INNOVATION AND INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY ON ECONOMIC GROWTH IN ASIA

When looking at the different effects of institutional quality on economic development, namely control of corruption, there are two different hypotheses that explain such effects. One is the “grease the wheel” hypothesis, which predicts that corruption is beneficial for growth, and the other one is the “sand the wheel” hypothesis, which says the opposite. Corruption is normally blamed for the slow economic growths in some countries, but some Asian countries’ exponential growths have proven the “grease the wheel” hypothesis otherwise. The “Asian experience”1 phenomenon occurs when corruption does not seem to hamper business activities in some Asian countries. This research will focus on finding how institutional quality variables, such as corruption control and government effectiveness, can correlate with innovation variables to contribute to economic growth. Using data and examples from Asian countries, this study finds a positive correlation between corruption and economic growth in some developed countries, such as China and South Korea

On the approximation in the smoothed finite element method (SFEM)

This letter aims at resolving the issues raised in the recent short communication [1] and answered by [2] by proposing a systematic approximation scheme based on non-mapped shape functions, which both allows to fully exploit the unique advantages of the smoothed finite element method (SFEM) [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] and resolve the existence, linearity and positivity deficiencies pointed out in [1]. We show that Wachspress interpolants [10] computed in the physical coordinate system are very well suited to the SFEM, especially when elements are heavily distorted (obtuse interior angles). The proposed approximation leads to results which are almost identical to those of the SFEM initially proposed in [3]. These results that the proposed approximation scheme forms a strong and rigorous basis for construction of smoothed finite element methods.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 1 table; International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 201

A D.C. Algorithm via Convex Analysis Approach for Solving a Location Problem Involving Sets

We study a location problem that involves a weighted sum of distances to closed convex sets. As several of the weights might be negative, traditional solution methods of convex optimization are not applicable. After obtaining some existence theorems, we introduce a simple, but effective, algorithm for solving the problem. Our method is based on the Pham Dinh - Le Thi algorithm for d.c. programming and a generalized version of the Weiszfeld algorithm, which works well for convex location problems

Multilingual Schema Matching for Wikipedia Infoboxes

Recent research has taken advantage of Wikipedia's multilingualism as a resource for cross-language information retrieval and machine translation, as well as proposed techniques for enriching its cross-language structure. The availability of documents in multiple languages also opens up new opportunities for querying structured Wikipedia content, and in particular, to enable answers that straddle different languages. As a step towards supporting such queries, in this paper, we propose a method for identifying mappings between attributes from infoboxes that come from pages in different languages. Our approach finds mappings in a completely automated fashion. Because it does not require training data, it is scalable: not only can it be used to find mappings between many language pairs, but it is also effective for languages that are under-represented and lack sufficient training samples. Another important benefit of our approach is that it does not depend on syntactic similarity between attribute names, and thus, it can be applied to language pairs that have distinct morphologies. We have performed an extensive experimental evaluation using a corpus consisting of pages in Portuguese, Vietnamese, and English. The results show that not only does our approach obtain high precision and recall, but it also outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. We also present a case study which demonstrates that the multilingual mappings we derive lead to substantial improvements in answer quality and coverage for structured queries over Wikipedia content.Comment: VLDB201