一种能耗均衡的无线传感器网络路由算法

为了延长采用电池供电的无线传感器网络的生命周期,提出了一种综合考虑单个节点能耗和节点传输信息至汇集节点所需总能耗的路由算法。该算法首先根据网络中节点到汇集节点从小到大的距离顺序选择待规划节点,然后计算各对应候选节点的评价参数,该参数由单节点能耗和节点传输信息至汇集节点所需总能耗加权得到,最后选择评价参数最小的候选节点作为待规划节点的中继节点。仿真结果表明,该算法的生命周期明显长于LEACH(Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy)算法。     

Searching for cincinnatus: Representatives' backgrounds and voting behavior

Proponents of legislative term limits express concern about professional politicians, individuals who have no other occupation than running for and holding office. Term limits presumably will help allow the reemergence of the citizen-legislator. This paper examines whether pre-political background affects Congressional voting, specifically concentrating on whether a business background affects U.S. Chamber of Commerce vote scores. Business background significantly affects voting in the House, even with party affiliation and corporate and labor campaign contributions included as control variables, but background variables are insignificant for Senate voting.     

Current trends in hospital mergers and acquisitions

Healthcare reform will impact hospital consolidation in three key areas: Payment rates will decrease, indirectly encouraging consolidation by forcing hospitals to find new ways to reduce costs and increase negotiating clout with suppliers and payers. The cost of doing business will increase as hospitals spend more on compliance, technology, and physician employment. The ACO model will encourage hospital network formation by rewarding integrated healthcare systems that can reduce costs and improve quality.     

The Ethical Environment of Tax Practitioners: Western Australian Evidence

This study examines Australian tax agents' perceptions of the ethical environment in which they practice, within the context of an income tax system based on self-assessment principles. The research identifies and ranks an inventory of ethical issues in terms of perceived frequency of occurrence and importance to Western Australian tax agents. In addition, the extent and influence of ethical concerns in the profession are evaluated.The study has determined that the most frequently cited ethical issue is the failure to make reasonable enquiries where information or documentation provided by a client appears to be inaccurate or incomplete. The most important ethical problem is a failure to ensure confidentiality with regard to privileged client information. When the frequency of occurrence and importance means are compared, inadequate technical competence, failure to make reasonable enquiries/conduct research, continuing to act for a client where there is incorrect information, and conflicts in distinguishing between tax planning and tax avoidance emerge as the high frequency/high importance issues. Although acknowledging the potential for unethical actions in tax practice, Western Australian tax agents consider that they carry out their professional activities within an ethical environment.     

The Relation between Stock Prices and Accounting Information

The functional relation between expected stock prices and accounting information is analyzed through the theory of inverse probability. The approach models the mean of the posterior distribution for price, given the information that the accounting process provides. The implications of alternative assumptions about accounting measurement error and the unconditional price distribution are discussed. Our most refined model is consistent with recent empirical evidence showing convexity in the relationship between price and accounting information. Empirical tests, while exploratory, provide further evidence of a nonlinear relation between stock price and accounting measures of earnings and book value.     

An improved estimation method and empirical properties of the probability of informed trading

We report evidence that boundary solutions can cause a bias in the estimate of the probability of informed trading (PIN). We develop an algorithm to overcome this bias and use it to estimate PIN for nearly 80,000 stock-quarters between 1993 and 2004. We obtain two sets of PIN estimates by using the factorized likelihood functions in both [Easley et al., 2010] and [Lin and Ke, 2011], respectively. We find that the estimate based on the EHO factorization is systematically smaller than the estimate based on the LK factorization, meaning that there is a downward bias associated with the EHO factorization. In addition, we find that boundary solutions appear with a very high frequency when the LK factorization is used. Thus it is necessary to use the LK factorization together with the algorithm in this paper. At last, we document several interesting empirical properties of PIN.     

构建新农村文化建设长效机制探讨

文化作为上层建筑，既是农村经济发展水平的标志，同时也是建设新农村的必要动力。没有新文化，就无所谓新农村。加快我国农村新文化建设，具有重要的现实意义。积极探索新农村文化建设长效机制的要求、目标、载体，建立健全新农村新文化建设的投入机制、人才培养机制、评价机制、制度保障机制等长效机制，才能为持续、有效地推进新农村文化建设提供有力保障和不竭动力。     

The Impact of Economic Reform on Productivity Growth in Chinese Industry: A Case of Xiamen Special Economic Zone

China's industrial and trade reforms were expected to stimulate growth in output and welfare by increasing the capacity of industry to absorb surplus factors of production, and by utilizing labour, capital, energy and materials more efficiently. The impact of the special economic zone reform policies on productivity and growth is assessed by studies of China's overall industrial sector performance and case studies in Xiamen and Shanghai Beijing, which is not subject to special policy initiatives, is used as a control. Although there were data limitations, several conclusions may be drawn. An increase in total factor productivity was found to have occurred in Xiamen during the reform period, but the creation of the special economic zone does not appear to have had a significant impact on productivity. Productivity performance in Beijing's state-owned industry was considerably poorer than that of total Xiamen industry, including state, collective and firms jointly owned with foreign investors, and was also lower than the productivity performance of Xiamen's state sector. The productivity performance of Xiamen's joint ventures and collectively owned firms was, however, considerably superior to the state sectors in both cities. Due to data constraints, the analysis of productivity in Shanghai was for a shorter period. Most of Shanghai's state-owned industry did better than the state-owned sector in Beijing but did not perform as well as the non-State sector in Xiamen over this period. Factor productivity in Shanghai industry was stagnant, Beijing's industrial productivity generally declined, but Xiamen's productivity improved considerably over the decade. One of the major strengths of this study is its access to new and more accurate disaggregated price indices to deflate capital investments on an industry by industry basis. Hence, the availability of the new capital stock deflator series should improve the total factor productivity estimates considerably.