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A principal wants to procure a discrete number of homogeneous units from a finite set of agents. Each agent has an increasing and convex cost function, whose exact shape is unknown to the principal. Utility is quasilinear in money. We characterize the set of mechanisms that are strategy-proof and robust to collusion. The latter is captured by reallocation-proofness (group strategy-proofness) if the colluding agents can (cannot) make side deals among each other. We show that in every reallocation-proof mechanism, the principal offers the agents a fixed price per unit. While group-strategy-proof mechanisms can be more complex, they cannot guarantee that the principal will receive exactly her desired quantity. We fully characterize the set of group-strategy-proof mechanisms with a uniform price.

Battery energy storage effectively staBIlizes the electric grid and aids renewable integration by balancing supply and demand in real time. The importance of such storage is especially crucial in densely populated urban areas, where traditional storage techniques such as pumped hydroelectric energy storage and compressed-air energy storage are often not feasible.

During last decade biomedical devices have become more and more performing, covering an increasing number of usages. In particular, subcutaneous devices represent one the most invasive yet innovative application; their battery management is one of the most challenging topics because, once implanted, they can be handled only through surgery, so wireless charge is the only way to feed subcutaneous systems with appreciable energy in a controlled manner. But differently from conventional consumer devices, in this scenario the energy delivered necessarily runs into human body and tissues, so the main challenge consists in maximizing the "energy delivered vs. energy dissipated in tissues" ratio, in order to guarantee human safety first while also conveying an appreciable amount of energy to the implanted device After analysing the state-of-the-art of the principal techniques, this paper proposes a novel architecture for low-power wireless charging, based on a Wiegand sensor used as a transducer in order to fulfill all the requirements from both electrical and medical points of view; such architecture is implemented inside an IC prototype in 0.35 μm lithography that acts as an ultra-low-power DC-DC buck converter and battery manager.

A principal has to take a binary decision. She relies on information privately held by a completely biased agent. The principal cannot incentivize with transfers but can learn the agent's information at a cost. Additionally, the principal privately observes a signal correlated with the agent's type. Transparent mechanisms are optimal: unlike in standard results with correlation, the principal's payoff is the same as if her signal was public. They take a simple cut-off form: favorable signals ensure the agent's preferred action. Signals below this cut-off lead to the nonpreferred action unless the agent appeals. An appeal always triggers type verification.

The founder of a start‐up (principal) who has a project with uncertain returns must retain and incentivize an agent using promise of future payments and information gathering. The agent's effort incrementally advances production and such advance is a prerequisite for gathering new information. The principal decides how much information to gather based on these incremental advancements. The principal faces cash constraints. The agent's outside option is large relative to his effort cost. Equilibrium features one of two outcomes: immediate learning, whereby the agent's compensation is low, learning is immediate and retention is possible only conditional on the project being of high quality; or gradual learning, whereby the agent's compensation is high, learning is gradual, the agent never quits and effort is inefficiently high.

Transitions to a new principal are common, especially within urban public schools, and potentially highly disruptive to a school's culture and operations. We use longitudinal data from New York City to investigate if the effect of principal transitions differs by whether the incoming principal was hired externally or promoted from within the school. We take advantage of variation in the timing of principal transitions within an event-study approach to estimate the causal effect of principal changes. Changing principals has an immediate negative effect on student test scores that is sustained over several years regardless of whether hired internally or externally. However, externally hired principals lead to an increase in teacher turnover and a decline in perceptions of the school's learning environment, whereas transitions to an internally promoted principal have no such effects. This pattern of results raises important questions about leadership transitions and the nature of principal effects on school quality.

Correspondence analysis (CA) is a multivariate statistical tool used to visualize and interpret data dependencies by finding maximally correlated embeddings of pairs of random variables. CA has found applications in fields ranging from epidemiology to social sciences; however, current methods do not scale to large, high-dimensional datasets. In this paper, we provide a novel interpretation of CA in terms of an information-theoretic quantity called the principal inertia components. We show that estimating the principal inertia components, which consists in solving a functional optimization problem over the space of finite variance functions of two random variable, is equivalent to performing CA. We then leverage this insight to design novel algorithms to perform CA at an unprecedented scale. Particularly, we demonstrate how the principal inertia components can be reliably approximated from data using deep neural networks. Finally, we show how these maximally correlated embeddings of pairs of random variables in CA further play a central role in several learning problems including visualization of classification boundary and training process, and underlying recent multi-view and multi-modal learning methods., 30 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1902.07828

