Chronic food defi cits affect about 792 million people in the world (1). Malnutrition directly or indirectly affects a variety of organ systems including the central nervous system (CNS). A number of nutritional conditions are included in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, such as protein–energy malnutrition, iodine defi ciency, vitamin A defi ciency, and iron defi ciency anaemia. Over 1...

Skip-Gram word embeddings, estimated from large text corpora, have been shown to improve many NLP tasks through their highquality features. However, little is known about their robustness against parameter perturbations and about their e ciency in preserving word similarities under memory constraints. In this paper, we investigate three post-processing methods for word embeddings to study their...

To achieve e¢ ciency, an agent who uses criteria to make choice decisions should employ the coarse criteria that have a small number of categories. Coarse criteria reduce decision-making cost even though an agent, to maintain the number of choice distinctions, must use more criteria. The most e¢ cient criteria are binary with two categories each; this result holds even if the marginal cost of u...

Using three-wave survey data for four villages of Jiangsu Province in China, the present paper examines whether and to what extent off-farm employment affects the technical efficiency of agricultural production. The level of technical efficiency is measured using a stochastic frontier production function approach. Based on estimation results from instrumental variable panel quantile regressions...

Sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are often expected to operate on batteries for a long period of time. Battery power-ef ciency is a critical factor dictating the lifetime of WSNs. In this paper, we compare two pulse-based modulations, namely pulse position modulation (PPM) and on-off keying (OOK), both of which are suitable for WSNs due to their low complexity transceivers. The c...

Disk arrays have been proposed as a way of improving I/O performance by using parallelism among multiple disks. This paper focuses, however, on improving the performance of disk array systems in the presence of disk failures, which are signi"cant for applications where continuous operation is of concern. Although several approaches have been explored, the goals of achieving high performance and...

Using household travel diary data collected in Germany between 1997 and 2012, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) approach to estimate fuel price and effi ciency elasticities. The aim is to gauge the relative impacts of fuel economy standards and fuel taxes on distance traveled. We fi nd that the magnitudes of the elasticity estimates are statistically indistinguishable: higher fuel prices ...

in this paper, we study the generalized bin covering problem. for this problem an exact algorithm is introduced which can nd optimal solution for small scale instances. to nd a solution near optimal for large scale instances, a heuristic algorithm has been proposed. by computational experiments, the eciency of the heuristic algorithm is assessed.

The objective of this thesis is to investigate the initial allocation of pollution permits in a dynamic tradeable market. Tradeable pollution permit markets are an increasingly common method of environmental regulation and it is apparent that future schemes may have a number of repeated compliance periods. It is important to consider how and to what extent the dynamic allocation of pollution pe...

ATM networks are expected to accommodate a wide range of users including some who can tolerate a certain amount of cell loss and/or delay. There are also likely to be some users who can modify their tra c inputs in response to feedback signals from the network. We propose a feedback scheme to increase network e ciency by taking advantage of this exibility. Our scheme is based on economic princi...