We estimate the sensitivity of investment to the cost of outside equity for young firms. For estimation, we exploit differences across firms in eligibility to a new tax relief program for individual outside investors in the UK. On average, investment increases 1.5% in response to a 10% drop in the cost of outside equity. This average conceals substantial heterogeneity: 1% of eligible firms issu...

The rapid growth of elastic computing services, together with a raising need to target savings, enable new IT scenarios. In particular, Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) can benefit of digital forensic services sharing, lowering CAPEX and OPEX especially in case of spiky utilization of forensic hardware and software resources. In fact, considering the workloads related to the size of a forensic o...

Traditionally, optical networks have been designed with the objective of minimizing the capital expenditure (CAPEX) without considering the operative costs (OPEX), due for instance to energy consumption. However, the increase of energy consumption and corresponding costs and the challenges imposed by the environmental issues (such as the global warming and the limited oil reserves) are demandin...

  These days, data mining one of the most significant issues. One field data mining is a mixture of computer science and statistics which is considerably limited due to increase in digital data and growth of computational power of computer. One of the domains of data mining is the software cost estimation category. In this article, classifying techniques of learning algorithm of machine ...

Reliable effort estimation remains an ongoing challenge to software engineers. Accurate effort estimation is the state of art of software engineering, effort estimation of software is the preliminary phase between the client and the business enterprise. The relationship between the client and the business enterprise begins with the estimation of the software. The credibility of the client to th...

Estimating the effort of software development is fraught with difficulties, and it is clear that effort should be invested in improving the accuracy and the reliability (consistency) of effort estimates, as well as the assessment of estimate uncertainty. However, it is less clear where to target such improvement efforts. We discuss the degree to which it is feasible to improve the expertise of ...

In several US states, the legalisation of euthanasia has become a question for voters to decide in public referenda. This democratic approach in politics is consistent with notions of personal autonomy in medicine, but the right of choice does not mean all choices are morally equal. A presumption against the taking of human life is embedded in the formative moral traditions of society; human li...

The four studies included in this paper examine the strength of the first impression in the estimation of work effort. The studied context is mainly one where the first impressions of software development effort is manipulated (biased) through comparisons with either much too low or too high reference effort values, e.g., by responding to a question from the client whether one believes that the...

Calibration, has been .found to be difficult in practice. Wide experience in using the estimation model is necessary; experience which the beginner naturally lacks. This paper indicates why it is important to calibrate a model and how the inexperienced user can be helped by an expert system. In addition, the development of, and experience with, the prototype of an expert system are described. T...

Effort estimation is a key factor for software project success, defined as delivering software of agreed quality and functionality within schedule and budget. Traditionally, effort estimation has been used for planning and tracking project resources. Effort estimation methods founded on those goals typically focus on providing exact estimates and usually do not support objectives that have rece...