Measuring the Degree of Convergence among European Business Cycles

The dating of a possible European business cycle has been inconclusive. At this stage, there is no consensus on the existence of such a cycle, or of its periodicity and amplitude, or of the relationship of individual member countries to that cycle. Yet cyclical convergence is the key consideration for countries that wish to be members of the currency union. The confusion over whether and to what degree the UK is converging on the cycles of its European partners, or whether its cycle is more in line with the US, is one example of this lack of consensus. Moreover, countries will vary in the components and characteristics that make up their output cycles at any moment, as well as in the state of their cycle. In this paper we show how to decompose a business cycle into a time-frequency framework. This allows us to decompose movements in output, both at the European level and in member countries, into their component cycles and allows those component cycles (and the coherence between them) to vary in their importance and cyclical characteristics. That then allows us to determine if the inconclusive convergence results obtained so far have appeared because member countries have some cycles in common, but diverge at other frequencies. Jel Classification No: C22, C29, C49, F43, O49     

Exploring business cycles using running medians

In this paper we apply a certain class of non-linear data smoothers (see Turkey (1977) and Mallows (1980)) to the problem of dating turning points in business cycles in four industrial countries. In particular we use the plateau smoothing property of odd-span running medians to analyse ‘peak’ and ‘valley’ plateaus of quarterly GNP growth rates. The end points of peak and valley plateaus are used for dating turning points in business cycles. Those business cycle characteristics are used to find out about relationships between the USA, UK, Japan, Germany and Austria. No joint lead lag relationship can be detected but there are some short periods of coinciding developments.     

Terminability and compensatibility of cycles in business processes with a process-oriented trigger

BPTrigger is a process-oriented trigger model that provides economy of specification and efficient execution for complex business constraints. An essential part of trigger execution is detection and resolution of cycles. This paper presents an approach to determine the terminability of a cycle introduced by a BPTrigger in a business process and determine whether a cycle is allowable in terms of compensatibility. The foundation of the approach is a set of conditions for cycle termination derived from classifications of business processes by resource usage and activity types by compensation status. This paper formally presents cycle analysis procedures using the notion of cycle analysis graph. Further, a procedure is proposed which checks the terminability of multiple cycles using a composite cycle analysis graph constructed from the cycle analysis graphs of the associated cycles. The paper proves the correctness of the analysis and presents a validation example. The presented results extend some limitations of well-formed sphere which has addressed atomicity of workflow transactions.     

Exploring US Business Cycles with Bivariate Loops Using Penalized Spline Regression

The phrase business cycle is usually used for short term fluctuations in macroeconomic time series. In this paper we focus on the estimation of business cycles in a bivariate manner by fitting two series simultaneously. The underlying model is thereby nonparametric in that no functional form is prespecified but smoothness of the functions are assumed. The functions are then estimated using penalized spline estimation. The bivariate approach will allow to compare business cycles, check and compare phase lengths and visualize this in forms of loops in a bivariate way. Moreover, the focus is on separation of long and short phase fluctuation, where only the latter is the classical business cycle while the first is better known as Friedman or Goodwin cycle, respectively. Again, we use nonparametric models and fit the functional shape with penalized splines. For the separation of long and short phase components we employ an Akaike criterion.     

A Wavelet-Based Approach to Filter Out Symmetric Macroeconomic Shocks

We propose a novel method for econometric time series analysis. This method acts as the comovement-selective filter and is useful to filter out the cycles that are caused by an global event present in the reference time series. We demonstrate its applicability on removing symmetric macroeconomic shock caused by recent financial crisis from the business cycle of the euro area according to the comovement with the United States. The application allowing to identify the country specific business cycles in the Visegrad countries data using the comovement with Germany is also presented. The method is based on the continuous wavelet transform, its inverse and the comovement measurement in the time-frequency domain. Its application also enables to uncover detailed development of the business cycle synchronization in time.     

