8,259 research outputs found
Scotlandâs international competitiveness within Western Europe
The paper measures regional competitiveness of Scotland in comparison to ten EU regions and small countries using the International Benchmarking Index Family (âIB Index Familyâ) developed by BAK Basel Economics.1 The IB Index Family contains an index with three dimensions of competitiveness: Performance, Attractiveness and Structural Potential. The Performance Index measures recent economic success; the Attractiveness Index measures how well a region is an attractive location to companies and highly-qualified individuals; and the Structural Potential Index estimates future potential economic growth based on current economic structure. The application of the IB Index Family provides a first-step into a more in-depth benchmarking of the competitiveness of a region, which is necessary when working towards detailed policy conclusions. The paper explains these measurement tools and applies them in a short benchmarking analysis of Scotland and ten EU regions and small nations (e.g. Ireland, Norway, Western Sweden etc.)
On the efficient computation of high-order derivatives for implicitly defined functions
Scientific studies often require the precise calculation of derivatives. In
many cases an analytical calculation is not feasible and one resorts to
evaluating derivatives numerically. These are error-prone, especially for
higher-order derivatives. A technique based on algorithmic differentiation is
presented which allows for a precise calculation of higher-order derivatives.
The method can be widely applied even for the case of only numerically
solvable, implicit dependencies which totally hamper a semi-analytical
calculation of the derivatives. As a demonstration the method is applied to a
quantum field theoretical physical model. The results are compared with
standard numerical derivative methods.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Comput. Phys. Commu
Developing an Actuarial Risk Assessment to Inform the Decisions Made by Adult Protective Service Workers
In 2008, the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services Bureau of Elderly and Adult Services (BEAS) and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD), with funding provided by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), collaborated to construct an actuarial risk assessment to classify BEAS clients by their likelihood of elder maltreatment and/or self-neglect in the future. Studies in adult and juvenile corrections and child welfare have demonstrated that active service intervention with high risk clients can reduce criminal recidivism and the recurrence of child maltreatment (Wagner, Hull, & Luttrell, 1995; Eisenberg & Markley, 1987; Baird, Heinz, & Bemus, 1981). The purpose of this research was to examine a large set of individual and referral characteristics, determine their relationship to subsequent elder self-neglect and/or maltreatment, and develop an actuarial risk assessment for BEAS workers to complete at the end of an investigation to inform their case decisions.BEAS and NCCD pursued development of an actuarial risk assessment with the goal of reducing subsequent maltreatment of elderly and vulnerable adults who have been involved in an incident of self-neglect or maltreatment by another person (i.e., abuse, exploitation, or neglect). The actuarial risk assessment described in this report provides BEAS workers with a method to more accurately identify high risk clients and therefore more effectively target service interventions in an effort to protect their most vulnerable clients
Locating a semi-obnoxious facility in the special case of Manhattan distances
The aim of thiswork is to locate a semi-obnoxious facility, i.e. tominimize the distances
to a given set of customers in order to save transportation costs on the one hand and to
avoid undesirable interactions with other facilities within the region by maximizing
the distances to the corresponding facilities on the other hand. Hence, the goal is to
satisfy economic and environmental issues simultaneously. Due to the contradicting
character of these goals, we obtain a non-convex objective function. We assume that
distances can be measured by rectilinear distances and exploit the structure of this
norm to obtain a very efficient dual pair of algorithms
What does it take to evolve behaviorally complex organisms?
What genotypic features explain the evolvability of organisms that have to accomplish many different tasks? The genotype of behaviorally complex organisms may be more likely to encode modular neural architectures because neural modules dedicated to distinct tasks avoid neural interference, i.e., the arrival of conflicting messages for changing the value of connection weights during learning. However, if the connection weights for the various modules are genetically inherited, this raises the problem of genetic linkage: favorable mutations may fall on one portion of the genotype encoding one neural module and unfavorable mutations on another portion encoding another module. We show that this can prevent the genotype from reaching an adaptive optimum. This effect is different from other linkage effects described in the literature and we argue that it represents a new class of genetic constraints. Using simulations we show that sexual reproduction can alleviate the problem of genetic linkage by recombining separate modules all of which incorporate either favorable or unfavorable mutations. We speculate that this effect may contribute to the taxonomic prevalence of sexual reproduction among higher organisms. In addition to sexual recombination, the problem of genetic linkage for behaviorally complex organisms may be mitigated by entrusting evolution with the task of finding appropriate modular architectures and learning with the task of finding the appropriate connection weights for these architectures
No. 06: The Urban Food System of Nairobi, Kenya
Nairobi is a city of stark contrasts. Nearly half a million of its three million residents live in abject poverty in some of Africaâs largest slums, yet the Kenyan capital is also an international and regional hub. In East Africa, rapid urbanization is stretching existing food and agriculture systems as growing cities struggle to provide food and nutrition security for their inhabitants. Nairobi is no exception; it is a dynamically growing city and its food supply chains are constantly adapting and responding to changing local conditions. It is also an international city and the extent to which it is food secure is increasingly predicated on food imports from the regional East African Community and other international sources. Informal traditional value chains have a variety of actors and intermediaries that increase transaction costs and create an inefficient post-harvest procurement network, thereby pushing food products out of the reach of those who need them most. The majority of Nairobiâs food purchases are from informal food vendors. The cityâs urban poor rely on the informal food sector for several reasons including that it provides food close to where they live and work, credit and barter are often available, small quantities can be purchased, and many items are sold more cheaply than at formal outlets. The leading income-generating activity for women in Nairobiâs poor communities is selling fruit and vegetables
Static and Dynamic Aspects of Scientific Collaboration Networks
Collaboration networks arise when we map the connections between scientists
which are formed through joint publications. These networks thus display the
social structure of academia, and also allow conclusions about the structure of
scientific knowledge. Using the computer science publication database DBLP, we
compile relations between authors and publications as graphs and proceed with
examining and quantifying collaborative relations with graph-based methods. We
review standard properties of the network and rank authors and publications by
centrality. Additionally, we detect communities with modularity-based
clustering and compare the resulting clusters to a ground-truth based on
conferences and thus topical similarity. In a second part, we are the first to
combine DBLP network data with data from the Dagstuhl Seminars: We investigate
whether seminars of this kind, as social and academic events designed to
connect researchers, leave a visible track in the structure of the
collaboration network. Our results suggest that such single events are not
influential enough to change the network structure significantly. However, the
network structure seems to influence a participant's decision to accept or
decline an invitation.Comment: ASONAM 2012: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social
Networks Analysis and Minin
Static-light meson masses from twisted mass lattice QCD
We compute the static-light meson spectrum using two-flavor Wilson twisted
mass lattice QCD. We have considered five different values for the light quark
mass corresponding to 300 MeV < m_PS < 600 MeV. We have extrapolated our
results, to make predictions regarding the spectrum of B and B_s mesons.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, talk given at the XXVI International Symposium on
Lattice Field Theory, July 14 - 19 2008, Williamsburg, Virginia, US
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