies are potentially a rich source of metadata

Synthesis, anti-HIV activity and molecular modeling study of some new pyrimidine analogues

A new series of 2,6-diamino-5-arylazo-4-chloropyrimidine analogues (6-13) were synthesized from the pyrimidine scaffold 5, via diazotization with various amines. Nucleophilic displacement of compound 5 by ethanethiolate or arylthio nucleophiles, afforded the 4-alkylthio analogues (14-16). Treatment of compound 17 or 18 with thiourea under MWI gave the 4-thione derivatives 19 and 20, respectively. On treatment of compound 20 with 2-mercaptoacetic acid furnished the 4-thio analogue (21). Reaction of compound 19 or 20 with sodium hypochlorite followed by ammonium hydroxide afforded the 4-aminothio analogues 22 and 23, respectively. Oxidation of compound 23 with H2O2 led to the 4-sulphonamide derivative 24. All new compounds were evaluated for their in vitro antiviral activity against the replication of HIV-1 and HIV-2 in MT-4 cells. Compounds 14-16 and 21 showed an EC50 values of > 2.12, 1.99, 1.80 and 1.92 μg/mL, respectively. In addition, preliminary structure-activity relationship and molecular modeling of compound 15 has been studied

Design-space exploration of most-recent-only communication using myrinet on SGI ccNUMA architectures

technical reportSGI's current ccNUMA multiprocessor architectures offer high scalability and performance without sacrificing the ease of use of simpler SMP systems. Although these systems also provide a standard PCI expansion bus, the bridging between PCI and SGI's ccNUMA architecture invalidates the assumptions typically made by network protocol designers attempting to use Myrinet to reduce communications latencies. We explore the complications introduced by SGI's architecture in the context of designing most-recent-only communications, in which a reader requires only the most recent datum produced by a writer

The post office experience: designing a large asynchronous chip

Journal ArticleThe Post Office is an asynchronous, 300,000 transistor, full-custom CMOS chip designed as the communication component for the Mayfly scalable parallel processor. Performance requirements led to the development of a design style which permits the design of sequential circuits operating under a restricted form of multiple input change sign alling called burst-mode. The Post Office complexity forced us to develop a set of design fools capable of correctly synthesizing transistor circuits front state machine and equation specifications, and capable of verifying the correctness of the resultant circuity using implementation specific timing assumptions. The paper provides a case study of this design experience

ABP : predictor based management of DRAM row buffers

posterDRAM accesses are costly, especially in multicore systems. Future CMPs will run a mixed load of workloads/threads. Destructive interference at memory controller, spatio-temporal locality lost! DRAM row-buffer hits are least expensive, row-conflicts are most. Randomized memory access patterns render traditional row-buffer management policies useless. Most commercial CMPs have no buffer management policies implemented [1]. Timer based policies [2,3] are too coarse-grained to be effective. Rather then time, focus on access patterns. Access patterns are predictable, a predictor can accurately predict the number of accesses for which the row-buffer be kept open. In any case, can't do worse than a static policy

Biology and utilization of anadromous alosids: Annual progress report (October 1, 1969 - September 30, 1970)

This report is a completion report in the contractual sense, but progress report in the scientific sense. It includes the annual progress report on work accomplished during the period October l, 1969 and September 30, 1970 in addition to a summary of work done since the inception of the project in March, 1967