This study analyzes Chinese consumer behavior across different retail food store formats and how household demographics affect shopping behavior. A multivariate probit model with four categories of retail food store formats (wet markets, small grocery stores, super markets, and hypermarkets) in Qingdao, China is estimated. The results indicate that the new hypermarkets are substitutes for super...

This paper presents an adaptive multi domain language model built from large sources of pre existing human created structured data. The sources’ structure is exploited to create a large array of ngram language models which are dynamically interpolated at decoding time to produce a context dependent language model that continuously adapts itself to the current domain. Because the use of human an...

Recent advances in hash functions cryptanalysis provide a strong impetus to explore new designs. This paper describes a new hash function mq-hash that depends for its security on the difficulty of solving randomly drawn systems of multivariate equations over a finite field. While provably achieving pre-image resistance for a hash function based on multivariate equations is relatively easy, näıv...

For the analysis of caries experience in seven year old children we explored the association between the presence or absence of caries experience among different deciduous molars within each child. Some of the observed high associations have an etiological basis (e.g., between symmetrically opponent molars), while others (diagonally opponent molars) are assumed to be the result of the transitiv...

Searching the internet using the currently available search engines is not satisfactory. The techniques used there focus on the extraction of relevant information directly from the documents available on the web. We introduce a new approach, which aims at describing the content of a webspace, formed by a collection of related documents, instead of looking at the single documents. By identifying...

Electronic voting could increase citizens’ electoral participation and trust in countries characterized by fragile democratic institutions and public discredit of the political system such as those in Latin America. This paper examines attitudes towards e-voting among participants in a large scale pilot project conducted in Colombia in 2007, focusing on the perceived reliability and usability o...

We report gender differences in the epidemiology and outcome after hip fracture from the Scottish Hip Fracture Audit, with data on admission and at 120 days follow-up from 22 orthopaedic units across the country between 1998 and 2005. Outcome measures included early mortality, length of hospital stay, 120-day residence and mobility. A multivariate logistic regression model compared outcomes bet...

Bulk carriers have an important role in international maritime transport. In this paper, we carried out a numerical study on a model of bulk carrier vessel and calculated total resistance of the model. A model of a bulk carrier vessel with length of 2.76 m, breadth of 0.403 m and draught of 0.173 m was selected for numerical modeling. Numerical work was done by commercial CFD software ANSY...