18,075 research outputs found
Railway Reform in China.
The purpose of this working paper is to consider the current situation of Chinese Railways, the progress of reforms to date, and possible future developments. The first section describes the current problems of Chinese Railways, as a vast organisation subject to strong central control, facing enormous and rapidly growing demands which it is unable to satisfy. The progress of reform in Chinese Railways to date, and in particular the Economic Contract Responsibility System instituted in the late 1980's and the development of joint venture companies to build new lines, are then described. In the following section the key reform models found in other countries - deregulation and privatisation of vertically integrated regional companies; separation of infrastructure from operations with open access andlor franchising competitors; or reorganisation on the basis of business sectors - are then described. None is fully suitable for China, but it is suggested that a combination of sectorisation, more commercial independence, further development of joint public/private partnerships and more contracting out, is the most likely way forward
A multinomial quadrivariate D-vine copula mixed model for meta-analysis of diagnostic studies in the presence of non-evaluable subjects
Diagnostic test accuracy studies observe the result of a gold standard procedure that defines the presence or absence of a disease and the result of a diagnostic test. They typically report the number of true positives, false positives, true negatives and false negatives. However, diagnostic test outcomes can also be either non-evaluable positives or non-evaluable negatives. We propose a novel model for the meta-analysis of diagnostic studies in the presence of non-evaluable outcomes, which assumes independent multinomial distributions for the true and non-evaluable positives, and, the true and non-evaluable negatives, conditional on the latent sensitivity, specificity, probability of non-evaluable positives and probability of non-evaluable negatives in each study. For the random effects distribution of the latent proportions, we employ a drawable vine copula that can successively model the dependence in the joint tails. Our methodology is demonstrated with an extensive simulation study and applied to data from diagnostic accuracy studies of coronary computed tomography angiography for the detection of coronary artery disease. The comparison of our method with the existing approaches yields findings in the real data application that change the current conclusions
The utility of unmanned probes in lunar exploration
Utility of unmanned probes of Ranger or Surveyor class in Apollo exploration program - Lunar scientific exploratio
A simple explanation of the non-appearance of physical gluons and quarks
We show that the non-appearance of gluons and quarks as physical particles is
a rigorous and automatic result of the full, i.e. nonperturbative, nonabelian
nature of the color interaction in quantum chromodynamics. This makes it in
general impossible to describe the color field as a collection of elementary
quanta (gluons). Neither can a quark be an elementary quantum of the quark
field, as the color field of which it is the source is itself a source, making
isolated noninteracting quarks, crucial for a physical particle interpretation,
impossible. In geometrical language, the impossibility of quarks and gluons as
physical elementary particles arises due to the fact that the color Yang-Mills
space does not have a constant trivial curvature.
In QCD, the particles ``gluons'' and ``quarks'' are merely artifacts of an
approximation method (the perturbative expansion) and are simply absent in the
exact theory. This also coincides with the empirical, experimental evidence.Comment: 8 pages, Latex (to appear in Can.J.Phys.
Social work education, training and standards in the Asia-Pacific region
This article discusses the joint project between the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) to establish guidelines for the training and standard setting that elucidates what social work represents on a global level. While it is impossible to address all the issues that might be significant in such a large scope, attention is given to the challenges establishing global standards might encounter in a region as diverse as the Asia-Pacific
Approximate well-supported Nash equilibria in symmetric bimatrix games
The -well-supported Nash equilibrium is a strong notion of
approximation of a Nash equilibrium, where no player has an incentive greater
than to deviate from any of the pure strategies that she uses in
her mixed strategy. The smallest constant currently known for
which there is a polynomial-time algorithm that computes an
-well-supported Nash equilibrium in bimatrix games is slightly
below . In this paper we study this problem for symmetric bimatrix games
and we provide a polynomial-time algorithm that gives a
-well-supported Nash equilibrium, for an arbitrarily small
positive constant
Renormalization of Coulomb interaction in graphene: computing observable quantities
We address the computation of physical observables in graphene in the
presence of Coulomb interactions of density-density type modeled with a static
Coulomb potential within a quantum field theory perturbative renormalization
scheme. We show that all the divergences encountered in the physical quantities
are associated to the one loop electron self-energy and can be determined
without ambiguities by a proper renormalization of the Fermi velocity. The
renormalization of the photon polarization to second order in perturbation
theory - a quantity directly related to the optical conductivity - is given as
an example.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
Run-and-tumble particles with hydrodynamics: sedimentation, trapping and upstream swimming
We simulate by lattice Boltzmann the nonequilibrium steady states of
run-and-tumble particles (inspired by a minimal model of bacteria), interacting
by far-field hydrodynamics, subject to confinement. Under gravity, hydrodynamic
interactions barely perturb the steady state found without them, but for
particles in a harmonic trap such a state is quite changed if the run length is
larger than the confinement length: a self-assembled pump is formed. Particles
likewise confined in a narrow channel show a generic upstream flux in
Poiseuille flow: chiral swimming is not required
Topological Phase Transitions and Holonomies in the Dimer Model
We demonstrate that the classical dimer model defined on a toroidal hexagonal
lattice acquires holonomy phases in the thermodynamic limit. When all
activities are equal the lattice sizes must be considered mod 6 in which case
the finite size corrections to the bulk partition function correspond to a
massless Dirac Fermion in the presence of a flat connection with nontrivial
holonomy. For general bond activities we find that the phase transition in this
model is a topological one, where the torus degenerates and its modular
parameter becomes real at the critical temperature. We argue that these
features are generic to bipartite dimer models and we present a more general
lattice whose continuum partition function is that of a massive Dirac Fermion.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Minor corrections with additional figure
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