Our infrastructure touches the day-to-day life of each of our fellow citizens, and its capabilities, integrity and sustainability are crucial to the overall competitiveness and prosperity of our country. Unfortunately, the current state of U.S. infrastructure is not good: the American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest report on America’s infrastructure ranked it at a D+ — in need of $3.9 trill...

The effect of different kinds of weight normalization on the outcome of a simple competitive learning rule is analysed. It is shown that there are important differences in the representation formed depending on whether the constraint is enforced by dividing each weight by the same amount (“divisive enforcement”), or subtracting a fixed amount from each weight (“subtractive enforcement”). For th...

This paper studies the following online replacement problem. There is a real function f(t), called the ow rate, deened over a nite time horizon 0; T]. It is known that m f(t) M for some reals 0 m < M. At time 0 an online player starts to pay money at the rate f(0). At each time 0 < t T the player may changeover and continue paying money at the rate f(t). The complication is that each such chang...

We describe a multi-network, or modular, connectionist architecture that captures that fact that many tasks have structure at a level of granularity intermediate to that assumed by local and global function approximation schemes. The main innovation of the architecture is that it combines associative and competitive learning in order to learn task decompositions. A task decomposition is discove...

Internationalization is recognized as a valuable strategy for organizations’ growth and expansion; however little is known about the determinants of internationalization of SMEs in Malaysia, which is in a fast growing economy. In attempt to investigate the antecedents of internationalization, three key determinants are identified: the competitive advantage, the management attitude and the manag...

market structure is one of the most important characteristics of every industry. although, there exist different indices such as concentration, economies of scale, entry of firms, product differentiation, etc. for the evaluation of market structure, but most of the studies in the subject have used only one of these indices (usually concentration). in this study, by application of fuzzy inferenc...

In recent years, measuring and analyzing productivity changes is the main focus of variousresearches who study performance of organizations. All through widespread application ofMalmquist Productivity Index, different types of data should be considered thoroughly,otherwise any defective study of the related data and deciding factors may yield poor results.Practical Malmquist Productivity Index ...

globalization is a phenomenon of recent times. the world economy is moving towards a more intense & integrated status while at the same time local economies are becoming more interdependent. the fast pace of globalization and how to tackle the offspring ’s of such a movement have become a major challenge for the whole world as a whole in general and for the developing countries in particular. c...