Qualitative business survey data are used widely to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional indicators exploit only aggregate survey information, namely the proportions of respondents who report “up” and “down”. This paper considers disaggregate or firm-level survey responses. It derives an alternative Bayesian indicator of economic activit...

Leaf area index (LAI) is a major indicator for crop growth monitoring and yield estimation. Data assimilation as an effective tool for crop LAI estimation fully considers the properties of actual observations and physical model simulations. In this work, we present a new data assimilation scheme, introducing a very fast simulated annealing (VFSA) optimization algorithm into the process of crop ...

Accurate estimation of the number of ovarian follicles at various stages of development is an important indicator of the process of folliculogenesis in relation to the endocrine signals and paracrine/autocrine mechanisms that control the growth and maturation of the oocytes and their supporting follicular cells. There are 10-fold or greater differences in follicular numbers per ovary at similar...

BACKGROUND Despite distinct advancements in nutritional therapy, malnutrition and growth retardation remain inevitable consequences of chronic liver disease. The global prevalence of chronic liver disease in children is about 3%, with a quarter undernourished. Malnutrition itself is a negative prognostic indicator of survival. Further research is necessary for delivering adequate nutritional su...

Wayfinding is of vital importance if visually impaired pedestrians are to walk by themselves from one place to another, since they must calculate both their orientation and position. Here, a new haptic direction indicator is proposed, which will help blind pedestrians to avoid hazardous areas intuitively and safely by means of haptic navigation. A novel translational force perception method, ca...

Aggregative data infrastructures (ADIs) are information systems where organizations can find the tools to integrate their data sources to form uniform and richer information spaces of object metadata descriptions. Novel sustainable approaches for the realization of ADIs are based on the adoption of ADI enabling technologies which support the realization, maintenance and upgrade of ADIs and prom...

In the construction of a leading indicator model of economic activity, economists must select among a pool of variables which lead output growth. Usually the pool of variables is large, and selection of a subset must be carried out. In this paper we propose an `Automatic Leading Indicator' model. Rather than preselection, we use a dynamic factor model to summarise the information content of a p...

In 2006, Daim et al. published the highly cited paper on forecasting emerging technologies with bibliometrics and patent analysis. In the paper, scientific publications and patent were used as a numerical input to for example system dynamic models or scenarios –elaborating on the current state and trend of technological development as a year-to-year indicator value. By forcing the indicator to ...