On characterizing and generalizing the optional [formula omitted]-stability property for pricing set

This paper presents a study of English-Indonesian translation of the humorous utterances in Walt Disney’s Donald Duck comics. Twenty one Indonesian translated comics of the 2008 issues and their original English versions were used as the source of data. A total of 480 humorous English utterances were identified and verified by 4 native English speakers. These 480 English utterances and their translations were used as the data. Analyses of the collected data were then made to see the translation techniques used by the translator in translating the humorous utterances and to see the resulted pragmatic equivalence viewed from the equivalence of pragmatic force between the source text (ST) and target text (TT), involving implicture analysis of the utterances. The findings of the research reveal that 647 uses of translation techniques are made to translate the 480 utterances, as more than one techniques are used in some of the utterances. Seventeen out of 18 translation techniques proposed by Molina & Albir (2002) are chosen by the translator. It is also found out that the translator’s choice of translation techniques has resulted in 96.87% of the translated humorous utterances being equivalent in their pragmatic force, compared to the original English utterances. The use of such translation techniques as generalization, established equivalent, linguistic compression, amplification, literal translation, compensation, linguistic amplification, variation, particularization, borrowing, transposition, description, and calque has resulted in equivalent pragmatic force between ST and TT. Only minor portion (3.13%) of the translated text is not equivalent in its pragmatic force, and this is caused by the use of amplification, discursive creation, reduction, adaptation, and modulation techniques. The high rate of pragmatic equivalence shows the translator’s success in translating the text. Key words : implicature, pragmatic force, pragmatic equivalence, translation technique