We consider a social learning model where agents learn about an underlying state of the world from individual observations as well as from exchanging information with each other. A principal (e.g., a firm or a government) interferes with the learning process in order to manipulate the beliefs of the agents. By utilizing the same forces that give rise to the “wisdom of the crowd” phenomenon, the principal can get the agents to take an action that is not necessarily optimal for them but is in the principal’s best interest. We characterize the social norms and network structures that are susceptible to this kind of manipulation and derive conditions under which a social network is impervious and cannot be manipulated. In the process, we develop a new centrality measure and describe how our model offers insights into designing networks that are resistant to manipulation. This paper was accepted by Gabriel Weintraub, revenue management and market analytics.

A principal (e.g., a bond issuer) contracts with a researcher of unknown quality (e.g., a credit rating agency) to conduct a costly experiment, either to inform the principal or to persuade a decision maker. This contracting problem has a novel feature that captures the difference between the form of an experiment and the strength of its results: researchers face a problem of information design, rather than optimal effort. Using a novel comparative static for Bayesian persuasion settings, I characterize the optimal contract and show how experimentation is distorted by adverse selection. Moreover, I show that there is no loss from contracting on the experiment’s result rather than the experiment itself. This optimal results-based contract takes the form of reimbursement for contractible costs, at a rate which is lower for stronger results, plus a (piecewise) two-part tariff.

This article briefly reviews the rise of Critical Discourse Analysis and teases out a detailed analysis of the various critiques that have been levelled at CDA and its practitioners over the last twenty years, both by scholars working within the “critical” paradigm and by other critics. A range of criticisms are discussed which target the underlying premises, the analytical methodology and the disputed areas of reader response and the integration of contextual factors. Controversial issues such as the predominantly negative focus of much CDA scholarship, and the status of CDA as an emergent “intellectual orthodoxy”, are also reviewed. The conclusions offer a summary of the principal criticisms that emerge from this overview, and suggest some ways in which these problems could be attenuated.

This paper examines the question of politeness in political interviews, looking particularly at the use of loaded questions. Comparison is made between the two principal paradigms of politeness, Locher and Watts (2005) and Brown and Levinson (1987). The paper focuses on the interviewing style of Steven Sackur (HARDtalk, BBC) who employs loaded questions in his political interviews in keeping with the analysis of Walton (1991) who argues that loaded questions can function as a ‘reasonable’ means to constrain the response of an interviewee and in turn further discourse. Sackur employs loaded questions selectively to convey and reinforce a presupposition to which an interviewee is not committed. In so doing, he is able to constrain the contribution of his interviewee. Loaded questions are a linguistic means of (im)politeness used strategically by Sackur to further the discourse of his interviews.

Research is often guided by maps of elementary dimensions, such as core traits, foundations of morality, and principal stereotype dimensions. Yet, there is no comprehensive map of prejudice dimensions. A major limiter of developing a prejudice map is the ad hoc sampling of target groups. We used a broad and largely theory-agnostic selection of groups to derive a map of principal dimensions of expressed prejudice in contemporary American society. Across a series of exploratory and confirmatory studies, we found three principal factors: Prejudice against marginalized groups, prejudice against privileged/conservative groups, and prejudice against unconventional groups (with some inverse loadings for conservative groups). We documented distinct correlates for each factor, in terms of social identifications, perceived threats, personality, and behavioral manifestations. We discuss how the current map integrates several lines of research, and point to novel and underexplored insights about prejudice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

We present a one principal/two agents model of price-volume agreement, which involves one buyer (the principal) and competition between two manufacturers (the two agents). A theoretical analysis is presented, showing that, in accordance with empirical evidence from the literature on price-volume agreements in the pharmaceutical sector, manufacturers’ competition in a price-volume agreement scheme can decrease buyer’s expenditure especially when the second manufacturer, which has the possibility to enter (or not enter) later, has sufficiently small marginal production cost. Moreover, it is shown that the adoption of a price-volume agreement scheme for the first manufacturer can benefit the buyer with respect to the case in which single-price contracts are proposed to the former. The paper contributes to fill a gap in the literature about theoretical models of price-volume agreements, which are still scarce according to a recent review.

