Previous studies of the so-called frontier production function have not utilized an adequate characterization of the disturbance term for such a model. In this paper we provide an appropriate specification, by defining the disturbance term as the sum of symmetric normal and (negative) half-normal random variables. Various aspects of maximum-likelihood estimation for the coefficients of a produc...

As the catalytic and regulatory centers of protein synthesis in cells, ribosomes are central to many aspects of cell and structural biology. Recent work highlights the unique properties and complexity of eukaryotic ribosomes and their component rRNAs and proteins.

We have carried out a theoretical study on the structure-function relationship for the selective oxidation of lower alkanes (C1-C4). The H abstraction mechanism has been examined over the model catalysts of high-valence d0 transition metal oxides in the tetrahedral coordination. The intrinsic connections among the H abstraction barrier, the strengths of the O-H and the M-O bonds, the ability of...

This paper presents a distributed multi-robot system to search for odor sources inside unknown environments. The robots cooperatively explore the whole environment and generate its topological map. The exploration method is a decentralized frontier based algorithm that is enhanced by considering odor concentration at each frontier inside its cost/gain function. The robots independently generate...

Organic, conjugated donor−acceptor (D−A) systems are essential components of photovoltaic devices. Design and optimization of D−A systems is typically based on trial-and-error experimentation methods that would benefit from fundamental physical insights on structure−function relationships at the molecular level. Here, we implement a nonequilibrium Green’s function methodology at the density fun...

Knowledge frontier discovery is a novel technique for identifying interesting subpopulations of a dataset with respect to classification performance. A knowledge frontier is a collection of meaningful groups where any sub-partition with significantly different predictive accuracy is not meaningful. This research introduces knowledge frontiers and knowledge frontier discovery. The first knowledg...

Since the Labour government came to power in 1997, it has introduced a regime whereby public services are accountable in respect of best value performance indicators (BVPIs). A recent Public Services Productivity Panel (PSP) (2000) report has developed a set of criteria whereby the economic analysis of police force efficiency by the Home Office is to be made standard. In this paper we utilise a...

The Fukui matrix is introduced as the derivative of the one-electron reduced density matrix with respect to a change in the number of electrons under constant external potential. The Fukui matrix extends the Fukui function concept: the diagonal of the Fukui matrix is the Fukui function. Diagonalizing the Fukui matrix gives a set of eigenvectors, the Fukui orbitals, and accompanying eigenvalues....

The literature on the measurement of regional convergence at different spatial scales and over different time periods is extensive. This study explores the potential role of variations in European regional technical efficiency as a contributing factor in providing explanation for convergence or divergence. To control for spatial dependence among regions, the paper uses a spatial stochastic fron...