We consider the asymmetric active coupler (AAC) consisting of two coupled dissimilar waveguides with gain and loss. We show that under generic conditions, not restricted by parity-time symmetry, there exist finite-power, constant-intensity nonlinear supermodes (NS), resulting from the balance between gain, loss, nonlinearity, coupling and dissimilarity. The system is shown to possess non-recipr...

The price effects of the Swedish pharmaceutical substitution reform are analyzed using data for a panel of all pharmaceutical product sold in Sweden in 1997-2007. The price reduction due to the reform was estimated to average 10% and was found to be significantly larger for brand-name pharmaceuticals than for generics. The results also imply that the reform amplified the effect that generic ent...

Electronic government has been established as an effective mechanism for increasing government productivity and efficiency and a key enabler of citizen-centric services. Like the rest of the world, in Gulf countries, public sector transformation efforts are focused towards increasing accessibility, availability, competitive advantage, and enhancing services in civil administration. The e-govern...

An area of computer vision research which has recently become more active is the development of generic object models We consider a model to be generic if it is meant to represent an object category rather than a single object instance The motivation for work in this area is both to make recog nition algorithms more e cient but more importantly to make them robust in real world applications In ...

This paper reviews the need for powerful computing facilities in econometrics, focusing on concrete problems which arise in financial economics and in macroeconomics. We argue that the profession is being held back by the lack of easy-to-use generic software which is able to exploit the availability of cheap clusters of distributed computers. Our response is to extend, in a number of directions...