Dynamic game of offending and law enforcement: a stochastic extension

This article provides an extension of the Fend-Feichtinger-Tragler dynamic game of offending and law enforcement to a stochastic framework. This allows the analysis to reflect actual crime statistics which displays randomness in its distribution. Stochastic paths of crimes are derived. The asymptotic stationary distribution of crime records is also obtained. © 2010 World Scientific Publishing Company.postprin

Models of Financial Markets with Extensive Participation Incentives

We consider models of financial markets in which all parties involved find incentives to participate. Strategies are evaluated directly by their virtual wealths. By tuning the price sensitivity and market impact, a phase diagram with several attractor behaviors resembling those of real markets emerge, reflecting the roles played by the arbitrageurs and trendsetters, and including a phase with irregular price trends and positive sums. The positive-sumness of the players' wealths provides participation incentives for them. Evolution and the bid-ask spread provide mechanisms for the gain in wealth of both the players and market-makers. New players survive in the market if the evolutionary rate is sufficiently slow. We test the applicability of the model on real Hang Seng Index data over 20 years. Comparisons with other models show that our model has a superior average performance when applied to real financial data.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figure

Case study: Use of contact lenses to manage complications following combined corneal cross-linking and topography-guided photorefractive keratectomy for pellucid marginal degeneration

This case report describes two significant long-term complications experienced by a patient following treatment for pellucid marginal degeneration (PMD). Two years after undergoing a combination of topography-guided photorefractive keratectomy (T-PRK) and corneal collagen cross-linking (CXL) procedures, the patient continued to experience glare and dryness associated with persistent stromal haze and dry eye. These procedures resulted in dissatisfaction with the final outcome, which led the patient to seek contact lens correction. Management of the symptomatic ocular sequelae with specialty soft toric contact lenses designed for irregular corneas supported her visual rehabilitation

A Chemical and Enzymatic Approach to Study Site-Specific Sumoylation.

A variety of cellular pathways are regulated by protein modifications with ubiquitin-family proteins. SUMO, the Small Ubiquitin-like MOdifier, is covalently attached to lysine on target proteins via a cascade reaction catalyzed by E1, E2, and E3 enzymes. A major barrier to understanding the diverse regulatory roles of SUMO has been a lack of suitable methods to identify protein sumoylation sites. Here we developed a mass-spectrometry (MS) based approach combining chemical and enzymatic modifications to identify sumoylation sites. We applied this method to analyze the auto-sumoylation of the E1 enzyme in vitro and compared it to the GG-remnant method using Smt3-I96R as a substrate. We further examined the effect of smt3-I96R mutation in vivo and performed a proteome-wide analysis of protein sumoylation sites in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. To validate these findings, we confirmed several sumoylation sites of Aos1 and Uba2 in vivo. Together, these results demonstrate that our chemical and enzymatic method for identifying protein sumoylation sites provides a useful tool and that a combination of methods allows a detailed analysis of protein sumoylation sites

Market uncertainty and sentiment, and the post-earnings announcement drift

The post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) first identified over 40 years ago seems to be as much alive today as it ever was. Numerous attempts have been made to explain its continued existence. In this paper we provide evidence to support a new explanation: that the PEAD is a reflection of the level of market uncertainty and sentiment that prevails during the post-announcement period. The finding that uncertainty plays a role in explaining how investors respond to information suggests that it should be included as a factor in pricing models while the fact that market sentiment also has a role is another instance of the importance of human behaviour in establishing price

Exploring how to develop customer-oriented business strategies in a clothing supply chain: a study in Southern China

Understanding customer expectations is one of the keys to success for today's clothing manufacturers. Previous studies have explained how operational performance can be improved by a better understanding of customer-perceived values. This paper presents an analysis of data collected through a questionnaire from 62 clothing manufacturers in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) of Southern China. The data collected was first classified into three groups using cluster analysis. The classification is based on how well the respondents recognize the expectations of their customers, including both industrial customers and consumers. The paper then empirically explores the characteristics of each group and how such characteristics are related to the internal operations performance; internal operations are grouped into two major types: planning processes and operational processes. The paper concludes by presenting a relationship model that can be used as a reference tool by those organizations operating in the PRD clothing industry to improve internal operations performance by enhancing customer satisfaction.published_or_final_versio

High temperature behaviour of magnetron sputtered nanocrystalline titanium aluminium nitride coatings

This paper is to study the thermal stability of nanocrystalline ternary nitride coatings at elevated temperatures. Nanocrystalline titanium aluminium nitride coatings were produced by reactive magnetron co-sputtering on glass substrates and AISI H13 tool steel substrates with nitrogen pressures of 0.4 and 0.65 mTorr (0.053 and 0.086 Pa) respectively. Heat treatment was applied to the coatings at temperatures up to 1000C. It was found that an unexpected grain refinement occurred in the coatings deposited at 0.4 mTorr nitrogen pressure after the heat treatment. a stronger development of TiN(TiAIN (200) component was also evident at temperatures above 800C. With a finer and densified grain struicture, the hardness of the coatings increased substantially from ~1700 to 2300HV