We show that given an ideal I generated by regular functions f_1,...,f_r on the smooth complex variety X, the Bernstein-Sato polynomial of I is equal to the reduced Bernstein-Sato polynomial of the function g=\sum_{i=1}^rf_iy_i on the product of X with an r-dimensional affine space. By combining this with results from [BMS], we relate invariants and properties of I to those of g. We also use the result on Bernstein-Sato polynomials to show that the Strong Monodromy Conjecture for Igusa zeta functions of principal ideals implies a similar statement for arbitrary ideals., Comment: 7 pages; v.2: inaccuracy at the end of the proof of Theorem 1.4 corrected

A principal has n homogeneous objects to allocate to I > n agents. The principal can allocate at most one good to an agent and each agent values the good. Agents have private information about the principal’s payoff of allocating the goods. There are no monetary transfers but the principal can costly check any agent’s value. We characterize the mechanism which maximizes the principal’s net expected payoff. Such an optimal mechanism is a hybrid between two extremes. One extreme allocates the goods efficiently, i.e., to the $n$ agents who have the highest values, which requires agents being checked and leads to very high checking cost; the other incurs no checking cost by allocating without learning agents' value, which results in very large allocation inefficiency. The optimal mechanism balances the benefit of efficiency and the cost of checking. Moreover, it is easy to implement. We also compare the optimal mechanism with an alternative mechanism that allocates the goods one by one, where the single-good optimal mechanism is used in each step. The optimal mechanism dominates such an alternative in a particular way: Under any value profile, the two mechanisms allocate the goods to the same set of agents, but the optimal mechanism checks agents less frequently.

When a single line-to-ground fault occurs in the ungrounded distribution system, the steady-state fault current is relatively small for fault analysis and the transient fault current is observable, which can be used for faulted feeder identification and location. The principal frequency component retains most of the characteristics of the transient current. The principal frequency is related to the distance from the fault point to the substation and can be used for fault location. This paper analyzes the sequence network model of a single line-to-ground fault in the distribution network, and gives a method for principal frequency calculation. Depending on the characteristics of the maximum amplitude of the principal frequency component of the faulted feeder, the method of faulted feeder identification is given. Based on the complementary characteristics of the phase angle of the principal frequency component of the fault current and the phase angle at the substation bus, the faulted section location is carried out. MATLAB simulation is used to verify the effectiveness of the faulted feeder identification and location method.

Temporal dominance (TD) methods can be used to record temporal changes in multiple sensory and affective responses. TD methods have found wide applications in the analysis of eating experiences of humans. However, extant analyses performed on TD data do not fully utilize the time-series properties of such data. The present study validates the prospect of principal motion analysis (PMA) of TD data. PMA is an extension of principal component analysis, and can be used to resolve multivariate motion data into base principal motions. In this study, panelists were asked to evaluate the tastes of ten types of pickled plums using the temporal dominance of sensations (TDS) and emotions (TDE) methods. Additionally, the panelists were asked to rate the plums using the semantic differential method. Results obtained using both methods were observed to demonstrate good agreement with each other in terms of the structures of reduced variable spaces. As realized in this study, implementation of the combined TD-PMA approach can potentially facilitate statistical discrimination of all food products, whereas conventional methods, such as principal component analysis of data provided via use of the semantic differential method, can at best discriminate only 67% of product pairs. PMA can, therefore, be considered as a suitable technique to reveal the characteristics of TD data.

Many financial arrangements reference market prices that are yet to be realized at the time of contracting and consequently susceptible to manipulation. Two of the most common such arrangements are as follows: (i) guaranteed volume-weighted average price (VWAP) contracts, which reference the VWAP prevailing over an execution window, and (ii) market-on-close contracts, which reference the price prevailing at the window’s end. To study such situations, we introduce a stylized model of financial contracting between a client, who wishes to trade a large position, and the client’s dealer. We provide conditions under which guaranteed VWAP contracts are optimal in this principal-agent problem. In contrast, market-on-close contracts generally cannot be optimal. These results explain the use of guaranteed VWAP contracts in practice, question the use of market-on-close contracts, and suggest considerations for the design of financial benchmarks. This paper was accepted by Haoxiang Zhu, finance.