In this thesis, we introduce and examine four new temporal logic formalisms that can be used as specification languages for the automated verification of the reliability of hardware and software designs with respect to a desired behavior. The work is organized in two parts. In the first one, we reason about two logics for computations, GCTL* and MCTL*, which are useful to describe a correct execution of monolithic closed systems. In the second one, instead, we focus on two logics for strategies, SL and mATL*, which are useful to formalize several interesting properties about interactive plays in multi-entities systems modeled as multi-agent games. In the “Logics for Computations” part, we first study the immersion of the idea of graded quantifications into the temporal-logic framework. In first order logic, existential and universal quantifiers express the concepts of the existence of at least one individual object satisfying a formula, or that all individual objects satisfy a formula. In other logics, these quantifiers have been generalized to express that, for a given non-negative integer n, at least n or all but n individuals satisfy a particular formula. Here, we consider GCTL, a temporal logic with graded path quantifiers, which allows to describe properties like “there exist at least n different classes of computational fluxes in which a system reaches a predetermined state”, where the classes over paths are computed by means of a predetermined equivalence relation. More precisely, we uniformly extend the classic concept of graded quantifiers from states to paths, through the use of a concept of path equivalence with respect to a given path formula. About this logic, in particular, we study the expressiveness and succinctness relationships with respect to GµCalculus and the complexity of the satisfiability problem, which results to be ExpTime-Complete. This research is partially based on the works [BMM09] “Graded Computation Tree Logic” and [BMM10] “Graded Computation Tree Logic with Binary Coding” published, respectively, in the proceedings of the “IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, 2009” and “EACSL Annual Conference on Computer Science Logic, 2010”. Preliminary results can be also found in [Mog07]. Furthermore, we consider special quantifiers over substructures, which allow to select, using parametric criteria, small critical parts of a system to be successively verified. In literature, there are some attempts to define a logic that allows to modify the underlying structure under exam and then to verify on it some assigned property. However, as far as we know, none of them is able to select minimal submodels of a given property describing the criteria on which then execute the verification process. Here, we base our work on the search of a new operator that merges the concept of quantifiers on structures with that one derived by a generalization of the concept of pruning. The results of this work, is a class of three different extensions of CTL* with minimal model quantifiers, which we name MCTL*. Regarding these logics, we study several reductions among them, as well as the satisfiability problem that we prove to be highly undecidability, i.e., Σ_1^1-Hard, for two out of the three cases. This research is partially based on the work [MM09] “Branching-Time Temporal Logics with Minimal Model Quantifiers” published in the proceedings of the “International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, 2009”. In the “Logics for Strategies” part, we first study the problem of defining a new specification language through which it is possible to express several important properties of multi-entities systems that are neither expressible using classical monolithic temporal logics, such as CTL*, nor using two-agent-teams temporal logics, such as ATL*. In literature, we can found some proposal of logics that try to achieve this goal, but unfortunately, none of them succeeds completely on all the aspects. Among them, one of the most important attempts is CHP-SL, a logics in which one can use variables over strategies. However, this logic has a deep weakness, since it does not allow to describe games with more than two players and even two-players concurrent games. Here, we introduce SL, a logic with a syntax similar in some aspects to the first order logic, in which the strategies of the agent building the game are treated as first order objects on which we can quantify. This logic generalizes CHP-SL, by allowing the specification of the correct behavior of multi-agent concurrent games. In SL, for example, we are able to express very complex but useful Nash equilibria that are not expressible with CHP-SL. We enlighten that Nash equilibrium is one of the most important concepts in game theory. For the introduced logic, we solve two problems left open in the work on CHP-SL. Precisely, we show that the related model-checking problem is 2ExpTime-Complete, thus not harder of the same problem for several subsumed logics, while we prove that its satisfiability problem is highly undecidable, i.e., Σ_1^1-Hard. This research is partially based on the work [MMV10a] “Reasoning About Strategies” published in the proceedings of the “IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, 2010”. Finally, we consider the concept of relentful strategic reasoning, i.e., a formalism that expresses the ability of a strategy to be used not only to achieve a first given goal, but also to change its final goal in dependence of the history of the play. In the context of planning, memoryful quantification, i.e., quantification over computations that does not lose information about the past along the time, is one of the principal way to express the fact that a system is able to achieve a desired result, and shift to a different goal if some event happens. However, this kind of quantification was not considered before in the context of multi-agent planning. Here, we introduce mATL*, a fusion of the classic alternating temporal logic ATL* with memoryful quantification, with the aim of covering the previous idea. About this logics, we prove that, although it is equivalent to ATL*, it is exponentially more succinct. Nevertheless, we prove that both the model-checking and the satisfiability problems remain 2ExpTime-Complete, as for ATL*. This research is partially based on the work [MMV10b] “Relentful Strategic Reasoning in Alternating-Time Temporal Logic” published in the proceedings of the “International Conference on Logic for Programming Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning, 2010”.

We provide an alternative proof of a theorem of Marinacci [2] regarding the equality of two convex-ranged measures. Specifically, we show that, if P and Q are two nonatomic, countably additive probabilities on a measurable space (S,Σ), the condition [∃A∗ ∈ Σ with 0 P (B) =⇒ Q(A) ≥ Q(B)]. Moreover, either one is equivalent to P = Q. JEL Classification Number: D81 In [2], Marinacci proved the following theorem. Theorem (Marinacci [2]) Let P and Q be two finitely additive probabilities on a λ-system Σ. Suppose that P is convex-ranged and thatQ is countably additive. If ∃A∗ ∈ Σ with 0 P (B) =⇒ Q(A) ≥ Q(B). Proposition 1 below shows that this latter is equivalent to P = Q, and Proposition 2 proves the equivalence to Marinacci’s condition. Our condition is probably easier to check in applications. It is in this form, for instance, that the result about the equality of convex-ranged ∗Department of Economics, Columbia University, 1019 IAB, 420 W 118th street, NY, NY 10027. Email: ma734@columbia.edu.

