pessimistic predicate/transform model for long running business processes

Many business processes in enterprise applications are both long running and transactional in nature. However, no current transaction model can provide full transaction support for such long running business processes. This paper proposes a new transaction model, the pessimistic predicate/transform (PP/T) model, which can provide full transaction support for long running business processes. A framework was proposed on the enterprise JavaBeans platform to implement the PP/T model. The framework enables application developers to focus on the business logic, with the underlying platform providing the required transactional semantics. The development and maintenance effort are therefore greatly reduced. Simulations show that the model has a sound concurrency management ability for long running business processes.

Exploring optimistic and pessimistic attributions in depression-specific mood

Cognitive theories of depression include maladaptive thinking styles as depressive vulnerabilities. The hopelessness theory of depression (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989) particularly implicates stable and global attributions for negative events as influences upon depression. Positive event attributions are considered less influential, yet they have shown equal predictiveness to negative event attributions for depression-specific mood. Previous research has provided equivocal results largely because of cross-sectional design and modest psychometric properties of the measures. The present research aimed to: create a new instrument to measure optimistic and pessimistic attributions; test the relatedness of attributions for positive and negative events; and, clarify relationships of the scales with optimism and mood. Three studies were undertaken, all of which used structural equation modeling. Two cross-sectional studies, using 342 and 332 community participants respectively, developed and validated the Questionnaire of Explanatory Style (QES). A final longitudinal study with 250 community participants tested the predictive validity of the QES. Overall, six scales were developed, three of which were optimistic and three of which were negative. The scales were acceptable to community samples and had adequate psychometric properties. The optimistic scales were attributions for positive events and the negative scales were attributions for negative events rather than pessimistic scales. Cross-sectional results indicated that only one of the negative scales weakly directly predicted depression-specific mood, but all predicted general psychological distress. By contrast, the optimistic scales were more directly predictive of depression-specific mood, particularly the Positive Disposition scale. Longitudinal results indicated that two of the optimistic scales were the most important QES predictors of depression-specific mood two months later. The optimistic scale Positive Disposition appears most central to the prediction of both concurrent and subsequent depression-specific mood. The scale content represents explanations for positive events that are internal and stable characteristics. These may be construed as personal competencies to bring about positive outcomes. This scale is closely allied to measures of optimism. Findings affirm the importance of optimistic attributions to the understanding of depression-specific mood and provide a productive focus for therapeutic intervention and future research.

Neural correlates of 'pessimistic' attitude in depression

BACKGROUND Preparing for potentially threatening events in the future is essential for survival. Anticipating the future to be unpleasant is also a cognitive key feature of depression. We hypothesized that 'pessimism'-related emotion processing would characterize brain activity in major depression.MethodDuring functional magnetic resonance imaging, depressed patients and a healthy control group were cued to expect and then perceive pictures of known emotional valences--pleasant, unpleasant and neutral--and stimuli of unknown valence that could have been either pleasant or unpleasant. Brain activation associated with the 'unknown' expectation was compared with the 'known' expectation conditions. RESULTS While anticipating pictures of unknown valence, activation patterns in depressed patients within the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal areas, inferior frontal gyrus, insula and medial thalamus were similar to activations associated with expecting unpleasant pictures, but not with expecting positive pictures. The activity within a majority of these areas correlated with the depression scores. Differences between healthy and depressed persons were found particularly for medial and dorsolateral prefrontal and insular activations. CONCLUSIONS Brain activation in depression during expecting events of unknown emotional valence was comparable with activation while expecting certainly negative, but not positive events. This neurobiological finding is consistent with cognitive models supposing that depressed patients develop a 'pessimistic' attitude towards events with an unknown emotional meaning. Thereby, particularly the role of brain areas associated with the processing of cognitive and executive control and of the internal state is emphasized in contributing to major depression.