We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way tradeoff between exploration (trying out insufficiently explored alternatives to help others in the future), exploitation (making optimal decisions given the information discovered by other agents), and incentives of the agents (who are myopically interested in exploitation, while preferring the others to explore). We posit a principal who controls the flow of information from agents that came before, and strives to coordinate the agents towards a socially optimal balance between exploration and exploitation, not using any monetary transfers. The goal is to design a recommendation policy for the principal which respects agents' incentives and minimizes a suitable notion of regret. We extend prior work in this direction to allow the agents to interact with one another in a shared environment: at each time step, multiple agents arrive to play a Bayesian game, receive recommendations, choose their actions, receive their payoffs, and then leave the game forever. The agents now face two sources of uncertainty: the actions of the other agents and the parameters of the uncertain game environment. Our main contribution is to show that the principal can achieve constant regret when the utilities are deterministic (where the constant depends on the prior distribution, but not on the time horizon), and logarithmic regret when the utilities are stochastic. As a key technical tool, we introduce the concept of explorable actions, the actions which some incentive-compatible policy can recommend with non-zero probability. We show how the principal can identify (and explore) all explorable actions, and use the revealed information to perform optimally., Comment: All revisions focused on presentation; all results (except Appendix C) have been present since the initial version

This article contributes to our existing knowledge through a crime script analysis of contract killings, based on six extensively analyzed police investigations in the Netherlands. Starting from a universal crime script, a more specific crime script for contract killings is elaborated. To provide a clear picture of the whole process, the description of the scenes focuses on requirements, facilitators, modi operandi, and preparatory actions. A comparison of liquidation investigations is made through a crime script analysis, which results in three types of requirements: vehicles, automatic weapons, and technical equipment, including PGP-telephones and beacons. In addition, spy shops turn out to play a major role in liquidations as facilitators. Due to a lack of licensing and regulations, the owners of spy shops can decide to a large extent on their own procedures. This leads to the possibility of buying and selling equipment anonymously and with large amounts of cash, which facilitates the preparation of liquidations and crime in general. Hitmen are the second type of important facilitators. The analysis reveals that all liquidation investigations contain indications of a principal to whom account has to be held. Two investigations clearly demonstrate financial rewards for contract killings.

Following the risk-taking model of Seel and Strack, $n$ players decide when to stop privately observed Brownian motions with drift and absorption at zero. They are then ranked according to their level of stopping and paid a rank-dependent reward. We study the problem of a principal who aims to induce a desirable equilibrium performance of the players by choosing how much reward is attributed to each rank. Specifically, we determine optimal reward schemes for principals interested in the average performance and the performance at a given rank. While the former can be related to reward inequality in the Lorenz sense, the latter can have a surprising shape., To appear in SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics

We study criteria for the finiteness of the constants in integral inequalities generalizing the Poincaré–Friedrichs inequality and Saint-Venant’s variational definition of torsional rigidity. The Rayleigh–Faber–Krahn isoperimetric inequality and the Saint-Venant–Pólya inequality guarantee the existence of finite constants for domains of finite volume. Criteria for the existence of finite constants for unbounded domains of infinite volume were known only in the cases of planar simply connected and spatial convex domains. We generalize and strengthen some known results and extend them to the case when . Here is one of our results. Suppose that and , where is a compact set and is either a planar domain with uniformly perfect boundary or a spatial domain satisfying the exterior sphere condition. Under these assumptions, a finite constant exists if and only if the integral is finite, where is the distance from the point to the boundary of .

We introduce the principal representation category $\mathscr{O}({\bf G})$ of reductive algebraic groups with Frobenius maps and put forward a conjecture that this category is a highest weight category. When $\Bbbk$ is complex field $\mathbb{C}$, we provide some evidences of this conjecture. We also study certain kind of bound quiver algebras whose representations are related to the principal representation category $\mathscr{O}({\bf G})$ ., 14 pages

The successful interaction amongst relevant stakeholders in water and climate management in Africa is of principal importance when trying to address local water challenges and provide effective solutions. Yet there was no mechanism in place to know who has the information, which organisations are the bridges, and which are the bottlenecks to water and climate change knowledge exchange. The AfriAlliance Stakeholder Map, based on a detailed Social Network Analysis, serves to identify, visualise and understand stakeholder connections in the fields of water and climate change in Africa and Europe. With its continued use and updating, this map will be a major asset to any research, innovation and/or development project in water and climate in Africa, further reducing fragmentation in this space. The future ambitions of the AfriAlliance Stakeholder Map are to prove its use in different environments and to plan for societal adaptation, which require refining it further together with relevant stakeholders. More generally, with wider use and continued investigation, SNA and network maps can provide the tools to reduce fragmentation in the water and climate change space.

Зроблено короткий огляд ключових лекцій та доповідей, що були представлені під час Міжнародного симпозіуму «Захворювання кістково-м’язової системи та вік» 5–7 травня 2015 року у м. Львів, Україна.