The Turnover and Retention of it Managers in Rapidly Changing Organizations

The explosion of information technology (IT) during the 1990s created tremendous opportunities and challenges for IT professionals. As organizations expanded and integrated their information technology into their business functions and made greater use of the Internet as a business tool and marketing channel, the demand for IT managers to guide these efforts created unprecedented career opportunities. Industry sources suggest that even amid the peaks and valleys of turbulent IT business cycles, there is a chronic shortage of top-quality IT managers in North America and that this situation will persist well into the foreseeable future. These supply-and-demand dynamics make it imperative for organizations to know why IT managers leave their positions and, using this knowledge, formulate effective retention strategies.     

Hydrological consistency using multi-sensor remote sensing data for water and energy cycle studies

A multi-sensor/multi-platform approach to water and energy cycle prediction is demonstrated in an effort to understand the variability and feedback of land surface and atmospheric processes over large space and time scales. Remote sensing-based variables including soil moisture (from AMSR-E), surface heat fluxes (from MODIS) and precipitation rates (from TRMM) are combined with North American Regional Reanalysis derived atmospheric components to examine the degree of hydrological consistency throughout these diverse and independent hydrologic data sets. The study focuses on the influence of the North American Monsoon System (NAMS) over the southwestern United States, and is timed to coincide with the SMEX04 North American Monsoon Experiment (NAME). The study is focused over the Arizona portion of the NAME domain to assist in better characterizing the hydrometeorological processes occurring across Arizona during the summer monsoon period. Results demonstrate that this multi-sensor approach, in combination with available atmospheric observations, can be used to obtain a comprehensive and hydrometeorologically consistent characterization of the land surface water cycle, leading to an improved understanding of water and energy cycles within the NAME region and providing a novel framework for future remote observation and analysis of the coupled land surface-atmosphere system.     

并联HEV工况识别能量管理与优化控制

考虑到行驶工况对具有多个动力源的PHEV燃油经济性的显著影响,提出一种基于K-means++工况识别的能量管理策略.以ADVISOR中30种标准行驶工况构建组合工况,在工况片段划分与工况识别周期选取的基础上,结合K-means++聚类算法得到四种聚类结果,分别对应拥堵、城市、郊区以及高速四种典型行驶工况.建立发动机油耗...     

Closing the loop: Empirical evidence for a positive feedback model of IT business value creation

Researchers have established that information technology (IT) can improve firms’ productivity. Whether improved productivity leads to additional investment in IT, however, remains largely uninvestigated. In this paper, we consider whether the relationship between productivity and subsequent IT investment might be positive, negative, or ad hoc, and hypothesize that this relationship is positive. We analyze seven years of panel data from 1236 healthcare firms and present empirical evidence supporting our hypothesis. When our finding is combined with extant research, it becomes reasonable to propose that unidirectional causality does not fully describe the process of IT business value creation. Instead, we argue that existing static models of IT business value with unidirectional causality can be recast as dynamic models that explicitly incorporate multiple time periods and a positive feedback relationship to more accurately capture the complexity of this process. The creation of IT business value can thus be understood as a positive feedback model where IT investment in a given time period builds the stock of IT inputs, where those IT inputs then impact productivity, and where productivity leads to IT investment in a future time period, beginning the cycle anew.     

人类HLA-DRB1基因型与民族和人群的神经网络无监督模式分类

HLA-DRB1等位基因主要参与人类的抗原免疫功能,对其进行比较研究,有助于追溯人类的进化迁移史,开发类群特异性药物.本研究以Matlab为平台,用自组织竞争网络(Self-Organizing Competitive Neural Network),对世界54个民族和人群、14个HLA-DRB1等位基因,进行了无监督模式分类.结果表明,各民族之间存在差异性,同民族的各人群之间有相似性.西伯利亚各人群,澳洲各土著人群,黑人各人群,南美印第安各人群,犹太族各人群,日本各人群,及欧美白人各人群有相对独立性:南美印第安人与西伯利亚人有高度相似性;中国民族在南方人群和北方人群间存在较大差异;中国汉族中,广东汉族地位特殊,与少数民族如拉祜族、瑶族关系密切.     

