12,323 research outputs found
Selected reading from Treatise on Friendship
Course reading ebook, adapted by Ian D. Dunkle from Project Gutenberg’s Treatises on Friendship and Old Age, by Marcus Tullius Cicero, translated by E.S. Shuckburgh: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2808Cicero describes the necessary features, the value, and the limits of friendship through a short dialogue
Eurozone - a sensible absorption of risk capital?
This paper aims to prove that in countries with no inter-zonal real estate divergence caused by lack of uniform economic development, labor migration trends or other causes, the real estate price movements tend to be correlated with currency movements, thus a certain vulnerability to hot money exists however it may be manageable.
Evaluating, taxing and insuring agricultural enterprises
By analyzing the pros and cons of the US farms taxation methodologies, this paper aims to advise that best practice of taxing farms in transition economies would be consistent with a multiple of cash flow valuation approaches and suggests that a liquid market for agricultural insurance can be created in emerging economies as it provides a methodology for valuation of drought insurance contracts. As such recent drought and flood damages in such countries could have been reimbursed privately.evaluation, taxing, insurrance, agriculture, US farms
Architectures for RF Frequency synthesizers
Frequency synthesizers are an essential building block of RF communication products. They can be found in traditional consumer products, in personal communication systems, and in optical communication equipment. Since frequency synthesizers are used in many different applications, different performance aspects may need to be considered in each case. The main body of the text describes a conceptual framework for analyzing the performance of PLL frequency synthesizers, and presents optimization procedures for the different performance aspects. The analysis of the PLL properties is performed with the use of the open-loop bandwidth and phase margin concepts, to enable the influence of higher-order poles to be taken into account from the beginning of the design process. The theoretical system analysis is complemented by descriptions of innovative system and building block architectures, by circuit implementations in bipolar and CMOS technologies, and by measurement results. Architectures for RF Frequency Synthesizers contains basic information for the beginner as well as in-depth knowledge for the experienced designer. It is widely illustrated with practical design examples used in industrial products.\ud
Written for:\ud
Electrical and electronic engineer
A Quantification Of The 2008-2009 US Bailout Package
By examining the credit crunch causes and effects, this paper reflects on the necessity of the banks bailout package and its alternatives and quantifies a maximum non-inflationary bailout amount which is unlikely to cause permanent adjustments in the long term (trade-weighted) exchange rate equilibrium level of the US dollar. Furthermore it determines that the current bailout amounts are less than the maximum non-inflationary bailout amount and determines that to resolve the underlying credit crunch problem, an increase in non-bank bailout M1 and/or a tax reduction is necessary.credit crunch, M1, M3, ISLM equilibrium, demand shock, Keynesian multiplier, monetary policy, fiscal policy, mortgage prepayments changes, MBS, velocity of money supply, long term equilibrium of exchange rates.
Boosting Named Entity Recognition with Neural Character Embeddings
Most state-of-the-art named entity recognition (NER) systems rely on
handcrafted features and on the output of other NLP tasks such as
part-of-speech (POS) tagging and text chunking. In this work we propose a
language-independent NER system that uses automatically learned features only.
Our approach is based on the CharWNN deep neural network, which uses word-level
and character-level representations (embeddings) to perform sequential
classification. We perform an extensive number of experiments using two
annotated corpora in two different languages: HAREM I corpus, which contains
texts in Portuguese; and the SPA CoNLL-2002 corpus, which contains texts in
Spanish. Our experimental results shade light on the contribution of neural
character embeddings for NER. Moreover, we demonstrate that the same neural
network which has been successfully applied to POS tagging can also achieve
state-of-the-art results for language-independet NER, using the same
hyperparameters, and without any handcrafted features. For the HAREM I corpus,
CharWNN outperforms the state-of-the-art system by 7.9 points in the F1-score
for the total scenario (ten NE classes), and by 7.2 points in the F1 for the
selective scenario (five NE classes).Comment: 9 page
Theoretical investigations of a highly mismatched interface: the case of SiC/Si(001)
Using first principles, classical potentials, and elasticity theory, we
investigated the structure of a semiconductor/semiconductor interface with a
high lattice mismatch, SiC/Si(001). Among several tested possible
configurations, a heterostructure with (i) a misfit dislocation network pinned
at the interface and (ii) reconstructed dislocation cores with a carbon
substoichiometry is found to be the most stable one. The importance of the slab
approximation in first-principles calculations is discussed and estimated by
combining classical potential techniques and elasticity theory. For the most
stable configuration, an estimate of the interface energy is given. Finally,
the electronic structure is investigated and discussed in relation with the
dislocation array structure. Interface states, localized in the heterostructure
gap and located on dislocation cores, are identified
Signal processing for guided wave structural health monitoring
The importance of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) in several industrial fields
has been continuously growing in the last few years with the increasing need for
the development of systems able to monitor continuously the integrity of complex
structures. In order to be competitive with conventional non destructive evaluation
techniques, SHM must be able to effectively detect the occurrence of damage in
the structure, giving information regarding the damage location. Ultrasonic guided
waves offer the possibility of inspecting large areas of structures from a small number
of sensor positions. However, inspection of complex structures is difficult as the
reflections from different features overlap. Therefore damage detection becomes an
extremely challenging problem and robust signal processing is required in order to
resolve strongly overlapping echoes.
In our work we have considered at first the possibility of employing a deconvolution
approach for enhancing the resolution of ultrasonic time traces and the potential
and the limitations of this approach for reliable SHM applications have been shown.
The effects of noise on the bandwidth of the typical signals in SHM and the effects
of frequency dependent phase shifts are the main detrimental issues that strongly
reduce the performance of deconvolution in SHM applications.
The second part of this thesis is concerned with the evaluation of a subtraction approach
for SHM when changes of environmental conditions are taken into account.
Temperature changes result in imperfect subtraction even for an undamaged structure,
since temperature changes modify the mechanical properties of the material
and therefore the velocity of propagation of ultrasonic guided waves. Compensation
techniques have previously been used effectively to overcome temperature effects, in
order to reduce the residual in the subtraction. In this work the performance of temperature
compensation techniques has been evaluated also in the presence of other
detrimental effects, such as liquid loading and different temperature responses of
materials in adhesive joints. Numerical simulations and experiments have been conducted
and it has been shown that temperature compensation techniques can cope in principle with non temperature effects. It is concluded that subtraction approach
represents a promising method for reliable Structural Health Monitoring. Nonetheless
the feasibility of a subtraction approach for SHM depends on environmental
conditions
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