Neural correlates of a 'pessimistic' attitude when anticipating events of unknown emotional valence

Since we do not know what future holds for us, we prepare for expected emotional events in order to deal with a pleasant or threatening environment. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense to be particularly prepared for the worst-case scenario. We were interested to evaluate whether this assumption is reflected in the central nervous information processing associated with expecting visual stimuli of unknown emotional valence. While being scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging, healthy subjects were cued to expect and then perceive visual stimuli with a known emotional valence as pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral, as well as stimuli of unknown valence that could have been either pleasant or unpleasant. While anticipating pictures of unknown valence, the activity of emotion processing brain areas was similar to activity associated with expecting unpleasant pictures, but there were no areas in which the activity was similar to the activity when expecting pleasant pictures. The activity of the revealed regions, including bilateral insula, right inferior frontal gyrus, medial thalamus, and red nucleus, further correlated with the individual ratings of mood: the worse the mood, the higher the activity. These areas are supposedly involved in a network for internal adaptation and preparation processes in order to act according to potential or certain unpleasant events. Their activity appears to reflect a 'pessimistic' bias by anticipating the events of unknown valence to be unpleasant.

Crisis in Japan and the Way Out: A Counterargument to Pessimistic Views

This paper focuses on a review of the present state of, and outlook for the Japanese economy. The paper is composed of three parts. The first describes the interrelation between the crisis-ridden East Asian economies and Japan. I argue that Japan did not cause the Asian currency crisis. The second part describes the current state of the Japanese economy after the bubble burst. I also discuss the medium- and long-term challenges that face the Japanese economy. The third part concentrates on the issue of the "liquidity trap" Japan is experiencing. I argue that the yen's exchange rate is more likely to appreciate than depreciate by pumping liquidity into the economy while interest rates cannot be lowered any further, and therefore a "helicopter money" policy is the only way to induce a positive inflation rate and escape from the liquidity trap.

Numerical investigations of linear least squares methods for derivative estimation

The results of a numerical investigation into the errors for least squares estimates of function gradients are presented. The underlying algorithm is obtained by constructing a least squares problem using a truncated Taylor expansion. An error bound associated with this method contains in its numerator terms related to the Taylor series remainder, while its denominator contains the smallest singular value of the least squares matrix. Perhaps for this reason the error bounds are often found to be pessimistic by several orders of magnitude. The circumstance under which these poor estimates arise is elucidated and an empirical correction of the theoretical error bounds is conjectured and investigated numerically. This is followed by an indication of how the conjecture is supported by a rigorous argument.

Reliability analysis with suspended items

Reliability analysis has several important engineering applications. Designers and operators of equipment are often interested in the probability of the equipment operating successfully to a given age - this probability is known as the equipment's reliability at that age. Reliability information is also important to those charged with maintaining an item of equipment, as it enables them to model and evaluate alternative maintenance policies for the equipment. In each case, information on failures and survivals of a typical sample of items is used to estimate the required probabilities as a function of the item's age, this process being one of many applications of the statistical techniques known as distribution fitting. In most engineering applications, the estimation procedure must deal with samples containing survivors (suspensions or censorings); this thesis focuses on several graphical estimation methods that are widely used for analysing such samples. Although these methods have been current for many years, they share a common shortcoming: none of them is continuously sensitive to changes in the ages of the suspensions, and we show that the resulting reliability estimates are therefore more pessimistic than necessary. We use a simple example to show that the existing graphical methods take no account of any service recorded by suspensions beyond their respective previous failures, and that this behaviour is inconsistent with one's intuitive expectations. In the course of this thesis, we demonstrate that the existing methods are only justified under restricted conditions. We present several improved methods and demonstrate that each of them overcomes the problem described above, while reducing to one of the existing methods where this is justified. Each of the improved methods thus provides a realistic set of reliability estimates for general (unrestricted) censored samples. Several related variations on these improved methods are also presented and justified. - i

Bounded parameter Markov Decision Processes with average reward criterion

Bounded parameter Markov Decision Processes (BMDPs) address the issue of dealing with uncertainty in the parameters of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Unlike the case of an MDP, the notion of an optimal policy for a BMDP is not entirely straightforward. We consider two notions of optimality based on optimistic and pessimistic criteria. These have been analyzed for discounted BMDPs. Here we provide results for average reward BMDPs. We establish a fundamental relationship between the discounted and the average reward problems, prove the existence of Blackwell optimal policies and, for both notions of optimality, derive algorithms that converge to the optimal value function.

