Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of
market share and diversification on the nonlife insurers- performance.
The underlying relationships have been investigated in different
industries and different disciplines (economics, management...), still,
no consistency exists either in the magnitude or statistical
significance of the relationship between market share (and
diversification as well) on one side and companies- performance on
the other side. Moreover, the direction of the relationship is also
somewhat questionable. While some authors find this relationship to
be positive, the others reveal its negative association. In order to test
the influence of market share and diversification on companies-
performance in Croatian nonlife insurance industry for the period
from 1999 to 2009, we designed an empirical model in which we
included the following independent variables: firms- profitability
from previous years, market share, diversification and control
variables (i.e. ownership, industrial concentration, GDP per capita,
inflation). Using the two-step generalized method of moments
(GMM) estimator we found evidence of a positive and statistically
significant influence of both, market share and diversification, on
insurers- profitability.
Abstract: This paper describes a method of modeling to model
shadow play puppet using sophisticated computer graphics techniques
available in OpenGL in order to allow interactive play in real-time
environment as well as producing realistic animation. This paper
proposes a novel real-time method is proposed for modeling of puppet
and its shadow image that allows interactive play of virtual shadow
play using texture mapping and blending techniques. Special effects
such as lighting and blurring effects for virtual shadow play
environment are also developed. Moreover, the use of geometric
transformations and hierarchical modeling facilitates interaction
among the different parts of the puppet during animation. Based on the
experiments and the survey that were carried out, the respondents
involved are very satisfied with the outcomes of these techniques.
Abstract: The resistive-inductive-capacitive behavior of long
interconnects which are driven by CMOS gates are presented in this
paper. The analysis is based on the ¤Ç-model of a RLC load and is
developed for submicron devices. Accurate and analytical
expressions for the output load voltage, the propagation delay and the
short circuit power dissipation have been proposed after solving a
system of differential equations which accurately describe the
behavior of the circuit. The effect of coupling capacitance between
input and output and the short circuit current on these performance
parameters are also incorporated in the proposed model. The
estimated proposed delay and short circuit power dissipation are in
very good agreement with the SPICE simulation with average
relative error less than 6%.
Abstract: Term Extraction, a key data preparation step in Text
Mining, extracts the terms, i.e. relevant collocation of words,
attached to specific concepts (e.g. genetic-algorithms and decisiontrees
are terms associated to the concept “Machine Learning" ). In
this paper, the task of extracting interesting collocations is achieved
through a supervised learning algorithm, exploiting a few
collocations manually labelled as interesting/not interesting. From
these examples, the ROGER algorithm learns a numerical function,
inducing some ranking on the collocations. This ranking is optimized
using genetic algorithms, maximizing the trade-off between the false
positive and true positive rates (Area Under the ROC curve). This
approach uses a particular representation for the word collocations,
namely the vector of values corresponding to the standard statistical
interestingness measures attached to this collocation. As this
representation is general (over corpora and natural languages),
generality tests were performed by experimenting the ranking
function learned from an English corpus in Biology, onto a French
corpus of Curriculum Vitae, and vice versa, showing a good
robustness of the approaches compared to the state-of-the-art Support
Vector Machine (SVM).
Abstract: A numerical method for Riccati equation is presented in this work. The method is based on the replacement of unknown functions through a truncated series of hybrid of block-pulse functions and Chebyshev polynomials. The operational matrices of derivative and product of hybrid functions are presented. These matrices together with the tau method are then utilized to transform the differential equation into a system of algebraic equations. Corresponding numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed method.
Abstract: Prediction of viscosity of natural gas is an important parameter in the energy industries such as natural gas storage and transportation. In this study viscosity of different compositions of natural gas is modeled by using an artificial neural network (ANN) based on back-propagation method. A reliable database including more than 3841 experimental data of viscosity for testing and training of ANN is used. The designed neural network can predict the natural gas viscosity using pseudo-reduced pressure and pseudo-reduced temperature with AARD% of 0.221. The accuracy of designed ANN has been compared to other published empirical models. The comparison indicates that the proposed method can provide accurate results.
Abstract: This paper deals with the modeling and the evaluation of a multiplicative phase noise influence on the bit error ratio in a general space communication system. Our research is focused on systems with multi-state phase shift keying modulation techniques and it turns out, that the phase noise significantly affects the bit error rate, especially for higher signal to noise ratios. These results come from a system model created in Matlab environment and are shown in a form of constellation diagrams and bit error rate dependencies. The change of a user data bit rate is also considered and included into simulation results. Obtained outcomes confirm theoretical presumptions.
