Financial Competitiveness of Macau in Comparison with Other Gaming Destinations

This paper analyzes the financial competitiveness of the Macau gaming industry visa- vis its counterparts in North America and Europe. The analysis covers casino product structure, revenue composition, assets productivity and financial returns of Macau versus those of gaming destinations in North America and Europe. The findings reveal that while Macau is advantageously positioned in terms of assets productivity and financial returns, its casino product structure and revenue composition seem at odds with today\u27s gaming trend. Macau is facing challenges from emerging competitors in Asia. To maintain a stable gaming revenue growth and retain its competitiveness, Macau must modify its casino product structure and revenue composition. Pursuing a more diversified market is a critical step towards the goal

The defocusing energy-supercritical NLS in four space dimensions

We consider a class of defocusing energy-supercritical nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations in four space dimensions. Following a concentration-compactness approach, we show that for $1<s_c<3/2$, any solution that remains bounded in the critical Sobolev space $\dot{H}_x^{s_c}(\R^4)$ must be global and scatter. Key ingredients in the proof include a long-time Strichartz estimate and a frequency-localized interaction Morawetz inequality.Comment: 52 page

Comparing macroscopic continuum models for rarefied gas dynamics : a new test method

We propose a new test method for investigating which macroscopic continuum models, among the many existing models, give the best description of rarefied gas flows over a range of Knudsen numbers. The merits of our method are: no boundary conditions for the continuum models are needed, no coupled governing equations are solved, while the Knudsen layer is still considered. This distinguishes our proposed test method from other existing techniques (such as stability analysis in time and space, computations of sound speed and dispersion, and the shock wave structure problem). Our method relies on accurate, essentially noise-free, solutions of the basic microscopic kinetic equation, e.g. the Boltzmann equation or a kinetic model equation; in this paper, the BGK model and the ES-BGK model equations are considered. Our method is applied to test whether one-dimensional stationary Couette flow is accurately described by the following macroscopic transport models: the Navier-Stokes-Fourier equations, Burnett equations, Grad's 13 moment equations, and the regularized 13 moment equations (two types: the original, and that based on an order of magnitude approach). The gas molecular model is Maxwellian. For Knudsen numbers in the transition-continuum regime (Kn less-than-or-equals, slant 0.1), we find that the two types of regularized 13 moment equations give similar results to each other, which are better than Grad's original 13 moment equations, which, in turn, give better results than the Burnett equations. The Navier-Stokes-Fourier equations give the worst results. This is as expected, considering the presumed accuracy of these models. For cases of higher Knudsen numbers, i.e. Kn > 0.1, all macroscopic continuum equations tested fail to describe the flows accurately. We also show that the above conclusions from our tests are general, and independent of the kinetic model used

Development & Application of the Transportation Index for Sustainable Places (TISP)

The purpose of transportation systems go beyond the movement of people and goods. These systems shape the natural and built environment which subsequently affects social and economic interactions. However, conventional metrics typically only address the mobility aspect of transportation via measures such as level of service and congestion. Metrics are needed to evaluate the broader impacts of transportation. This work describes the Transportation Index for Sustainable Places (TISP), a performance metric designed to assess the sustainability of transportation systems with respect to environmental, social, and economic outcomes. The development of the TISP was guided through literature review focused on understanding existing performance measures and the numerous conceptualizations of sustainability. From this review, we developed a definition of transportation sustainability and translated it into a model to be used as our framework. The results of this work show that statewide transportation systems have significant differences with respect to environmental, social, and economic sustainability issues. These differences are in a large part due to the types of transportation systems among the states. States that are more dependent on automobile travel tended to have poorer sustainable outcomes. Conversely, states offering more diverse travel options tended to be more sustainable when rated with the TISP

Social Collaborative Retrieval

Socially-based recommendation systems have recently attracted significant interest, and a number of studies have shown that social information can dramatically improve a system's predictions of user interests. Meanwhile, there are now many potential applications that involve aspects of both recommendation and information retrieval, and the task of collaborative retrieval---a combination of these two traditional problems---has recently been introduced. Successful collaborative retrieval requires overcoming severe data sparsity, making additional sources of information, such as social graphs, particularly valuable. In this paper we propose a new model for collaborative retrieval, and show that our algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by incorporating information from social networks. We also provide empirical analyses of the ways in which cultural interests propagate along a social graph using a real-world music dataset.Comment: 10 page

Automatic User Interaction Detection and Scheduling with RSIO

Response time is one of the most important factors for the overall usability of a computer system. We present RSIO, a processor scheduling framework for improving the response time of latency-sensitive applications by monitoring accesses to I/O channels and inferring when user interactions occur. RSIO provides a general mechanism for all user interactions, including direct interactions via local HCI devices such as mouse and keyboard, indirect interactions through middleware, and remote interactions through networks. It automatically and dynamically identifies processes involved in a user interaction and boosts their priorities at the time the interaction occurs to improve system response time. RSIO detects processes that directly handle a user interaction as well as those indirectly involved in processing the interaction, automatically accounting for dependencies and boosting their priorities accordingly. RSIO works with existing schedulers, processes that may mix interactive and batch activities, and requires no application modifications to identify periods of latency-sensitive application activity. We have implemented RSIO in Linux and measured its effectiveness on microbenchmarks and real applications. Our results show that RSIO is easy to use and can provide substantial improvements in system performance for latency-sensitive applications