Esprit Futur : Le Corbusier and José Oubrerie at Saint-Pierre De Firminy, Firminy-Vert, France, 1968–2006

What is the secret mesmerism that death possesses and under the operation of which a modern architect – strident, confident, resolute – becomes rueful, pessimistic, or melancholic?1 Five years before Le Corbusier’s death at sea in 1965, the architect reluctantly agreed to adopt the project for L’Église Saint-Pierre de Firminy in Firminy-Vert (1960–2006), following the death of its original architect, André Sive, from leukemia in 1958.2 Le Corbusier had already developed, in 1956, the plan for an enclave in the new “green” Firminy town, which included his youth and culture center and a stadium and swimming pool; the church and a “boîte à miracles” near the youth center were inserted into the plan in the ’60s. (Le Corbusier was also invited, in 1962, to produce another plan for three Unités d’Habitation outside Firminy-Vert.) The Saint-Pierre church should have been the zenith of the quartet (the largest urban concentration of works by Le Corbusier in Europe, and what the architect Henri Ciriani termed Le Corbusier’s “acropolis”3) but in the early course of the project, Le Corbusier would suffer the diocese’s serial objections to his vision for the church – not unlike the difficulties he experienced with Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950–1954) and the resistance to his proposed monastery of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette (1957–1960). In 1964, the bishop of Saint-Étienne requested that Le Corbusier relocate the church to a new site, but Le Corbusier refused and the diocese subsequently withdrew from the project. (With neither the approval, funds, nor the participation of the bishop, by then the cardinal archbishop of Lyon, the first stone of the church was finally laid on the site in 1970.) Le Corbusier’s ambivalence toward the project, even prior to his quarrels with the bishop, reveals...

Psychoanalytic perspectives on substance use and antisocial personality disorder

Psychoanalysis and related psychodynamic psychotherapies have historically had a limited engagement with substance use and antisocial personality disorders. This in part reflects an early preoccupation with ‘transference neuroses’ and in part reflects later de-emphasis of diagnosis and focus on therapeutic process. Nonetheless, psychoanalytic perspectives can usefully inform thinking about approaches to treatment of such disorders and there are psychoanalytic constructs that have specific relevance to their treatment. This paper reviews some prominent strands of psychoanalytic thinking as they pertain to the treatment of substance abuse and antisocial personality disorders. It is argued that, while Freudian formulations lead to a primarily pessimistic view of the prospect of treatment of such disorders, both the British object relations and the North American self psychology traditions suggest potentially productive approaches. Finally the limited empirical evidence from brief psychodynamically informed treatments of substance use disorders is reviewed. It is concluded that such treatments are not demonstrably effective but that, since no form of psychotherapy has established high efficacy with substance use disorders, brief psychdynamic therapies are not necessarily of lesser value than other treatments and may have specific value for particular individuals and in particular treatment contexts.