Syntax and semantics are proposed for realtime (i.e., continuous-time) regular expressions, which extend and generalize existing SVA regular expressions. The extensions are motivated by practical needs for AMS circuit verification and were developed as part of the authors' contribution to analog assertions work in the Accellera committee standardizing Verilog-AMS. Given a suitable notion of sampling, we prove that the realtime semantics provided for the existing SVA clocked digital regular expressions is equivalent to the original discrete semantics. As a result, the existing digital operators can intermix freely with the new realtime operators, which is a major contribution of our framework. We also investigate the theoretical relationship between our framework and the timed regular expressions of Asarin, Caspi, and Maler. We provide a semantically faithful embedding of timed regular expressions into our realtime regular expressions, as well as a construction of timed automata recognizers for our realtime regular expressions. These constructions show that our realtime regular expressions are no less expressive than the timed regular expressions of [1] and no more expressive than the generalized timed regular expressions of [2]. The automata recognizers also provide the basis for an implementation strategy for our framework.

Certain algebraic invariants of the integral group ring ZG of a group G were introduced and investigated in relation to the problem of extending the Farrell-Tate cohomology, which is defined for the class of groups of finite virtual cohomological dimension. It turns out that the finiteness of these invariants of a group G implies the existence of a generalized Farrell-Tate cohomology for G which is computed via complete resolutions. In this article we present these algebraic invariants and their basic properties and discuss their relationship to the generalized Farrell-Tate cohomology. In addition we present the status of conjecture which claims that the finiteness of these invariants of a group G is equivalent to the existence of a finite dimensional model for EG, the classifying space for proper actions.

Aim of this thesis is that to furnish some methodologies for the accurate evaluation of the electromagnetic characteristics of a microstrip. This results particularly useful for the extraction of equivalent circuital parameters, needed from circuit simulators to study more complex structures. From an analysis of the available models in literature, it is possible to find that some approximations are usually assumed to simplify the treatment. It can be observed that it is usual to neglect the conductive losses, that nevertheless result more and more remarkable with the increase of the density of the circuits. Besides, the existing models for the analysis of microstrips don't generally take into account the thickness of the structure, if not in a perturbative way. This thesis has the objective to propose some models that try to eliminate or however to reduce the approximation around the finite conductivity and the finite thickness of a microstrip. In the first chapter, general aspects of the microstrips are introduced, shortly examining its uses and the constructive aspects. In the second chapter a lossless microstrip of infinitesimal thickness is examined. Different kinds of sources are examined. The aim of the chapter is to introduce the method that will be used in future. In the third chapter, a microstrip of infinitesimal thickness and finite conductibility is examined. Then the method is generalized to the case of an arbitrary number of coupled microstrips. In the fourth chapter, it is shortly presented a variation of the method previously exposed, studying the problem of a thick strip in the free space. Then, a microstrip of finite thickness is examined. In the thesis, also the computational aspects related to the convergence of the method and to the numerical treatment of the integrals.

In the present paper we consider initial value problems for Hilfer fractional differential equations and for system of Hilfer fractional differential equations. By using equivalent integral equations and some fixed point theorems, we study the local existence of solutions. We extend these local existence results globally with the help of continuation theorems and generalized Gronwall inequality.

A sufficient condition of asymptotic stability is obtained for multivariable systems whose system matrices are of the block Schwartz form. By using this condition a method of stability analysis for multivariable systems is proposed. The system matrix of the control canonical form with square matrices as its elements is transformed to a matrix of the block Schwartz form by elementary equivalent transformations. Then a generalized Routh criterion for multivariable systems is obtained.

