There is a worldwide trend towards defined contribution savings plans, where investors are often able to select their own portfolios. How much is this freedom of choice worth? We present retirement investors with information about the distribution of outcomes they could expect to obtain from the portfolios they picked for themselves, and the same information for the median portfolio selected by...

The main aim of the paper is to examine the shortand medium-term empirical link between current account balances and a broad set of (economic) variables proposed by theoretical and empirical literature. The paper focuses on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), an economically diverse region, which has so far mainly been neglected in such empirical analyzes. For this purpose, a (dynamic) pan...

Black holes came into existence together with the universe through the quantum process of pair creation in the inflationary era. We present the instantons responsible for this process and calculate the pair creation rate from the no boundary proposal for the wave function of the universe. We find that this proposal leads to physically sensible results, which fit in with other descriptions of pa...

The creation of TE-mode photons in a three-dimensional perfectly conducting cavity with one resonantly vibrating wall is studied numerically. We show that the creation of TE-mode photons in a rectangular cavity is related to the production of massive scalar particles on a time-dependent interval. The equations of motion are solved numerically which allows to take into account the intermode coup...

In this article, the influence of reservoirs and ponds on hydrological regime in Yesil River basin is studied. To assess impact existing annual runoff rivers study basin, a simplified methodology State Hydrological Institute was used. The change (seasonal) under determined using two methods: by volume filling reservoirs; due to additional evaporation from water surface compared land before thei...

This work relates to the solution of real multimedia documents indexing tasks. New approach to high-performance speech/music segmentation system creation is considered. This approach uses wavelet analysis and it is based not only on new distinctive features (entropy and dynamism) investigation, but it also takes into account information concerning language. Different experiments have shown the ...

JXTA is an open-source initiative that allows to specify a set of collaboration and communication protocols which enable the creation and deployment of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. This paper provides a survey on its current state regarding the topic of security. The study focuses on the security evaluation of standard peer operations within the JXTA network, highlighting which issues must ...

Here the authors provide a generalized Chudley-Elliott expression for the activated atom surface diffusion which takes into account the coupling between both low-frequency vibrational motion (namely, the frustrated translational modes) and diffusion. This expression is derived within the Gaussian approximation framework for the intermediate scattering function at low coverage. Moreover, inelast...

In this paper we describe the process of designing a task-oriented continuous speech recognition system for Arabic, based on CMU Sphinx4, to be used in the voice interface of Quranic reader. The concept of the Quranic reader controlled by speech is presented, the collection of the corpus and creation of acoustic model are described in detail taking into account a specificities of Arabic languag...

Many dependencies appear between the different stages of the creation of a hypermedia presentation. These dependencies have to be taken into account while designing a system for their automatic generation. In this work we study two of them and propose some techniques to treat them. During this process, we introduce the partial design of a hypermedia formatting model that we call Hypermedia Form...