Abstract: Network management techniques have long been of
interest to the networking research community. The queue size plays
a critical role for the network performance. The adequate size of the
queue maintains Quality of Service (QoS) requirements within
limited network capacity for as many users as possible. The
appropriate estimation of the queuing model parameters is crucial for
both initial size estimation and during the process of resource
allocation. The accurate resource allocation model for the
management system increases the network utilization. The present
paper demonstrates the results of empirical observation of memory
allocation for packet-based services.
Abstract: Cross sections of As radionuclides in the interaction of natGe with 14-30 MeV protons have been deduced by off-line y-ray spectroscopy to find optimal reaction channels leading to radiotracers for positron emission tomography. The experimental results were compared with the previous results and those estimated by the compound nucleus reaction model.
Abstract: The traditional software product and process metrics
are neither suitable nor sufficient in measuring the complexity of
software components, which ultimately is necessary for quality and
productivity improvement within organizations adopting CBSE.
Researchers have proposed a wide range of complexity metrics for
software systems. However, these metrics are not sufficient for
components and component-based system and are restricted to the
module-oriented systems and object-oriented systems. In this
proposed study it is proposed to find the complexity of the JavaBean
Software Components as a reflection of its quality and the component
can be adopted accordingly to make it more reusable. The proposed
metric involves only the design issues of the component and does not
consider the packaging and the deployment complexity. In this way,
the software components could be kept in certain limit which in turn
help in enhancing the quality and productivity.
Abstract: In 2002 an amendment to SOLAS opened for
lightweight material constructions in vessels if the same fire safety as
in steel constructions could be obtained. FISPAT (FIreSPread
Analysis Tool) is a computer application that simulates fire spread
and fault injection in cruise vessels and identifies fire sensitive areas.
It was developed to analyze cruise vessel designs and provides a
method to evaluate network layout and safety of cruise vessels. It
allows fast, reliable and deterministic exhaustive simulations and
presents the result in a graphical vessel model. By performing the
analysis iteratively while altering the cruise vessel design it can be
used along with fire chamber experiments to show that the
lightweight design can be as safe as a steel construction and that
SOLAS regulations are fulfilled.
Abstract: A multicriteria linear programming problem with integer variables and parameterized optimality principle "from lexicographic to Slater" is considered. A situation in which initial coefficients of penalty cost functions are not fixed but may be potentially a subject to variations is studied. For any efficient solution, appropriate measures of the quality are introduced which incorporate information about variations of penalty cost function coefficients. These measures correspond to the so-called stability and accuracy functions defined earlier for efficient solutions of a generic multicriteria combinatorial optimization problem with Pareto and lexicographic optimality principles. Various properties of such functions are studied and maximum norms of perturbations for which an efficient solution preserves the property of being efficient are calculated.
Abstract: While compressing text files is useful, compressing
still image files is almost a necessity. A typical image takes up much
more storage than a typical text message and without compression
images would be extremely clumsy to store and distribute. The
amount of information required to store pictures on modern
computers is quite large in relation to the amount of bandwidth
commonly available to transmit them over the Internet and
applications. Image compression addresses the problem of reducing
the amount of data required to represent a digital image. Performance
of any image compression method can be evaluated by measuring the
root-mean-square-error & peak signal to noise ratio. The method of
image compression that will be analyzed in this paper is based on the
lossy JPEG image compression technique, the most popular
compression technique for color images. JPEG compression is able to
greatly reduce file size with minimal image degradation by throwing
away the least “important" information. In JPEG, both color
components are downsampled simultaneously, but in this paper we
will compare the results when the compression is done by
downsampling the single chroma part. In this paper we will
demonstrate more compression ratio is achieved when the
chrominance blue is downsampled as compared to downsampling the
chrominance red in JPEG compression. But the peak signal to noise
ratio is more when the chrominance red is downsampled as compared
to downsampling the chrominance blue in JPEG compression. In
particular we will use the hats.jpg as a demonstration of JPEG
compression using low pass filter and demonstrate that the image is
compressed with barely any visual differences with both methods.
Abstract: Demand of energy is increasing faster than the
generation. It leads shortage of power in all sectors of society. At
peak hours this shortage is higher. Unless we utilize energy efficient
technology, it is very difficult to minimize the shortage of energy. So
energy efficiency program and energy conservation has an important
role. Energy efficient technologies are cost intensive hence it is
always not possible to implement in country like India. In the recent
study, an educational building with operating hours from 10:00 a.m.
to 05:00 p.m. has been selected to quantify the possibility of lighting
energy conservation. As the operating hour is in daytime, integration
of daylight with artificial lighting system will definitely reduce the
lighting energy consumption. Moreover the initial investment has
been given priority and hence the existing lighting installation was
unaltered. An automatic controller has been designed which will be
operated as a function of daylight through windows and the lighting
system of the room will function accordingly. The result of the study
of integrating daylight gave quite satisfactory for visual comfort as
well as energy conservation.