Synthesizing object life cycles from business process models

Unified modeling language (UML) activity diagrams can model the flow of stateful business objects among activities, implicitly specifying the life cycles of those objects. The actual object life cycles are typically expressed in UML state machines. The implicit life cycles in UML activity diagrams need to be discovered in order to derive the actual object life cycles or to check the consistency with an existing life cycle. This paper presents an automated approach for synthesizing a UML state machine modeling the life cycle of an object that occurs in different states in a UML activity diagram. The generated state machines can contain parallelism, loops, and cross-synchronization. The approach makes life cycles that have been modeled implicitly in activity diagrams explicit. The synthesis approach has been implemented using a graph transformation tool and has been applied in several case studies.     

Business engagement on Twitter: a path analysis

Social media services, such as Twitter, enable commercial businesses to participate actively in online word-of-mouth communication. In this project, we examined the potential influences of business engagement in online word-of-mouth communication on the level of consumers’ engagement and investigated the trajectories of a business’ online word-of-mouth message diffusion in the Twitter community. We used path analysis to examine 164,478 tweets from 96,725 individual Twitter users with regards to nine brands during a 5-week study period. We operationalized business engagement as the amount of online word-of-mouth messages from brand and the number of consumers the brand follows. We operationalized consumers’ engagement as the number of online word-of-mouth messages from consumers both connecting to the brand and having no connection with the brand as well as the number of consumers following the brand. We concluded that the business engagement on Twitter relates directly to consumers’ engagement with online word-of-mouth communication. In addition, retweeting, as an explicit way to show consumers’ response to business engagement, indicates that the influence only reaches consumers with a second-degree relationship to the brand and that the life cycle of a tweet is generally 1.5 to 4 hours at most. Our research has critical implications in terms of advancing the understanding of the business’s role in the online word-of-mouth communication and bringing insight to the analytics of social networks and online word-of-mouth message diffusion patterns.     

Incorporating Background Knowledge for Better Prediction of Cycle Phases

When predicting the state of a system, we sometimes know that the succession of states is cyclic. This is for example true for the prediction of business cycle phases, where an upswing is always followed by upper turning points, and the subsequent downswing passes via lower turning points over to the next upswing and so on. We present several ideas of how to implement this background knowledge in popular static classification methods. Additionally, we present a full dynamic model. The usefulness for the prediction of business cycles is investigated, revealing pitfalls and potential benefits of ideas.     

Limit cycles with chattering in relay feedback systems

Relay feedback has a large variety of applications in control engineering. Several interesting phenomena occur in simple relay systems. In the paper, scalar linear systems with relay feedback are analyzed. It is shown that a limit cycle where part of the limit cycle consists of fast relay switchings can occur. This chattering is analyzed in detail and conditions for approximating it by a sliding mode are derived. A result on existence of limit cycles with chattering is given, and it is shown that the limit cycles can have arbitrarily many relay switchings each period. Limit cycles with regular sliding modes are also discussed. Examples illustrate the results.     

Dynamic efficiency evaluation of state-level business incubators in China by using a slacks-based measure approach

It is important to evaluate the efficiency of business incubators for their performance improvement. Because few enterprises can successfully graduate from the incubation process in one incubation period, the incubating enterprises will be carried over to the successive periods. In this context, the number of incubating enterprises can be regarded as a carry-over variable linking different incubation periods, which can also be treated as an undesirable output in the current period. This paper proposes a dynamic slacks-based measure model to evaluate the efficiency of China's state-level business incubators during 2010–2012. The empirical results show that neglecting new entrants and the typical carry-over variable may underestimate the incubation system's efficiency. Moreover, the operational efficiency of China's state-level business incubators is relatively low, which is largely caused by the lower pure technical efficiency. There exist great disparities between pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency for all considered incubators in China. Some important insights and policy suggestions are presented.     

