This paper examines the e-learning strategies adopted by universities, from the perspective of three common objectives: widening access to educational opportunity; enhancing the quality of learning; and reducing the cost of higher education. The discussion is illustrated by drawing on case studies of universities in Europe and the United States. It is concluded that the most striking characteri...

Due to the reform and opening-up policy, China has become one of the most attractive recipients of FDI, attributing a lot to the economic boom in the last three decades. The inflow of foreign investment has not only brought a package of capital, management expertise and production technology but also significantly spurred industrial development through technology spillover. Such a diffusion eff...

This paper reviews methods for extracting both risk-neutral and physical density forecasts for interest rates. It presents some applications, with particular focus on issues pertaining to forward guidance and the zero lower bound. Several important applied questions in macroeconomics and monetary economics can be very directly addressed using the wealth of information in interest rate derivativ...

In this paper, some results of Singh, Gopalakrishna and Kulkarni (1970s) have been extended to higher order derivatives. It has been shown that, if $sumlimits_{a}Theta(a, f)=2$ holds for a meromorphic function $f(z)$ of finite order, then for any positive integer $k,$ $T(r, f)sim T(r, f^{(k)}), rrightarrowinfty$ if $Theta(infty, f)=1$ and $T(r, f)sim (k+1)T(r, f^{(k)}), rrightarrowinfty$ if $Th...

In this paper, we present our work on constructing a textual semantic relation corpus by making use of an existing treebank annotated with discourse relations. We extract adjacent text span pairs and group them into six categories according to the different discourse relations between them. After that, we present the details of our annotation scheme, which includes six textual semantic relation...

Usually a light beam pushes a particle when the photons act upon it. We investigate the optical forces by non-paraxial gradientless beams and find that the forces can drag suitable particles all the way towards the light source. The major criterion of realizing the backward dragging force is the strong non-paraxiality of the light beam, which contributes to the pulling force owing to the moment...

This article is devoted to the study of monoids which can be endowed with a shuffle product with coefficients in a semiring. We show that, when the multiplicities do not belong to a ring with prime characteristic, such a monoid is a monoid of traces. When the characteristic is prime, we give a decomposition of the congruences ≡ (or relators R) such that A∗/≡ = 〈A;R〉 admits a shuffle product. Th...

A new development of the “monodromy transform” method for analysis of hyperbolic as well as elliptic integrable reductions of Einstein equations is presented. Compatibility conditions for some alternative representations of the fundamental solutions of associated linear systems with spectral parameter in terms of a pair of dressing (“scattering”) matrices give rise to a new set of linear (quasi...