This paper describes the spread of industry from country to country as a region grows. All industrial sectors are initially agglomerated in one country, tied together by inputoutput links between firms. Growth expands industry more than other sectors, bidding up wages in the country in which industry is clustered. At some point firms start to move away, and when a critical mass is reached indus...

Technology alignment helps organizations to do things better by supporting or shaping competitive strategies. Above all, it must have an impact on organizational performance. Technology has been instrumental in transforming the field of Human Resources in delivery, support and management of HR processes in an effective and efficient way. As companies begin to compete in the challenging business...

Quantum information and computation is the new hype in physics. It is promising, mindboggling and even already applicable in cryptography, with good prospects ahead. A brief, rather subjective outline is presented. 1 Is Nature telling us something? Friends in experimental physics tell me that the essence of their observations are clicks in some counter. There is a click or there is none. This i...

In the in-vivo brain background synaptic activity has a strong modulatory influence on neuronal excitability. Here we report that in rat hippocampal slices, blockade of endogenous in vitro background activity results in an increased excitability of CA1 pyramidal neurons within tens of minutes. The increase in excitability constitutes a leftward shift in the input-output relationship of pyramida...

This chapter aims to give a general description of the basic features of a three phase to three phase matrix converter in terms of performance and of technological issues. This chapter does not require to the reader a special knowledge of the matrix converter technology. It is worth noting that the three phase to three phase configuration is just one of the possible direct AC-AC converter topol...

New statistical analysis and data mining techniques are utilized by researchers to develop tools that help healthcare professionals to easily and efficiently diagnose thyroid related diseases. Useful knowledge can be extracted from the databases where a significant amount of relevant data is stored. A new decision-based hybrid system for the diagnosis of thyroid diseases is presented in this ar...

Ecosystems are vital to any human activity because they constitute the basic planetary support systems. Their deterioration threatens the sustainability of all industrial activity and erodes a nation’s productive capital base. A necessary step towards preserving ecosystems is to estimate their contribution to economic activity. Most contemporary economic, thermodynamic and life cycle assessment...

In this paper, we study the problem of semi-supervised structured output prediction, which aims to learn predictors for structured outputs, such as sequences, tree nodes, vectors, etc., from a set of data points of both inputoutput pairs and single inputs without outputs. The traditional methods to solve this problem usually learns one single predictor for all the data points, and ignores the v...

A multivariable laboratory process of four interconnected water tanks is considered for modeling and robust control. The objective of the current study is to design and implement a variety of control algorithms and present corresponding robust control analysis on a multivariable laboratory four tank process. The control methodologies considered are (i) decentralized PI control, (ii) “inner-oute...

-This article presents a design principle of a neural network using Gaussian activation functions, referred to as a Gaussian Potential Function Network (GPFN), and explores the capability of a GPFN in learning a continuous input-output mapping from a given set of teaching patterns. The design principle is highlighted by a Hierarchically Self-Organizing Learning (HSOL) algorithm featuring the au...