1 Abbreviations and Notations 3

Using a field experiment in China, we study whether migration status is correlated with attitudes toward risk, ambiguity, and competitiveness. Our subjects include migrants and non-migrants. We find that, migrants exhibit no differences from non-migrants in risk and ambiguity preferences elicited using pairs of lotteries; however, migrants are significantly more likely to enter competition in t...

Exercising is an activity in which the presence of others can motivate an individual to surpass his / her own limits. In recent years, technology has changed the way we carry out these activities. User commitment has been shown to be dependent on, among other, peer pressure. The introduction of challengeable virtual opponents broadened the spectrum of possibilities, enabling users to be motivat...

Proximity matrices like kernels or dissimilarity matrices provide nonstandard data representations common in the life science domain. Here we extend fast soft competitive learning to a discriminative and vector labeled learning algorithm for proximity data. It provides a more stable and consistent integration of label information in the cost function solely based on a give proximity matrix with...

This paper presents a new algorithm, Magnitude Sensitive Competitive Learning (MSCL), which has the ability of distributing the unit weights following any magnitude calculated from the unit parameters or the input data inside the Voronoi region of the unit. This controlled behavior permits to surpass other standard Competitive Learning algorithms that only tend to concentrate neurons accordingl...

Adaptation to customer needs is a key component of competitiveness in any service industry. In online HE (higher education), which is increasingly worldwide, this adaptation must include consideration of learning styles. Most research shows that learning style has little impact on learning outcomes in online education. Nevertheless, students with different learning styles prefer different learn...

contamination of water by heavy metals is a global problem. nowadays everybody knows that heavy metal ions consist of iron, lead, manganese, zinc, copper, cadmium, and nickel and so on they are common contaminants in wastewater and known to be toxic and carcinogenic that lead to many problems for human and water environment. in this research, experiments have been performed in the batch system ...

an integrated model considers all parameters and elements of different deficiencies in one problem. this paper presents a new integrated model of a supply chain that simultaneously considers facility location, vehicle routing and inventory control problems as well as their interactions in one problem, called location-routing-inventory (lri) problem. this model also considers stochastic demands ...

The allocation of design tolerances between the components of a mechanical assembly and manufacturing tolerances can significantly affect the functionality of products and related production costs. This paper introduces Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) approach to solve the machining tolerance allocation of an overrunning clutch assembly.  The objective is to obtain optimum tolerances of...