This research aims to advance the literature by identifying the association between four advertising media vehicles (Internet, press, outdoor, television) and contemporaneous sales. Previous research highlights the influence of advertising on firm value but does not delve into the effects of advertising media vehicles. Employing primary data which details the advertising expenditures of 88 publicly traded companies over 11 years, we empirically show a positive association between television and outdoor advertising expenditures and contemporaneous sales. However, we do not find any significant results for press and Internet advertising. We investigate the moderating effect of the growth opportunities, industry sectors and firm size. Our study offers important evidence that the contemporaneous relationship between sales and advertising expenditures varies by media vehicle. We discuss the implications of our findings for the matching principle, a principal concept in accrual accounting.

The farm-shelter forest network is a complex grid protection system, with a windbreak that is distinctly different from that of the single shelterbelt. We selected the farm-shelter forest network of a jujube field in the Tarim Basin of northwest China and used a combination of field measurements and wind tunnel tests to determine the optimal spacing interval between principal shelterbelts. The wind speed reductive curve of the farm-shelter forest network showed a gradual wind speed tendency to stability. Therefore, a model was established based on the energy transfer balance between the upper and the lower airflows for a steady wind speed. The prediction error of the model was found to be H to 20 H, where H is the shelterbelt height, maintained more than 70% of the windbreak effect of the farm-shelter forest network. If the spacing interval between principal shelterbelts were to be increased from 10 H to 20 H, the jujube planting area would be increased by 0.54%. Therefore, a thorough consideration of the windbreak effect of each shelterbelt, the synergistic effects of shelterbelts, the windbreak effects of tall crops, and the effects of temperature and humidity in farm-shelter forest networks indicates that increasing the spacing interval will not only maintain the windbreak effect, but it will also reduce the side effects of shelterbelts, increase the planting area, favor mechanized operation, and improve planting efficiency.

This study explores ways in which salary can be structured to reduce leadership shortages by investigating how comparative wage dispersion and position alter the relationship of salary to principal turnover. Using a seventeen-year longitudinal dataset covering over sixteen thousand principals in Texas, discrete-time hazard models demonstrate that principals are highly sensitive to salary comparisons over and above basic salary. Higher comparative position is associated with significantly reduced turnover risk, while wider dispersion is associated with a significantly increased turnover risk. Interactions demonstrate that dispersion and position act in tandem to create conditions where principals have particularly high turnover risk. These results have implications for strategies to address turnover through district salary structures, as well as broader notions of how wage tournaments operate in the principal labor market.

Nationwide, school principals are given wide discretion to use disciplinary tools like suspension and expulsion to create a safe learning environment. There is legitimate concern that this power can have negative consequences, particularly for the students who are excluded. This study uses linked disciplinary, education, and criminal justice records from 2008 to 2016 in North Carolina to examine the impact of principal-driven disciplinary decisions on middle school student outcomes. We find that when principals are more likely to remove students, this leads to reductions in reported rates of minor student misconduct. However, this deterrence comes at a high cost—these harsher principals generate more juvenile justice complaints and reduce high school graduation rates for all students in their schools. Students who commit minor disciplinary infractions in a school with a harsh principal suffer additional declines in attendance and test scores. Finally, principals exhibiting racial bias in their disciplinary decisions also widen educational gaps between white and black students.

The kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is widely used as a fault monitoring tool for complex nonlinear chemical processes in recent years. The cumulative contribution rate that extracts the kernel principal is usually obtained relied on a fixed model, which cannot be employed for time-varying chemical processes. Hence, a novel adaptive kernel principal component analysis (AKPCA) integrating grey relational analysis (GRA) (AKPCA-GRA) is proposed to dynamically monitor the fault occurrence. A moving window integrating the threshold method is used to adaptively extract the kernel principal for chemical processes. Then the corresponding T2 and Q statistics calculated by the selected kernel principal based on the AKPCA decides whether the fault has occurred. Moreover, the GRA method is used to analyze and calculate the correlation coefficient of abnormal features obtained based on the APKCA method, which provides the operational guidance for the nonlinear chemical process to find out the variable causing the fault. Finally, the proposed method is verified using the Tennessee Eastman (TE) process. The case results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the KPCA, the KPCA based on the threshold and the moving window principal component analysis, the support vector machine (SVM) and the Logistic Regression (LR) in terms of the missed alarm rate (MAR) and the false alarm rate (FAR), which can effectively analyze the variables causing the fault.

