Improving Software Team Productivity During System Construction

System construction (detailed design, coding and testing) is crucial to software project because it requires extensive (estimated 1/3 of the overall) human and computing resources. This is because during this period a large number of specialists implement the system in parallel. While a large team constructs the system at a faster rate, it also results to conceptual disintegration on system design and thus periodical synchronization among developers and integration of software modules become necessary to ensure system quality

BAYESIAN DECISION STRATEGIES APPLIED TO PRODUCTION AND MARKETING DECISIONS FOR COW-CALF FARMS IN THE SHENANDOAH AREA OF VIRGINIA

Livestock Production/Industries,

Licensing and Revenue Sharing for Digital Content Co-Production

Social media platforms foster creativity by helping creators monetize their content and resolving their disputes with copyright holders. These disputes often occur when content creators use prior work (e.g., musical works, movie or show clips, and video game plays) as baseline materials. We develop a content co-production mechanism for copyright owners to set a revenue-sharing split with content creators. Content creators, aiming for higher ad revenue, can dispute the copyright claim within a specific timeframe. We suggest how the proposed mechanism can help the two sides settle and avoid a trial in court with a sensible revenue-sharing ratio and dispute timeframe. We also show how the share of ad revenue can be made proportional to the contribution of the baseline materials

Strategic Planning and Project Selection for IT Portfolio Management

Software project proposals, solicited from various sources across an organization, could significantly vary in strategic value, overlap in functionality, and assume conflicting technical infrastructure. Without a holistic approach toward project selection and planning, the resulting project portfolio will likely incur undue risk while delivering poor return on investment. We propose a two-stage optimization procedure. In the first stage, project characteristics such as strategic alignment, perceived benefits, cost, and risk are considered to maximize portfolio value. In the second stage, inter-project dependencies and team expertise are used to determine how projects are assigned to programs and in what sequence they should be carried out. Future extension on the proposed optimization procedure is also discussed

On the evolution of the inner disk radius with flux in the neutron star low-mass X-ray binary Serpens X-1

We analyze the latest \emph{Suzaku} observation of the bright neutron star low-mass X-ray binary Serpens X-1 taken in 2013 October and 2014 April. The observation was taken using the burst mode and only suffered mild pile-up effects. A broad iron line is clearly detected in the X-ray spectrum. We test different models and find that the iron line is asymmetric and best interpreted by relativistic reflection. The relativistically broadened iron line is generally believed to originate from the innermost regions of the accretion disk, where strong gravity causes a series of special and general relativistic effects. The iron line profile indicates an inner radius of $\sim8$ $R_{\rm G}$, which gives an upper limit on the size of the neutron star. The asymmetric iron line has been observed in a number of previous observations, which gives several inner radius measurements at different flux states. We find that the inner radius of Serpens X-1 does not evolve significantly over the range of $L/L_{\rm Edd}\sim0.4-0.6$, and the lack of flux dependence of the inner radius implies that the accretion disk may be truncated outside the innermost stable circular orbit by the boundary layer rather than the stellar magnetic field.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Ap