Augmenting the GTAP Database with Data on Inter-Regional Transactions

This paper reports the results of an exercise to augment the GTAP database with information from the income and current transfers components of the current account of the balance of payments. The exercise demonstrates that the process of augmenting the GTAP database is relatively straightforward. A simple simulation exercise using the augmented and non-augmented versions of the database demonstrates that the results from a trade liberalisation scenario are sufficiently large to provide a justification for the augmentation of the GTAP database over and above the case that could be argued based on national accounting conventions

Where and Why in the UK? The Case of Polish Migrants

This article focuses on one of the most controversial issues frequently discussed by many including politicians, academics and the media in the UK and Poland: migration of Polish people to Britain. The main aim is to identify the important factors causing migration of Poles within the UK. In this article, the authors seek to study the pull factors, i.e. level of wages or employment rate, for Polish people between different regions within the UK. By using the data from “Labour Force Surveys” collected by the UK government; and data from Główny Urząd Statystyczny (GUS) in Poland, this paper analyses where and why the Polish migrants live in the UK. The most important factor determining the fraction of Polish people in a given region is the fraction of Polish people in that region in the past. When Polish people move within UK, they tend to choose a region with a higher level of gross pay, and they don’t seem to consider the risk of unemployment. The authors are grateful to providers of survey data discussed in the“Data and methods”section of this paper. LFS data are made available by the UK Data Service. Views reported in this paper do not necessarily reflect opinions of organisations which commissioned or provided access to these surveys

PHOTOGRAMMETRIC WIREFRAME AND DENSE POINT CLOUD 3D MODELLING OF HISTORICAL STRUCTURES: THE STUDY OF SULTAN SELIM MOSQUE AND YUSUF AGA LIBRARY IN KONYA, TURKEY

The photogrammetry enables to getting high accuracy measurement with low-cost and easy application in documentation of historical structures. The object details are signified with lines in cultural heritage documentation by photogrammetry. The combination of all the lines create 3D wireframe model of the measurement object. In addition, patch surfaces of the wireframe are mapped with the texture from the images for more realistic visualization. On the other hand, the progress on computer vision and image processing techniques is allowing automatically perform the photogrammetric process. A large number of points that are called dense point cloud can be measured from coverage area of multi view images. The dense point cloud represents the object shape with small space measured points while the wireframe photogrammetry is representing the object with lines. In this study these two photogrammetric methods were evaluated with respect to visualization, cost, labour and measurement time through 3D modelling of historical structures of Sultan Selim Mosque and Yusuf Aga Library

Allocation in Practice

How do we allocate scarcere sources? How do we fairly allocate costs? These are two pressing challenges facing society today. I discuss two recent projects at NICTA concerning resource and cost allocation. In the first, we have been working with FoodBank Local, a social startup working in collaboration with food bank charities around the world to optimise the logistics of collecting and distributing donated food. Before we can distribute this food, we must decide how to allocate it to different charities and food kitchens. This gives rise to a fair division problem with several new dimensions, rarely considered in the literature. In the second, we have been looking at cost allocation within the distribution network of a large multinational company. This also has several new dimensions rarely considered in the literature.Comment: To appear in Proc. of 37th edition of the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2014), Springer LNC

A global optimization approach applied to structural dynamic updating

In this paper, the application of stochastic global optimization tech- niques, in particular the GlobalSearch and MultiStart solvers from MatLab®, to improve the updating of a structural dynamic model, are presented. For com- parative purposes, the efficiency of these global methods relatively to the local search method previously used in a Finite Element Model Updating program is evaluated. The obtained solutions showed that the GlobalSearch and MultiStart solvers are able to achieve a better solution than the local solver previously used, in the updating of a structural dynamic model. The results show also that the GlobalSearch solver is more efficient than the MultiStart, since requires less computational effort to obtain the global solution.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

CFH haplotypes without the Y402H coding variant show strong association with susceptibility to age-related macular degeneration

In developed countries, age-related macular degeneration is a common cause of blindness in the elderly. A common polymorphism, encoding the sequence variation Y402H in complement factor H (CFH), has been strongly associated with disease susceptibility. Here, we examined 84 polymorphisms in and around CFH in 726 affected individuals (including 544 unrelated individuals) and 268 unrelated controls. In this sample, 20 of these polymorphisms showed stronger association with disease susceptibility than the Y402H variant. Further, no single polymorphism could account for the contribution of the CFH locus to disease susceptibility. Instead, multiple polymorphisms defined a set of four common haplotypes (of which two were associated with disease susceptibility and two seemed to be protective) and multiple rare haplotypes (associated with increased susceptibility in aggregate). Our results suggest that there are multiple disease susceptibility alleles in the region and that noncoding CFH variants play a role in disease susceptibility

Measurement of the Z/gamma* + b-jet cross section in pp collisions at 7 TeV

The production of b jets in association with a Z/gamma* boson is studied using proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and recorded by the CMS detector. The inclusive cross section for Z/gamma* + b-jet production is measured in a sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.2 inverse femtobarns. The Z/gamma* + b-jet cross section with Z/gamma* to ll (where ll = ee or mu mu) for events with the invariant mass 60 < M(ll) < 120 GeV, at least one b jet at the hadron level with pT > 25 GeV and abs(eta) < 2.1, and a separation between the leptons and the jets of Delta R > 0.5 is found to be 5.84 +/- 0.08 (stat.) +/- 0.72 (syst.) +(0.25)/-(0.55) (theory) pb. The kinematic properties of the events are also studied and found to be in agreement with the predictions made by the MadGraph event generator with the parton shower and the hadronisation performed by PYTHIA.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physic

Search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu channel in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

A search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu decay channel, where l = e or mu, in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is presented. The data were collected at the LHC, with the CMS detector, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.6 inverse femtobarns. No significant excess is observed above the background expectation, and upper limits are set on the Higgs boson production cross section. The presence of the standard model Higgs boson with a mass in the 270-440 GeV range is excluded at 95% confidence level.Comment: Submitted to JHE

Search for anomalous t t-bar production in the highly-boosted all-hadronic final state

A search is presented for a massive particle, generically referred to as a Z', decaying into a t t-bar pair. The search focuses on Z' resonances that are sufficiently massive to produce highly Lorentz-boosted top quarks, which yield collimated decay products that are partially or fully merged into single jets. The analysis uses new methods to analyze jet substructure, providing suppression of the non-top multijet backgrounds. The analysis is based on a data sample of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5 inverse femtobarns. Upper limits in the range of 1 pb are set on the product of the production cross section and branching fraction for a topcolor Z' modeled for several widths, as well as for a Randall--Sundrum Kaluza--Klein gluon. In addition, the results constrain any enhancement in t t-bar production beyond expectations of the standard model for t t-bar invariant masses larger than 1 TeV.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics; this version includes a minor typo correction that will be submitted as an erratu