2 3 " Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better " .

This paper presents a new approach to optimizing functional programs based on combining partial evaluation and rewriting. Programs are composed of higher-order primitives. Partial evaluation is used to eliminate higher-order functions. First-order rewriting is used to process the transformation. Laws about the higher-order primitives that are relevant for the optimizations are automatically ext...

The paper analyzes the determinants of the efficiency levels reached by twenty-one African water utilities. Efficiency is assessed through the estimation of a production frontier for the sector in Africa. The efficiency estimates confirm much of the common perceptions from partial productivity indicators. They point to a great heterogeneity in the African water utilities’ performances, the pred...

This paper develops a model in which platforms are partially binding: a candidate who implements a policy different from his platform must pay a cost of betrayal that increases with the size of the discrepancy. I also suppose that voters are uncertain about candidate preferences for policies. If voters believe that a candidate is likely to be extreme, there exists a semi-separating equilibrium:...

Most computational story generation systems lack the ability to generate new types of imaginary objects that play functional roles in stories, such as lightsabers in Star Wars. We present an algorithm that generates such imaginary objects, which we call gadgets, in order to extend the ontological expressivity of existing, planning-based story generation systems. The behavior of a gadget is repr...

Article history: Received 20 August 2014 Accepted 3 January 2015 Available online xxxx Submitted by Y. Wei MSC: 06A06 15A09 16U99

Competition authorities have a growing interest in assessing the effects of partial ownership arrangements. We show that the effects of such agreements on competition and welfare depend on the intensity of competition in the market and on the firms’ governance structure. When assessing the effects of partial ownership, competition policy has to consider both the financial interest and level of ...

We propose an approach to study static properties of metabolic networks with genetic regulation. We base our results on differential inequalities which are constraints on the values of the partial derivatives of the reaction rate functions. The approach uses an iterative elimination method for the steady state equations involving algebraic modules that satisfy the Gale-Nikaido global univalence...

In this letter, we propose a robust and fast tracking framework by combining local and global appearance models to cope with partial occlusion and pose variations. The global appearance model is represented by a correlation filter to efficiently estimate the movement of the target and the local appearance model is represented by local feature points to handle partial occlusion and scale variati...