This paper studies a mechanism design problem with networked agents and stochastically evolving private information. In contrast to the canonical mechanism design theory focusing only on information asymmetry, we also pay attention to the topology of social network among agents. We find that the standard first-order approach for mechanism design is invalid in dynamic environment. As a remedy, a novel ironing technique is proposed, which produces a perfectly sorting allocation. Based on the optimal dynamic mechanism obtained, we define and compare some important nodes and edges in a network for different ranges of synergy parameter. We further discuss the network intervention problem, in which the principal can intervene to change the ex-ante distribution of individual types.

The format of transitory facilities in a building space is managed using the determination concerning the maximal proficient design of these facilities to work productively and cost successfully. The layout configuration looks for the best plan of facilities inside the accessible zone. In the plan interaction of the design, numerous goals should be considered to viably use individuals, equipment, space, and energy. This paper, along these lines, proposes a methodology dependent on the fuzzy set hypothesis and Automated Layout Design Program and Computerized Relationship Planning to improve format interaction of facilities. The principal objective of this investigation is to get the closeness rating esteems between every two facilities in the building site. To accomplish this purpose, the fuzzy set hypothesis and defuzzification measure were accustomed to research the format of transitory facilities in connection through the building(s) to be built in making space.

Fuzzy graph (FG) models embrace the ubiquity of existing in natural and man-made structures, specifically dynamic processes in physical, biological, and social systems. It is exceedingly difficult for an expert to model those problems based on a FG because of the inconsistent and indeterminate information inherent in real-life problems being often uncertain. Vague graph (VG) can deal with the uncertainty associated with the inconsistent and determinate information of any real-world problem, where FGs many fail to reveal satisfactory results. Regularity definitions have been of high significance in the network heterogeneity study, which have implications in networks found across biology, ecology, and economy; so, adjacency sequence (AS) and fundamental sequences (FS) of regular vague graphs (RVGs) are defined with examples. One essential and adequate prerequisite has been ascribed to a VG with maximum four vertices is that it should be regular based on the adjacency sequences concept. Likewise, it is described that if ζ and its principal crisp graph (CG) are regular, then all the nodes do not have to have the similar AS. In the following, we obtain a characterization of vague detour (VD) g-eccentric node, and the concepts of vague detour g-boundary nodes and vague detour g-interior nodes in a VG are examined. Finally, an application of vague detour g-distance in transportation systems is given.

Minimally invasive techniques have been at the forefront of surgical progress, and the evolution of endovascular robotic technologies has seen a paradigm shift in the focus of future innovation. Endovascular robotic technology may help overcome many of the challenges associated with traditional endovascular techniques by enabling greater control, stability, and precision of target navigation and treatment, while simultaneously reducing operator learning curves and improving safety. Several robotic systems have been developed to perform a broad range of endovascular procedures, but none have been used at scale or widely in routine practice, and the evidence for their safety, effectiveness, and efficiency remains limited. High cost and device complexity, lack of haptic feedback, and limited integration and interoperability with existing equipment and devices are the principal technology, cost, and sustainability barriers to the scalability and widespread adoption in day-to-day practice. In order to fully realize its potential, future robotic innovation must ensure compatibility with a range of off-the-shelf equipment that can be tracked and exchanged quickly during a procedure and come together with developments in navigation, tracking, and imaging. Reducing cost and complexity and supporting sustainability of the technology is key. In parallel, new technologies must be evaluated by clear and transparent standardized outcomes and be accompanied by robust clinical training. Key to the successful future development and dissemination of robotic technology is open collaboration among industry, clinicians, and patients in order to fully understand and address current challenges and enable the technology to realize its full potential.

Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), as an attractive alternative power source, has seen its increasing deployment in both automotive and small stationary applications. To improve the durability of the PEMFC system, recent research has engaged in developing prognostics and health management methods. Although the prognostics methods have been extensively studied to improve the prediction accuracy, some critical issues have not been fully addressed. For example, few studies have looked into the prognostics methods by different criteria and under dynamic operation conditions, and none of them have investigated the data availability and quality for PEMFC prognostics. Due to the lack of more comprehensive and general prognostics methods as well as the limitations in data, studies in the post-prognostics decision-making phase have hardly ever been initiated. This paper tends to provide a full review of the existing prognostics research by analysing the prognostics scales, horizon, threshold, and the use of methods. The data used in the previous studies has also been investigated. Moreover, four principal directions of post-prognostics decision-making have been proposed and discussed. According to the findings, research challenges and development perspectives in the aspects of data, prognostics and decision-making are proposed.

