<p>Post­Keynesian economists state that there is a direct relationship between balance­-of­-payments and economic growth. Anthony Thirlwall, in particular, has formulated a model which defines the balance­-of­-payments equilibrium growth rate that would allow the economy to grow in the long­-run sustainably without deteriorating their external balance or entering major debts. The purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent Thirlwall's law applies to historical data from the Bulgarian economy.</p>

<p>Can you force a child to sucess, and when do the supportiv corset become a straitjacket?</p><p>In this essay you can read about several ways to get a child to feel worthy as a person and use its own will in several ways. It's viewed from several different aspects but most of all it's about children who play musical instruments and parents who wants there kids to get sucessful. I have interviewed four musicians and musicteatchers to see how they were raised and how it has affected the way they are teatching there own students today. My little inquiry shows that people have a stong will and that you can come far if you hade supportive people around you.</p>

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Multiparadigm languages are languages that are designed to support more than one style of programming. Leda is a strongly-typed multiparadigm programming language that supports imperative, functional, object-oriented, and logic programming. The constraint programming paradigm is a declarative style of programming where the programmer is able to state relationships among some entities and expect the system to maintain the validity of these relationships throughout program execution. The system accomplishes this either by invoking user-defined fixes that impose rigid rules governing the evolution of the entities, or by finding suitable values to be assigned to the constrained entities without violating any active constraint. Constraints, due to their declarative semantics, are suitable for the direct mapping of the characteristics of a number of mechanisms including: consistency checks, constraint-directed search, and constraint-enforced reevaluation, among others. This makes constraint languages the most appropriate languages for the implementation of a large number of applications such as scheduling, planning, resource allocation, simulation, and graphical user interfaces. The semantics of constraints cannot be easily emulated by other constructs in the paradigms that are offered by the language Leda. However, the constraint paradigm does not provide any general control constructs. The lack of general control constructs impedes this paradigm's ability to naturally express a large number of problems. This dissertation presents the language Electra, which integrates the constraint paradigm into the language Leda by creating a unified construct that provides the ability to express the conventional semantics of constraints with some extensions. Due to the flexibility of this construct, the programmer is given the choice of either stating how a constraint is to be satisfied or delegating that task to the constraint-satisfier. The concept of providing the programmer with the ability to express system-maintained relations, which is the basic characteristic of constraints, provided a motivation for enhancing other paradigms with similar abilities. The functional paradigm is extended by adding to it the mechanism of condition-based dispatching which is similar to argument pattern-matching. The object-oriented paradigm is extended by allowing feature exclusion which is a form of inheritance exception. This dissertation claims that the integration provided by the language Electra will enable Leda programmers to reap the benefits of the paradigm of constraints while overcoming its limitations. / Graduation date: 1995

The prediction of linear viscoelasticity (LVE) of a polymer melts from the knowledge of their structure has received tremendous attention in recent years. Quite accurate quantitative predictions are obtained for linear polymers, including inverse predictions of molecular weight distributions from knowledge of rheological response. The situation for branched polymers is much more complicated for at least two reasons. First, because of the incredible variety of architectures that can be, and are actually, made in the lab or by industry. Second, because branched polymers are characterised by very broad distributions of relaxation times, which are very dependent on details of the architecture. The main objective of this work is to propose a model suitable for predicting LVE of arbitrary mixtures of (a)symmetric stars and linear molecules, where the interrelation of relaxation processes (as reptation, tube length fluctuations or constraint release process) cannot be predicted a priori. We validate it on a large set of experimental data taken from the literature, from our own experiments or from co-workers. Next, we use it to detect long chain branching (LCB) in sparsely branched polycarbonate samples. This characterization technique, based on the analysis of the relaxation moduli, is compared to solution characterization. A similar work is performed for polyethylene samples, on which we compare our method to classical methods based on the measurement of their intrinsic viscosity or on the analysis of their activation energies spectrum. The success of our model in describing the relaxation of an already broad range of polymer structures gives some hope for understanding the dynamics of more complex systems. Indeed, its structure allows us to easily extend it to H or comb polymers and then, to proceed to polymers always closer to the industrial polymers.

Research on autonomous intelligent systems has focused on how robots can robustly carry out missions in uncertain and harsh environments with very little or no human intervention. Robotic execution languages such as RAPs, ESL, and TDL improve robustness by managing functionally redundant procedures for achieving goals. The model-based programming approach extends this by guaranteeing correctness of execution through pre-planning of non-deterministic timed threads of activities. Executing model-based programs effectively on distributed autonomous platforms requires distributing this pre-planning process. This thesis presents a distributed planner for modelbased programs whose planning and execution is distributed among agents with widely varying levels of processor power and memory resources. We make two key contributions. First, we reformulate a model-based program, which describes cooperative activities, into a hierarchical dynamic simple temporal network. This enables efficient distributed coordination of robots and supports deployment on heterogeneous robots. Second, we introduce a distributed temporal planner, called DTP, which solves hierarchical dynamic simple temporal networks with the assistance of the distributed Bellman-Ford shortest path algorithm. The implementation of DTP has been demonstrated successfully on a wide range of randomly generated examples and on a pursuer-evader challenge problem in simulation.