Introduction: Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women in Brazil and the world. The study of ultrasonographic and mammographic reports based on the BI-RADS 3 and BI-RADS 4 classes with the objective of predicting the existence of breast cancer in the light of the histopathological exams is of crucial importance, in our view, to seek the diagnosis of assurance. Thus, streamlining the therapeutic initiative, which in the direct proportion of the precocity of its beginning will be the probability of cure. Objective: To establish a relationship between BI-RADS 3 and BI-RADS 4 indices on ultrasonography as well as mammography and related histopathological results, through the analysis of the mastology charts of patients attended at the Niteroi Women's Assistance Clinic in the period of February 2015 through February 2017. Method and Technique: It is an observational, retrospective study that established a relationship between BI-RADS 3 and BI-RADS 4 indices on ultrasound as well as mammography and related histopathological results, by analyzing the results of the medical records mastology of the patients treated at the Niteroi Clinic for Women's Care from February 2015 to February 2017. Male records were excluded, percutaneous needle biopsy compatible with Idiopathic Granulomatous Mastitis and charts with mammography and ultrasonography classified in BI- RADS 1, BI-RADS 2, BI-RADS 5 and BI-RADS 6. RESULTS: The mean age was 47 years, with three age groups for the medical records: 18 to 50 years (29.3%) of the medical records, from 51 to 69 years old (52.3%) and from 70 to 89 years (18.4%). The studied population comprised the population of the municipalities of Niteroi (45.5%) and Sao Goncalo (45.2%), followed by Marica (6.8%) and Itaborai (2.5%). We observed a total of positive cases for breast cancer in the population studied, with a total of 6.1% of cases positive for breast cancer and 93.9% of cases negative for breast cancer in the sample analyzed with the respective BI-RADS 3 and 4. In the statistical analysis of the groups we observed that group 1 is statistically equal to group 2, of positive cases of breast cancer after percutaneous biopsy by thick needle. Similarly, group 1 is equivalent to group 3. Therefore group 1, group 2 and group 3 are statistically equivalent in the results. However, when MMG BI-RADS 4 and USG BI-RADS 4 (group 4), this differs significantly from all others. When we established only two groups, considering the sum of group 1, group 2 and group 3 as Group BI-RADS 3 or BI-RADS discordant and compared with Group 4, which was renamed of Group BI-RADS 4 concordant, we found that the odds ratio is 9.9. CONCLUSION: In view of the concomitants of BI-RADS 4 category in ultrasonography and mammography, the probability of detecting breast cancer by histopathological study is ten times higher than the concomitance in BI-RADS 3 especially when there is disagreement between them

Time-Scale Modification (TSM) is a well-researched field and allows for time-domain manipulation of a signal without modifying the pitch or timbre. Many TSM methods have been presented, however quantitative results on the quality of these methods are rare, with most methods reporting informal listening tests. This is likely due to the timecommitment and cost of subjective testing. Additionally, an objective measure of quality has not yet been developed that is suitable for timescaled signals. This dissertation describes the design of e ective objective measures of quality for TSM. TSM methods are, generally, single channel algorithms that give poor results when applied to multi-channel signals, as the phase relationship between channels must be maintained. This dissertation proposes a method and additional variant for maintaining the phase relationship between channels and retaining the presence in the centre of the stereo signal. The method involves pre- and post-processing the signal, with the variant processing each frame for real-time suitability. Sum and di erence transformations of the stereo signal are used for TSM and result in a large improvement in stereo phase coherence, consequently maintaining the stereo field. The proposed method produces a highquality