Knowing how to properly prepare a research proposal is a real challenge — and being able to prepare an excellent research proposal is increasingly a requirement to compete for funding with assurances of success. With this in mind, we aim to share with the reader our experience (in many cases, unsuccessful) as applicants on the most important aspects of preparing a research proposal and securing its approval and funding. This article aims not only to list theoretical recommendations but also to share some personal and eminently practical suggestions on the following elements of a research proposal: the title, the abstract, the introduction, the objectives, the methodology, the work plan or schedule, the proposal's consistency and coherence, its viability, its applicability, the importance of the principal investigator and the research team, the proposal’s limitations and alternatives, its budget, its references, and, finally, the research proposal's form or wording. In summary, a research proposal is a carefully written plan that includes all the scientific, ethical and logistical aspects of the study to be conducted. Writing a good research proposal requires considerable effort and a great deal of time, but it's worth it.

In this paper we study p p -adic principal series representation of a p p -adic group G G as a module over the maximal compact subgroup G 0 G_0 . We show that there are no non-trivial G 0 G_0 -intertwining maps between principal series representations attached to characters whose restrictions to the torus of G 0 G_0 are distinct, and there are no non-scalar endomorphisms of a fixed principal series representation. This is surprising when compared with another result which we prove: that a principal series representation may contain infinitely many closed G 0 G_0 -invariant subspaces. As for the proof, we work mainly in the setting of Iwasawa modules, and deduce results about G 0 G_0 -representations by duality.

Given the massive potentials of 5G communication networks and their foreseeable evolution, what should there be in 6G that is not in 5G or its long-term evolution? 6G communication networks are estimated to integrate the terrestrial, aerial, and maritime communications into a forceful network which would be faster, more reliable, and can support a massive number of devices with ultra-low latency requirements. This article presents a complete overview of potential 6G communication networks. The major contribution of this study is to present a broad overview of key performance indicators (KPIs) of 6G networks that cover the latest manufacturing progress in the environment of the principal areas of research application, and challenges.

Summary Linguistic historiography analyzes how linguistic knowledge has been acquired, stored, used and diffused. This article examines what can happen if linguists rely on copies of source data rather than the source data itself. It takes as a case study linguistic data from Siraya, a now-extinct Formosan language. Documents compiled in the seventeenth century by Dutch missionaries in Taiwan form a significant source of data for Siraya. One such document, a wordlist known as the Utrecht Manuscript (UM), is the principal source for the lexicon of one variety of Siraya, “Siraya Proper”. It has been published three times. Each edition, however, contains many errors. These editions, rather than the manuscript, have been used by scholars investigating Siraya. This article aims to correct errors in the editions and secondary literature on the UM with my readings of the manuscript itself. It therefore presents a more accurate record of the lexicon of “Siraya Proper” as well as illustrating the importance of using primary rather than secondary sources of linguistic data. Finally, it introduces an online edition of the UM, which will provide scholars and language revivalists with a useful resource for this lexicon.

Work to support pupils’ social learning in Swedish school-age educare (SAEC) may be understood to depend on how the principal leads the staff and how the vision is set. Therefore, in this article t...

The current examination is to break down the information dependent on the Big Data Analytics in enhancing electronic medical records in clinics and wellbeing focuses. Numerous emergency clinics and medical services habitats are experiencing incapable utilization of enormous information investigation in streamlining electronic medical records (EMRs) to create great bits of knowledge for their clinical practices. Hierarchical conduct and the exercises associated with the medical field are the principal factors in improving the utilization of Big Data Analytics in EMRs. The examination centres around exploring the how the models and methods of information can accomplish enormous information life cycle in EMRs. The examination likewise uncovers the information put together investigation with respect to EMRs use and capacity that assists with improving the significant usage of huge information rehearses. The investigation contributes on advanced wellbeing rehearses by investigating the appropriate adaption of scientific instruments to EMRs to shape the significant utilization of large information examination with EMRs.

Today the educational system in Mexico faces certain situations of change and restructuring that affect the functioning of all educational levels. Some researches have identified different factors that affect the educational process, such as the teacher's performance in class, the student's interest and motivation, the environment where the institution develops, and an aspect of great relevance: the role of the principal in his or her institution. The objective of the study was to estimate the relationship between the characteristics of the school principal as a context variable and its relationship with the performance of students at the school, evaluated with a measure of mastery based on the school curriculum. A total of 265 randomly selected high school principals from the state of Sonora participated in the study, who were administered an instrument that evaluates elements of the context in which they work. A multivariate discriminant analysis was carried out to differentiate principals of students with high and low performance, with a predictive effectiveness of 88.40%; the variables that most contributed to the differences were: Meetings and Courses, Infrastructure, and Salary and Problems. It is observed that only the actions that are within the principals' radius of action are the ones that effectively contribute to the generation of the most effective results.