Testing constraints for real-time systems are usually verified through the satisfiability of propositional formulae. In this paper, we propose an alternative where the verification of timing constraints can be done by counting the number of truth assignments instead of boolean satisfiability. This number can also tell us how “far away” is a given specification from satisfying its safety assertion. Furthermore, specifications and safety assertions are often modified in an incremental fashion, where problematic bugs are fixed one at a time. To support this development, we propose an incremental algorithm for counting satisfiability. Our proposed incremental algorithm is optimal as no unnecessary nodes are created during each counting. This works for the class of path RTL. To illustrate this application, we show how incremental satisfiability counting can be applied to a well-known rail-road crossing example, particularly when its specification is still being refined. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-134). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

In this research, we consider production/inventory management decisions of a rmthat sells its product in two market segments during a nite planning horizon. In thebeginning of each period, the rm makes a decision on how much to produce basedon the production capacity and the current on-hand inventory available. After theproduction is made at the beginning of the period, the rm rst satises the stochasticdemand from customers in its primary market. Any primary market demand thatcannot be satised is lost. After satisfying the demand from the primary market, ifthere is still inventory on hand, all or part of the remaining products can be sold ina secondary market with ample demand at a lower price. Hence, the second decisionthat the rm makes in each period is how much to sell in the secondary market, orequivalently, how much inventory to carry to the next period.The objective is to maximize the expected net revenue during a nite planninghorizon by determining the optimal production quantity in each period, and theoptimal inventory amount to carry to the next period after the sales in primary andsecondary markets. We term the optimal inventory amount to be carried to the nextperiod as \economic retention quantity". We model this problem as a nite horizonstochastic dynamic program. Our focus is to characterize the structure of the optimalpolicy and to analyze the system under dierent parameter settings. Conditioning on given parameter set, we establish lower and upper bounds on the optimal policyparameters. Furthermore, we provide computational tools to determine the optimalpolicy parameters. Results of the numerical analysis are used to provide furtherinsights into the problem from a managerial perspective.

Phonology Limited is a study of the areas of phonology where the application of optimality theory (OT) has previously been problematic. Evidence from a wide variety of phenomena in a wide variety of languages is presented to show that interactions involving more than just faithfulness and markedness are best analyzed as involving language-specific morphological constraints rather than universal phonological constraints. OT has proved to be a highly insightful and successful theory of linguistics in general and phonology in particular, focusing as it does on surface forms and treating the relationship between inputs and outputs as a form of conflict resolution. Yet there have also been a number of serious problems with the approach that have led some detractors to argue that OT has failed as a theory of generative grammar. The most serious of these problems is opacity, defined as a state of affairs where the grammatical output of a given input appears to violate more constraints than an ungrammatical competitor. It is argued that these problems disappear once language-specific morphological constraints are allowed to play a significant role in analysis. Specifically, a number of processes of Tiberian Hebrew traditionally considered opaque are reexamined and shown to be straightforwardly transparent, but crucially involving morphological constraints on form, such as a constraint requiring certain morphological forms to end with a syllabic trochee, or a constraint requiring paradigm uniformity with regard to the occurrence of fricative allophones of stop phonemes. Language-specific morphological constraints are also shown to play a role in allomorphy, where a lexeme is associated with more than one input; the constraint hierarchy then decides which input is grammatical in which context. For example, [ɨ]/[ə] and [u]/[ə] alternation found in some lexemes but not in others in Welsh is attributed to the presence of two inputs for the lexemes with the alternation. A novel analysis of the initial consonant mutations of the modern Celtic languages argues that mutated forms are separately listed inputs chosen in appropriate contexts by constraints on morphology and syntax, rather than being outputs that are phonologically unfaithful to their unmutated inputs. Finally, static irregularities and lexical exceptions are examined and shown to be attributable to language-specific morphological constraints. In American English, the distribution of tense and lax vowels is predictable in several contexts; however, in some contexts, the distributions of tense [ɔ] vs. lax [a] and of tense [æ] vs. lax [æ] are not as expected. It is shown that clusters of output-output faithfulness constraints create a pattern to which words are attracted, which however violates general phonological considerations. New words that enter the language first obey the general phonological considerations before being attracted into the language-specific exceptional pattern.