Abstract: A system for market identification (SMI) is presented.
The resulting representations are multivariable dynamic demand
models. The market specifics are analyzed. Appropriate models and
identification techniques are chosen. Multivariate static and dynamic
models are used to represent the market behavior. The steps of the
first stage of SMI, named data preprocessing, are mentioned. Next,
the second stage, which is the model estimation, is considered in more
details. Stepwise linear regression (SWR) is used to determine the
significant cross-effects and the orders of the model polynomials. The
estimates of the model parameters are obtained by a numerically stable
estimator. Real market data is used to analyze SMI performance.
The main conclusion is related to the applicability of multivariate
dynamic models for representation of market systems.
Abstract: The utilization of cheese whey as a fermentation
substrate to produce bio-ethanol is an effort to supply bio-ethanol
demand as a renewable energy. Like other process systems, modeling
is also required for fermentation process design, optimization and
plant operation. This research aims to study the fermentation process
of cheese whey by applying mathematics and fundamental concept in
chemical engineering, and to investigate the characteristic of the
cheese whey fermentation process. Steady state simulation results for
inlet substrate concentration of 50, 100 and 150 g/l, and various
values of hydraulic retention time, showed that the ethanol
productivity maximum values were 0.1091, 0.3163 and 0.5639 g/l.h
respectively. Those values were achieved at hydraulic retention time
of 20 hours, which was the minimum value used in this modeling.
This showed that operating reactor at low hydraulic retention time
was favorable. Model of bio-ethanol production from cheese whey
will enhance the understanding of what really happen in the
fermentation process.
Abstract: Despite so many years- development, the mainstream of workflow solutions from IT industries has not made ad-hoc workflow-support easy or inexpensive in MIS. Moreover, most of academic approaches tend to make their resulted BPM (Business Process Management) more complex and clumsy since they used to necessitate modeling workflow. To cope well with various ad-hoc or casual requirements on workflows while still keeping things simple and inexpensive, the author puts forth first the TSM design pattern that can provide a flexible workflow control while minimizing demand of predefinitions and modeling workflow, which introduces a generic approach for building BPM in workflow-aware MISs (Management Information Systems) with low development and running expenses.
Abstract: Discrete choice model is the most used methodology for studying traveler-s mode choice and demand. However, to calibrate the discrete choice model needs to have plenty of questionnaire survey. In this study, an aggregative model is proposed. The historical data of passenger volumes for high speed rail and domestic civil aviation are employed to calibrate and validate the model. In this study, different models are compared so as to propose the best one. From the results, systematic equations forecast better than single equation do. Models with the external variable, which is oil price, are better than models based on closed system assumption.
Abstract: Glomerular filtration rate (GFR) is a measure of
kidney function. It is usually estimated from serum concentrations of
cystatin C or creatinine although there has been considerable debate
in the literature about (i) the best equation to use and (ii) the
variability in the correlation between the concentrations of creatinine
and cystatin C. The equations for GFR can be written in a general
form and from these I calculate the error of the GFR estimates
associated with analyte measurement error. These show that the
error of the GFR estimates is such that it is not possible to distinguish
between the equations over much of the concentration range of either
analyte. The general forms of the equations are also used to derive
an expression for the concentration of cystatin C as a function of the
concentration of creatinine. This equation shows that these analyte
concentrations are not linearly related. Clinical reports of cystatin C
and creatinine concentration are consistent with the expression
derived.
Abstract: In this paper delamination phenomenon in
Carbon-Epoxy laminated composite material is investigated
numerically. Arcan apparatus and specimen is modeled in ABAQUS
finite element software for different loading conditions and crack
geometries. The influence of variation of crack geometry on
interlaminar fracture stress intensity factor and energy release rate for
various mixed mode ratios and pure mode I and II was studied. Also,
correction factors for this specimen for different crack length ratios
were calculated. The finite element results indicate that for loading
angles close to pure mode-II loading, a high ratio of mode-II to
mode-I fracture is dominant and there is an opposite trend for loading
angles close to pure mode-I loading. It confirms that by varying the
loading angle of Arcan specimen pure mode-I, pure mode-II and a
wide range of mixed-mode loading conditions can be created and
tested. Also, numerical results confirm that the increase of the mode-
II loading contribution leads to an increase of fracture resistance in
the CF/PEI composite (i.e., a reduction in the total strain energy
release rate) and the increase of the crack length leads to a reduction
of interlaminar fracture resistance in the CF/PEI composite (i.e., an
increase in the total interlaminar strain energy release rate).