stereo output and greatly improves quality over the independent channel processing method. It also allows for simple implementation around all existing TSM frameworks. A modification to the Epoch-Synchronous Overlap-Add (ESOLA) TSM algorithm is proposed in this dissertation. The proposed method, Fuzzy Epoch-Synchronous Overlap-Add, improves on the previous ESOLA method through cross-correlation of time-smeared epochs before overlap-adding. This reduces distortion and artefacts while the speaker's fundamental frequency is stable, as well as reducing artefacts during pitch modulation. The proposed method is tested against well-known TSM algorithms. It is preferred over ESOLA and gives similar performance to other TSM algorithms for voice signals. It is also shown that this algorithm can work effectively with solo instrument signals containing strong fundamental frequencies. No effective objective measure of quality for TSM exists. This dissertation details the creation, subjective evaluation and analysis of a dataset, for use in the development of an objective measure of quality for TSM. Comprising two parts, the training subset contains 88 source files processed using six TSM methods at 10 time-scales, while the testing subset contains 20 source files processed using three additional methods at four time-scales. The source material contains speech, solo harmonic and percussive instruments, sound effects and a range of music genres. 42,529 ratings were collected from 633 sessions using laboratory and remote collection methods. Analysis of results shows no correlation between age and quality of rating; equivalence between expert and non-expert listeners; negligible di erences between participants with and without hearing issues; and negligible di erences between testing modalities. Comparison of published objective measures and subjective scores shows the objective measures to be poor indicators of subjective quality. Initial results for a retrained objective measure of quality are presented with results approaching average loss and correlation values of subjective sessions. An objective measure of quality for time-scaled audio is proposed that makes use of the previously developed dataset and improves on reported results. The measure uses hand-crafted features and a fully connected network to predict subjective mean opinion scores. Basic and Advanced Perceptual Evaluation of Audio Quality features are used in addition to nine features specific to TSM artefacts. Six methods of alignment are explored, with interpolation of the reference magnitude spectrum to the length of the test magnitude spectrum giving the best performance. The proposed measure achieves an average Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.490 and a mean Pearson Correlation Coe cient (PCC) of 0.864, equivalent to 97th and 82nd percentiles of subjective sessions respectively. The proposed measure is used to evaluate TSM algorithms, finding that Elastique gives the highest objective quality for solo instrument and voice signals, while the Identity Phase-Locking Phase Vocoder gives the highest objective quality for music signals and the best overall quality. Two single-ended objective quality measures for time-scaled audio are also proposed. These measure do not require a reference signal, nor alignment. Data driven features are created by either a convolutional neural network (CNN) or a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BGRU) network, and are fed to a fully-connected network to predict subjective mean opinion scores. The proposed CNN and BGRU measures achieve an average RMSE of 0.608 and 0.576, and a mean PCC of 0.771 and 0.794, respectively. The proposed measures are used to evaluate TSM algorithms, and comparisons are provided for 16 TSM implementations. A literature review is included with required background knowledge. It includes the fundamentals of sound perception, sound capture, digital signal processing, time-scale modification methods used within research, and subjective and objective measures of quality. Full implementation of all proposed methods and measures can be found at github.com/zygurt/TSM, while the labelled dataset is available at http://ieee-dataport.org/1987.

