1 Abstract This study uses labor productivity in terms of real GDP as a basis for comparing a nation's competitiveness. We evaluate how corporate income tax, dividend tax, and the tax on the highest income bracket affect productivity while controlling for several environmental factors. A set of 24 OECD member nations is observed from 1996-2006. It is found that statutory corporate income tax ra...

proximity of the vagus nerve to a patent ductus arteriosus (pda) can cause traction or entrapment of vagus nerve during surgical closure of the in rare occasions. this can lead to a life threatening postoperative bradycardia. herein, we report a case of bradycardia caused by unexpected irritation of the vagal trunk by the end of operation. the patient was managed by re-opening the chest, lung r...

The Hit-or-Miss transform is a well-known morphological operator for template matching in binary and grey-level images. However it cannot be used straightforward in multivalued images (such as colour or multispectral images) since Mathematical Morphology needs an ordering relation which is not trivial on multivalued spaces. Moreover, existing definitions of the Hit-Or-Miss Transform in grey-lev...

We study the problem of closure under complementation of languages accepted by one-way and two-way tree automata modulo equational theories. We deal with the equational theories of commutative monoids ( ), idempotent commutative monoids ( ), Abelian groups ( ), and the theories of exclusive-or ( ), generalized exclusive-or ( ), and distributive minus symbol ( ). While the one-way automata for a...

In 2006, Peris-Lopez et al. [1, 2, 3] initiated the design of ultralightweight RFID protocols –with the UMAP family of protocols– involving only simple bitwise logical or arithmetic operations such as bitwise XOR, OR, AND, and addition. This combination of operations was revealed later to be insufficient for security. Then, Chien et al. proposed the SASI protocol [4] with the aim of offering be...

A recent publication introduced a Visual Crypto (VC) system, based on the polarisation of light. This VC system has good resolution, contrast and colour properties. Mathematically, the VC system is described by the XOR operation (modulo two addition). In this paper we investigate Threshold Visual Secret Sharing schemes associated to XOR-based VC systems. Firstly, we show that n out of n schemes...

Inspired by Fu et al. work [12] on modeling the exclusive-or differential property of the modulo addition as an mixed-integer programming problem, we propose a method with which any finite automaton can be formulated as an mixed-integer programming model. Using this method, we show how to construct a mixed integer programming model whose feasible region is the set of all differential patterns (...

once accompanied him to a miserable hovel in the West Port, and found there a poorly nourished, wretched looking woman in the pains of labour. On inquiry, she was doubtful about her exact age, and stated this to be her second pregnancy?her first child having been still-born about two years before, after a labour of three days' duration. Her condition during her present pregnancy had been fair, ...

Over the last two decades umbilical cord blood (UCB) transplantation (UCBT) is increasingly used for a variety of malignant and benign hematological and other diseases. The main factor that limits the use of UCB to low weight recipients, mainly children and adolescents, is its low progenitor cell content. Various alternatives have been exploited to overcome this difficulty, including the transp...

To reduce the feedbacks between access point and all nodes in lossy wireless networks, a clustered system model consisting of a cluster head and multiple common nodes is investigated. Network coding has been proposed for more efficient retransmissions in reliable multicast. However, in existing schemes the access point retransmits coded packets, which causes severe delay and considerable feedba...