Austerity and fiscal crisis make the search for cost saving reforms in local government more critical. While cost savings from privatization have frequently proven ephemeral, inter-municipal cooperation has been a relatively understudied reform. We analyze the literature on cost savings under cooperation and find savings are dependent on (1) the cost structure of public services, particularly t...

Smooth local coordinates have been proposed by Hiyoshi and Sugihara 2000 to improve the classical Sibson’s and Laplace coordinates. These smooth local coordinates are computed by integrating geometric quantities over weights in the power diagram. In this paper we describe how to efficiently implement the Voronoi based C local coordinates. The globally C interpolant that Hiyoshi and Sugihara pre...

Histories of the global smallpox eradication programme have tended to concentrate on the larger national formations in Africa and Asia. This focus is generally justified by chroniclers by the fact that these locations contributed a major share of the world’s annual tally of variola, which meant that international agencies paid a lot of attention to working with officials in national and local g...

In this article, the quasi-Laguerre iteration is established in the spirit of Laguerre's iteration for solving polynomial f with all real zeros. The new algorithm, which maintains the monotonicity and global convergence of the Laguerre iteration, no longer needs to evaluate f". The ultimate convergence rate is + 1. When applied to approximate the eigenvalues of a symmetric tridiagonal matrix, t...

seistan was one of the important ancient urban centres in south eastern persia. the ruins of the city show the prosperity and fertility of this city to the extent that a british civil officer considered it as the ancient london of asia. this article attempts to describe the enormous latent wealth of this ancient city which made it important for strategic, political and commercial reasons. due t...

This study aims to investigate whether different player-matching mechanisms in educational multi-player online games (MOGs) can affect students’ learning performance, enjoyment perception and gaming behaviors. Based on the multi-player quiz game, TRIS-Q, developed by Tsai, Tsai and Lin (2015) using a free player-matching (FPM) mechanism, the same game, but incorporating an automatic player-matc...

feature extraction is a main step in all perceptual image hashing schemes in which robust features will led to better results in perceptual robustness. simplicity, discriminative power, computational efficiency and robustness to illumination changes are counted as distinguished properties of local binary pattern features. in this paper, we investigate the use of local binary patterns for percep...

Much of the literature on metropolitan political reorganization (defined here as secession, annexation, and incorporation) understands the phenomenon as a self-contained politics. That is, the literature mostly analyzes the politics surrounding reorganization in terms of the powers and responsibilities of the local state itself. Specifically, the literature finds that the main motivations for r...