A retrospective, cost-effectiveness analysis was performed on 106 clinically evaluable patients who participated in a multi-centre, randomized study of sequential IV/oral ciprofloxacin therapy versus ceftazidime for the treatment of nosocomial pneumonia. Although nearly half of the ciprofloxacin patients received sequential therapy, the majority were treated with a full IV regimen. Clinical success rates and antibiotic-related adverse events were similar for the ciprofloxacin and ceftazidime groups. Per patient and per day costs of antibiotic acquisition; preparation and administration; treatment of adverse events, and clinical failures were compared. Decision analysis revealed that ciprofloxacin therapy was cost-effective compared to ceftazidime 2 g q8h. Varying the probability of clinical success between 60-99% failed to change the economic decision; costs for ciprofloxacin were always lower than for ceftazidime. Further sensitivity analyses demonstrated that if the ceftazidime price was reduced by 50% (equivalent to 1 g q8h), treatment costs would be similar to ciprofloxacin therapy. Increasing the ciprofloxacin price by 50% (equivalent to a q8h frequency) produced per patient costs similar to ceftazidime, although ciprofloxacin therapy retained a lower cost per day (p < 0.0002). For the treatment of nosocomial pneumonia, ciprofloxacin therapy was cost-effective compared to ceftazidime.

The increased water demand and the increased capital construction costs of water resource development projects force engineers and water planners to utilize efficiently the existing and proposed water resources systems. Hence, it is considered necessary to find the optimum real time operating rules for systems of multiple reservoirs.Stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) has been used as the tool for deriving the real time operating rules for a system of multiple reservoirs, in preference to simulation analysis and linear programming. This is because the operation of the storages is considered as a sequential decision problem and dynamic programming is well suited to handle sequential, multi-period type decision problems. Further, the stochastic nature of streamflow is considered explicitly through a multivariate distribution for streamflow. The method theoretically produces the global optimum solution.The computational difficulties in terms of computer time and memory space have prohibited the realistic application of this method to systems of multiple reservoirs in the past. In this study, two methods have been introduced to reduce the computational difficulties of the method, thus making SDP more attractive to use in the derivation of the real time operating rules for a system of multiple reservoirs.The first method, the assumption of cross correlation of streamflow, reduces the number of states in the SDP method which reduces computer time and memory space. Further, it reduces the number of conditional probability estimates of streamflow which are used in recursive relation of the SDP algorithm. The second method, the “corridor” approach, reduces computer time involved in the SDP method by eliminating the computation of infeasible and/or inferior (suboptimal) solutions. These two methods have resulted in significant savings in the computer effort of the SDP method.The conditional probabilities of streamflow are computed by considering the hypervolume under the conditional probability density function between the integration limits using the computationally efficient Gaussian Legendre quadrature method. The conditional probability density function is derived from the historical streamflow data.Real time operating rules are expressed as a function of the storage volume(s) at the beginning of the current time interval and the forecast inflow into the storage(s) during the current time interval.The Melbourne water supply system is used as the example. The derived operating rules have been tested by operating a simulation model and the conclusion is made that the SDP method is a satisfactory technique for objectively deriving real time operating rules for a system of multiple reservoirs.Finally, a combined stochastic dynamic programming – statistical disaggregation approach is introduced to determine the real time operating rules for a system of multiple reservoirs where operational data are available. Releases from individual storages are a function of the total system storage volume and inflow. The method uses SDP to determine the release rules from the equivalent single reservoir of the multiple reservoir system; these releases are then disaggregated to individual releases using the statistical release disaggregation model whose parameters are derived from the historical operational data. The approach was used to derive real time operating rules for the Melbourne water supply system and the operating rules were validated using a simulation model of the system.

The trend of using heterogeneous computing and HW/SW-Codesign approaches allows increasing performance significantly while reducing power consumption. One of the main challenges when combining multiple processing devices is the communication, as an inefficient communication configu-ration can pose a bottleneck to the overall system performance. To address this problem, we present a methodology that assists the designer in making good design decisions for systems using shared DDR memory for communication. Our methodology analyzes a software implementation of the application and subsequently predicts the memory accesses of a functionallyequivalent hardware implementation of the selected function. We furthermore propose an IP core that can perform these predicted memory accesses to estimate the achievable memory bandwidth between a functionally equivalent hardware implementation and shared memory. The resulting achievable memory bandwidth estimations differ by less than 2% from the actual achievable memory bandwidth of a functionally equivalent hardware implementation, demonstrating the feasibility of the presented methodology.

Despite the high potential of geothermal reservoirs in Meshkinshahr, we only see the government entering the electricity extraction of geothermal energy because the cost of the Meshkinshahr geothermal electricity is higher than the balanced price of the electricity market and the private sector is disadvantaged for entering it. So, the government has adopted a feed in tariff policy for geothermal electricity to encourage private sector investors. This research is aimed at financial appraisal of Maskinshahr geothermal power plant with the assumption of feed in tariff by the government with Equivalent Uniform Annual Worth, Equivalent Uniform Annual Worth, and Equivalent Uniform Annual Cost methods. Equivalent Uniform Annual Benefit is obtained from feed in tariff of government and Equivalent Uniform Annual Cost is determined based on technical and economic components of the geothermal power plant and macroeconomic parameters. The results of the data analysis show that the construction of the geothermal power plant is fully justified with the 14% reduction rate, but if the investor's minimum expected rate exceeds 54%, the construction of the power plant has no economic justification. Also, if the construction of Meshkinshahr geothermal plant takes more than 13 years and 5 months like the government project, the generation of geothermal power is not cost-effective.

Design bored pile foundation often use formulae of Reese and wright (1977) on projects heild in Jakarta. The safety factor often use on the design foundation on project in Jakarta are generally 2 or 3. By using advance First Order Liability Method to analysis design foundation, the result showed that the design was very conservative. Proven by the safety index for this design is 2.68 where’s the equivalent of failure probably 3.72 x 10-3, this result is less than requirement of failure probability 1 x 10-2. Lastiasih (2012) propose the use of multiple safety factors by applying Load Resistance Factor Design (LRFD) in accordance with the design of building age so as not to use single safety factor again. Further more the design of bored pile foundation become more efficient.