Tsunamis, despite occurring with low frequency, are permanent hazards for a large number of coastal cities and their consequences are highly devastating in terms of human losses, material damages and urban structure disruptions. It is argued in this paper that the urban structure not only has to be recovered after the tsunami event, but also has to provide an important basis for the continuing ...

This paper investigates whether market competition enhances firms’ incentives to hide profits. We develop a theoretical model of firms’ profit hiding behavior in competitive environments and derive several testable hypotheses. We then test the model using a database that covers more than 20,000 large-and-medium-sized industrial firms in China during the period 1995-2002. Our findings show that ...

Each distributor between categories enriched over a small quantaloid Q gives rise to two adjunctions between the categories of contravariant and covariant presheaves, and hence to two monads. These two adjunctions are respectively generalizations of Isbell adjunctions and Kan extensions in category theory. It is proved that these two processes are functorial with infomorphisms playing as morphi...

Consider a sports competition among various teams playing against each other in pairs (matches) according to a previously determined schedule. At some stage of the competition one may ask whether a particular team still has a (theoretical) chance to win the competition. The computational complexity of this question depends on the way scores are allocated according to the outcome of a match. For...

It is well known that each compact orientable surface R gives rise to a simplicial complex C(R) playing in the theory of Teichmüller modular groups a role similar to the role of Tits buildings in theories of algebraic and arithmetic groups. In this paper we introduce, for each closed orientable surface S, an analogue of Tits buildings more suitable for investigation of the Torelli group I(S) of...

Play has been an informal approach to teach young ones the skills of survival for centuries. With advancements in computing technology, many researchers believe that computer games1 can be used as a viable teaching and learning tool to enhance a student’s learning. It is important that the educational content of these games is well designed with meaningful game-play based on pedagogically sound...

Then, the limit points of the sequence of plays are correlated equilibria. In fact, for each correlated equilibrium there is some calibrated learning rule that the players can use which results in their playing this correlated equilibrium in the limit. Thus, the statistical concept of a calibration is strongly related to the game theoretic concept of correlated equilibrium. Journal of Economic ...

In the paper we address a problem of controlling an oscillating motion with a robot. As the object we have selected a yo-yo. Yo-yo is a toy made of two discs connected with a short thin axle, which can be moved up and down by moving a string tied to the axle. Although it is very easy to play with yo-yo for a human, designing a control system for a robot is quite a challenge. We present a simpli...

The evolution of the quintessence field during a phase of chaotic inflation is studied. The inflaton φ and the quintesssence field Q are described in a supergravity framework where the coupling between the inflaton and quintessence is induced by non-renormalisable operators suppressed by the Planck mass. We show that the resulting quintessence potential during inflation possesses a time–depende...