We examine sensitivity of estimates of recreation demand using the Travel Cost Method (TCM) to four factors. Three of the four have been routinely and widely discussed in the TCM literature: a) Poisson verses negative binomial regression; b) application of Englin correction to account for endogenous stratification; c) truncation of the data set to eliminate outliers. A fourth issue we address h...

earthquakes travel times inversion for determination of velocity structure of crust is one of the most important objectives in seismology. in the simultaneous inversion method, the parameters of earthquakes and velocity model are determined initially and are improved during inversion steps. in this study, we have used more than 22000 calculated travel times for first arrivals of 6000 earthquake...

BACKGROUND An established relationship exists between the built environment and active travel. Nevertheless, the literature examining the impacts of different components of the built environment is limited. In addition, most existing studies are based on data from cities in the U.S. and Western Europe. The situation in Chinese cities remains largely unknown. Based on data from Nanjing, China, t...

The focus of this research is to develop a method for building Text to Speech Systems for resource poor languages by using data from other languages to fine tune a general template polyglot TTS architecture. Our method involves three main componants: language clustering, phoneme mappings and prosody modelling. As a proof of concept, four TTS have been implemented for English, Spanish, Malay and...

The so-called Exclusion argument (Kim 2000; Papineau 2004) about mental causation applies one premise that is typically accepted without much discussion: the thesis of causal completeness of the physical domain (CCP). In part one I evaluate Papineau’s (2001) argument for the CCP. I argue that this argument is not satisfying and that it is incomplete. The rest of the thesis is dedicated to an al...

In this paper we describe a system that uses natural language dialogue to provide customer service for a financial domain both over the phone as well as over the Internet. Some sample transactions include checking one’s account balance, transferring money from one account to another, buying, selling, and trading stocks, etc. The system described is robust enough to handle speech recognition err...

This paper presents a model of a card payment system to address the pricing and rules that govern such systems. It evaluates the social optimality of privately set interchange fees and the adoption of a rule by payment systems to prevent merchants surcharging for card transactions using two extremes of merchant pricing—monopolistic pricing and perfect competition. Both types of merchant pricing...

Empirical data shows that current account has the property of mean-reversion and the speed of current account convergence is heterogenous across countries. In order to explore the factors which affect the current account adjustment speed of a small country, this paper builds up a model to study how current account would be affected by factors such as labor supply and monetary policies. We found...

Global current account imbalances, more specifically the large deficit in the United States and the surplus in China and some other Asian economies, continue to attract considerable attention both among policy makers and academics. While the academic literature has focused predominantly on the sustainability of the imbalance and on the exchange-rate consequences of its elimination, many policy ...