North American vegetation dynamics observed with multi-resolution satellite data

We investigated normalized difference vegetation index data from the NOAA series of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers and found regions in North America that experienced marked increases in annual photosynthetic capacity at various times from 1982 to 2005. Inspection of these anomalous areas with multi-resolution data from Landsat, Ikonos, aerial photography, and ancillary data revealed a range of causes for the NDVI increases: climatic influences; severe drought and subsequent recovery; irrigated agriculture expansion; insect outbreaks followed by logging and subsequent regeneration; and forest fires with subsequent regeneration. Vegetation in areas in the high Northern Latitudes appear to be solely impacted by climatic influences. In other areas examined, the impact of anthropogenic effects is more direct. The pattern of NDVI anomalies over longer time periods appear to be driven by long-term climate change but most appear to be associated with climate variability on decadal and shorter time scales along with direct anthropogenic land cover conversions. The local variability of drivers of change demonstrates the difficulty in interpreting changes in NDVI and indicates the complex nature of changes in the carbon cycle within North America. Coarse scale analysis of changes could well fail to identify the important local scale drivers controlling the carbon cycle and to identify the relative roles of disturbance and climate change. Our results document regional land cover land use change and climatic influences that have altered continental scale vegetation dynamics in North America.     

影响区域自动观测站数据传输质量的成因分析

按照业务运行规定,区域自动气象观测站每小时将正点观测资料通过气象通信网络实时上传到省级信息中心,并对上传的气象资料传输质量进行考核。通过2008~2013年近6年宁夏区域气象观测站数据传输质量的分析,以及宁夏区域气象观测站网的建设和站点布局,阐述了影响区域自动气象观测站数据传输质量过程中主要存在的问题,查找分析逾限报、缺报的原因,并提出了相应的对策,以确保区域自动站观测资料的传输及时率和准确性,来满足现代气象业务的需求,对充分发挥区域气象观测站效益有积极的作用。     

The Threat of Cyber-Sabotage: The new Internet economy has recently seen a spate of layoffs. E-business’ had better watch out for their ex-technical employees — and guard against the potentially crippling effects of cyber-sabotage.

A little over a year ago, as the world faced the uncertain prospect of the Y2K transition, the angst was offset by the unlimited opportunity that was said to exist — the Internet economy. Many business analysts were so enraptured by the capabilities of electronic commerce and the Internet economy that they claimed that the end of the business cycle had been achieved. The eradication of the cycle was attributed to the advent of a ruthless efficiency forged in silicon and software. No longer would the global capitalist economy be plagued by alternate cycles of boom and bust, the coordination of buying and selling would henceforth be a smooth process that would ramp the economy ever upward.     

A system of processes related by cause and effect Part I. The model†

This paper develops a mathematical model for a system composed of product producing processes. The system is divided into subsets of processes called cycles. In each cycle the processes are linearly ordered and related by a cause and effect relationship where a change in any one process propagates from process to process throughout the entire cycle. This cause and effect relationship is a structure on processes of a cycle which asserts that each process of the cycle performs a step in a sequence of steps that finally load to the main product for which the cycle is identified. It is shown here that this model exhibits many of the empirical properties we would expect. It obeys a conservation law. Also in its state of equilibrium reserves are unchanged and it is neither efficient nor inefficient. There are also additional empirically expected phenomena which it exhibits. With this model the system is also shown to be able to insulate itself from environmental stimuli which could be regarded as a state of sleep or hibernation. Clearly such a model has application to many disciplines including biology, economics and ecology.     

测土配方施肥辅助决策平台的研究与应用*

为了解决目前我国测土配方施肥软件难以推广的问题,采用面向构件技术设计了测土配方施肥辅助决策技术体系,并着重对其构件体系进行阐述;对测土配方施肥的作业流程进行了业务单元的划分,并将划分结果映射为相应的业务构件;在此基础上,给出了按需搭建构件化测土配方施肥辅助决策系统的方法;最后,结合实例分析了构件化测土配方施肥辅助决策系统在大范围推广应用、节约开发成本、缩短开发周期、实现软件重用等方面具有的优势。