The claim by global trade modelers that the potential contribution to global economic welfare of removing agricultural subsidies is less than one-tenth of that from removing agricultural tariffs puzzles many observers. To help explain that result, this paper first compares the OECD and model-based estimates of the extent of the producer distortions (leaving aside consumer distortions), and show...

In this work we attempted to determine the relative importance of the geographical and WordNet-extracted terms with respect to the remainder of the query. In our system, geographical terms are expanded with WordNet holonyms and synonyms and indexed separately. We checked the relative importance of the terms by multiplying their weight by 0.75, 0.5 and 0.25. The comparison to the baseline system...

We consider estimating tail events using exponential families of importance sampling distributions and show that under mild conditions on the exponential family we can achieve bounded relative error. Keywords: rare event simulation, relative error, g&h distribution, Monte Carlo methods, Importance sampling, Cross-entropy, Rényi Divergence. 1 Introduction Suppose X is a random variable with cumu...

Since 1900 respiratory disease has remained a constant serious cause of chronic ill health and premature death in Britain. The falling importance of tuberculosis and pneumonia has been off-set by the rise in lung cancer. Bronchitis morbidity and mortality have fallen only slightly since 1935. To produce any real improvement in the future existing information as to cause must be studied. The rel...

As software houses increasingly align themselves to Agile Software Development paradigm, the issue of what constitutes agility is coming to the forefront. Is it enough to follow the rituals and practices of some agile method to deliver the promises of the paradigm? Or, certain enablers need to be in place to prepare the context for the methods to deliver? What are these attributes of agility an...

Niridazole is a nitrothiazole anthelmintic agent used to treat schistosomiasis. Its antibacterial activity was found to require the presence of the nitro group; a synthetic desnitro analog was completely inactive. Niridazole was mutagenic for Salmonella tester strains TA1538, TA98, and TA100, suggesting that it was both a frame-shift- and a base substitution-type mutagen. It was effective under...

Context can influence the experience of any event. For instance, the thought that "it could be worse" can improve feelings towards a present misfortune. In this study we measured hedonic feelings, skin conductance, and brain activation patterns in 16 healthy volunteers who experienced moderate pain in two different contexts. In the "relative relief context," moderate pain represented the best o...

defined confidence. J Nutr 1987;117:1638–41. 53 Acheson KJ, Campbell IT, Edholm OG, Miller DS, Stock MJ. The measurement of food and energy intake in man-an evaluation of some techniques. Am J Clin Nutr 1980;33:1147–54. 54 Tokudome Y, Goto C, Imaeda N et al. Relative validity of a short food frequency questionnaire for assessing nutrient intake versus three-day weighed diet records in middleage...

A core region surrounded by a rim characterizes biological interfaces. We ascertain the importance of the core by showing the sequence entropies of the residues comprising the core to be smaller than those in the rim. Such a distinction is not seen in the 2-fold-related, nonphysiological interfaces formed in crystal lattices of monomeric proteins, thereby providing a procedure for characterizin...