Localisation, i.e. estimation of one’s position in a given environment is a crucial element of many mobile systems, manned and unmanned. Due to the high demand for autonomous exploration, patrolling and inspection services and a rapid improvement of batteries, sensors and machine learning algorithms, the quality of localisation becomes even more important for smart robotic systems. The underwater domain is a very challenging environment due to the water blocking most of the signals over short distances. Recent results in localisation techniques for underwater vehicles are summarised in two principal categories: passive techniques, which strive to provide the best estimation of the vehicle’s position (global or local) given the past and current information from sensors, and active techniques, which additionally produce guidance output that is expected to minimise the uncertainty of estimated position.

PurposeWe study the role of school climate, and teacher task, and citizenship performance in mediating the effects of principal instructional leadership behavior on student achievement.Design/methodology/approachStructural equation modeling was applied to data obtained from 302 Indian secondary schools to test a mediated-effects model.FindingsSchool climate was examined under two broad dimensions, the social and affective and the physical environment. Results of mediation analysis showed that the benefits of principal instructional leadership for student achievement are operationalized as an indirect effect. This indirect effect is realized primarily through the physical environment, and the in-role task performance of teachers. No significant contribution to the indirect effect through the social and affective environment was found. The latter, nonetheless, fully mediated the relationship between the instructional leadership and extra-role or citizenship behavior of teachers. These findings underscore the different and distinct mediating roles played by the social and affective, and physical dimensions of the school climate in our model.Originality/valueTo the best of our knowledge, the reported associations between principal instructional leadership, school climate and student achievement that take into account both the in-role and extra-role job performance of teachers within the purview of a single framework are new. Also, this is the first study exploring these relations in an Indian context.

The purpose of this study was to determine the increase in student discipline at the Private High School Telukdalam Campus, South Nias. The research method used is the descriptive qualitative method. Data collection techniques using involvement, in-depth interviews, and documentation. Interviews were conducted with the principal, teachers, and students. The data processing is achieved by analyzing the data, data categories, data categories, and concluding. The results obtained that school culture can improve student discipline but must be supported by school facilities and high teacher competence, teacher competence greatly affects student discipline, school facilities greatly influence and determine student discipline, principal leadership also affects student discipline. Based on the results of the study, it can be said that to improve student discipline, school culture, teacher competence, and principal leadership must be supported by adequate school facilities.

Rural school principals often face issues of professional isolation and lack of access to leadership development opportunities. To address these challenges, the Elgin Children’s Foundation launched its Principal Support Program (PSP) in 2017 to support the development of effective school leaders in three states with high rural student populations in the Appalachian region. The PSP posited four components as essential for principal development: professional development, networking, mentoring, and learning plans. The aim of this qualitative study was to determine what PSP participants believed to be the most effective in terms of principal development. Results indicate that because of PSP training, rural principals grew from managers to instructional leaders and changed their mindsets and practices regarding shared leadership. Principals believed that they benefited most from the networking and coaching that the PSP provided. Future professional development for rural principals should consider a focus on opportunities to learn with and through others.

The purpose of this article is to examine a ‘grow your own’ model of leadership preparation and placement of educational administrators in the state of Tennessee. The growing need for school and district administrators in the rural counties of Tennessee mirrors a nationwide issue, and state policymakers and practitioners must respond appropriately to sustain adequate K-12 educational leadership that is representative of state demographics. Recommendations for policy and practice are provided for state and local education agencies as well as principal preparation programs in higher education.

We show how to recover a discrete twist over an ample Hausdorff groupoid from a pair consisting of an algebra and what we call a quasi-Cartan subalgebra. We identify precisely which twists arise in this way (namely, those that satisfy the local bisection hypothesis), and we prove that the assignment of twisted Steinberg algebras to such twists and our construction of a twist from a quasi-Cartan pair are mutually inverse. We identify the algebraic pairs that correspond to effective groupoids and to principal groupoids. We also indicate the scope of our results by identifying large classes of twists for which the local bisection hypothesis holds automatically., 47 pages. This version matches the version in International Mathematics Research Notices (IMRN)