Building an augmented map for road risk assessment

Recent road safety statistics show that the decades-long fatalities decreasing trend is stopping and stagnating. Statistics further show that crashes are mostly driven by human error, compared to other factors such as environmental conditions and mechanical defects. Within human error, the dominant error source is perceptive errors, which represent about 50% of the total. The next two sources are interpretation and evaluation, which accounts together with perception for more than 75% of human error related crashes. Those statistics show that allowing drivers to perceive and understand their environment better, or supplement them when they are clearly at fault, is a solution to a good assessment of road risk, and, as a consequence, further decreasing fatalities. To answer this problem, currently deployed driving assistance systems combine more and more information from diverse sources (sensors) to enhance the driver's perception of their environment. However, because of inherent limitations in range and field of view, these systems' perception of their environment remains largely limited to a small interest zone around a single vehicle. Such limitations can be overcomed by increasing the interest zone through a cooperative process. Cooperative Systems (CS), a specific subset of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), aim at compensating for local systems' limitations by associating embedded information technology and intervehicular communication technology (IVC). With CS, information sources are not limited to a single vehicle anymore. From this distribution arises the concept of extended or augmented perception. Augmented perception allows extending an actor's perceptive horizon beyond its "natural" limits not only by fusing information from multiple in-vehicle sensors but also information obtained from remote sensors. The end result of an augmented perception and data fusion chain is known as an augmented map. It is a repository where any relevant information about objects in the environment, and the environment itself, can be stored in a layered architecture. This thesis aims at demonstrating that augmented perception has better performance than noncooperative approaches, and that it can be used to successfully identify road risk. We found it was necessary to evaluate the performance of augmented perception, in order to obtain a better knowledge on their limitations. Indeed, while many promising results have already been obtained, the feasibility of building an augmented map from exchanged local perception information and, then, using this information beneficially for road users, has not been thoroughly assessed yet. The limitations of augmented perception, and underlying technologies, have not be thoroughly assessed yet. Most notably, many questions remain unanswered as to the IVC performance and their ability to deliver appropriate quality of service to support life-saving critical systems. This is especially true as the road environment is a complex, highly variable setting where many sources of imperfections and errors exist, not only limited to IVC. We provide at first a discussion on these limitations and a performance model built to incorporate them, created from empirical data collected on test tracks. Our results are more pessimistic than existing literature, suggesting IVC limitations have been underestimated. Then, we develop a new CS-applications simulation architecture. This architecture is used to obtain new results on the safety benefits of a cooperative safety application (EEBL), and then to support further study on augmented perception. At first, we confirm earlier results in terms of crashes numbers decrease, but raise doubts on benefits in terms of crashes' severity. In the next step, we implement an augmented perception architecture tasked with creating an augmented map. Our approach is aimed at providing a generalist architecture that can use many different types of sensors to create the map, and which is not limited to any specific application. The data association problem is tackled with an MHT approach based on the Belief Theory. Then, augmented and single-vehicle perceptions are compared in a reference driving scenario for risk assessment,taking into account the IVC limitations obtained earlier; we show their impact on the augmented map's performance. Our results show that augmented perception performs better than non-cooperative approaches, allowing to almost tripling the advance warning time before a crash. IVC limitations appear to have no significant effect on the previous performance, although this might be valid only for our specific scenario. Eventually, we propose a new approach using augmented perception to identify road risk through a surrogate: near-miss events. A CS-based approach is designed and validated to detect near-miss events, and then compared to a non-cooperative approach based on vehicles equiped with local sensors only. The cooperative approach shows a significant improvement in the number of events that can be detected, especially at the higher rates of system's deployment.

International juvenile (in)justice : penal severity and rights compliance

This article focuses on the anomalies and contradictions surrounding the notion of ‘international juvenile justice’, whether in its pessimistic (neoliberal penality and penal severity) or optimistic (universal children’s rights and rights compliance) incarnations. It argues for an analysis which recognises firstly, the uneven, multi-facetted and heterogeneous nature of the processes of globalisation and secondly, how the global, the international, the national and the local are not mutually exclusive but continually interact to re-constitute, re-make and challenge each other.

Loss reduction planning in electric distribution networks of IRAN until 2025

In this paper, a loss reduction planning in electric distribution networks is presented based on the successful experiences in distribution utilities of IRAN and some developed countries. The necessary technical and economical parameters of planning are calculated from related projects in IRAN. Cost, time, and benefits of every sub-program including seven loss reduction approaches are determined. Finally, the loss reduction program, the benefit per cost, and the return of investment in optimistic and pessimistic conditions are introduced.