ICT and exporting: the effects of broadband on the extensive margin of business service exports.

Over recent decades the global economy has witnessed rapid growth of international trade in services. This has been particularly true of service-intensive countries such as the UK. Developments in information and communication technologies are an obvious explanation for this. We provide empirical evidence for the effects of broadband use on the firm-extensive margin of UK service exports. To deal with the issue of causality we build a novel instrument that exploits exogenous variation in access to broadband technologies due to the historic telephone network. We find evidence for a causal effect from the internet on trade in business services, but no evidence for an effect on trade in services more generally

Evolving Test Environments to Identify Faults in Swarm Robotics Algorithms

Swarm robotic systems are often considered to be dependable. However, there is little empirical evidence or theoretical analysis showing that dependability is an inherent property of all swarm robotic system. Recent literature has identified potential issues with respect to dependability within certain types of swarm robotic algorithms. There appears to be a dearth of literature relating to the testing of swarm robotic systems; this provides motivation for the development of the novel testing methods for swarm robotic systems presented in this paper. We present a search based approach, using genetic algorithms, for the automated identification of unintended behaviors during the execution of a flocking type algorithm, implemented on a simulated robotic swarm. Results show that this proposed approach is able to reveal faults in such flocking algorithms and has the potential to be used in further swarm robotic applications

Visual Search Behavior in Individuals With Retinitis Pigmentosa During Level Walking and Obstacle Crossing

Purpose: Investigate the visual search strategy of individuals with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) when negotiating a floor-based obstacle compared with level walking, and compared with those with normal vision. Methods: Wearing a mobile eye tracker, individuals with RP and normal vision walked along a level walkway or walked along the walkway negotiating a floor-based obstacle. In the level walking condition, tape was placed on the floor to act as an object attracting visual attention. Analysis compared where individuals looked within the environment. Results: In the obstacle compared with level walking condition: (1) the RP group reduced the length of time and the number of times they looked Ahead, and increased the time and how often they looked at features on the ground (Object and Down, P < 0.05); and (2) the visual normal group reduced the time (by 19%) they looked Ahead (P = 0.076), and increased the time and how often they looked at the Object (P < 0.05). Compared with the normal vision group, in both level walking and obstacle conditions, the RP group reduced the time looking Ahead and looked for longer and more often Down (P < 0.05). Conclusions: The RP group demonstrated a more active visual search pattern, looking at more areas on the ground in both level walking and obstacle crossing compared with visual normals. This gaze strategy was invariant across conditions. This is most likely due to the constricted visual field and inability to rely on inferior peripheral vision to acquire information from the floor within the environment when walking

Livestock disease management for trading across different regulatory regimes

The maintenance of livestock health depends on the combined actions of many different actors, both within and across different regulatory frameworks. Prior work recognised that private risk management choices have the ability to reduce the spread of infection to trading partners. We evaluate the efficiency of farmers' alternative biosecurity choices in terms of their own-benefits from unilateral strategies and quantify the impact they may have in filtering the disease externality of trade. We use bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) in England and Scotland as a case study, since this provides an example of a situation where contrasting strategies for BVD management occur between selling and purchasing farms. We use an agent-based bioeconomic model to assess the payoff dependence of farmers connected by trade but using different BVD management strategies. We compare three disease management actions: test-cull, test-cull with vaccination and vaccination alone. For a two-farm trading situation, all actions carried out by the selling farm provide substantial benefits to the purchasing farm in terms of disease avoided, with the greatest benefit resulting from test-culling with vaccination on the selling farm. Likewise, unilateral disease strategies by purchasers can be effective in reducing disease risks created through trade. We conclude that regulation needs to balance the trade-off between private gains from those bearing the disease management costs and the positive spillover effects on others

Homeostatic Fault Tolerance in Spiking Neural Networks : A Dynamic Hardware Perspective

Fault tolerance is a remarkable feature of biological systems and their self-repair capability influence modern electronic systems. In this paper, we propose a novel plastic neural network model, which establishes homeostasis in a spiking neural network. Combined with this plasticity and the inspiration from inhibitory interneurons, we develop a fault-resilient robotic controller implemented on an FPGA establishing obstacle avoidance task. We demonstrate the proposed methodology on a spiking neural network implemented on Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. The system is able to maintain stable firing (tolerance ±10%) with a loss of up to 75% of the original synaptic inputs to a neuron. Our repair mechanism has minimal hardware overhead with a tuning circuit (repair unit) which consumes only three slices/neuron for implementing a threshold voltage-based homeostatic fault-tolerant unit. The overall architecture has a minimal impact on power consumption and, therefore, supports scalable implementations. This paper opens a novel way of implementing the behavior of natural fault tolerant system in hardware establishing homeostatic self-repair behavior

Hybrid Societies : Challenges and Perspectives in the Design of Collective Behavior in Self-organizing Systems

Hybrid societies are self-organizing, collective systems, which are composed of different components, for example, natural and artificial parts (bio-hybrid) or human beings interacting with and through technical systems (socio-technical). Many different disciplines investigate methods and systems closely related to the design of hybrid societies. A stronger collaboration between these disciplines could allow for re-use of methods and create significant synergies. We identify three main areas of challenges in the design of self-organizing hybrid societies. First, we identify the formalization challenge. There is an urgent need for a generic model that allows a description and comparison of collective hybrid societies. Second, we identify the system design challenge. Starting from the formal specification of the system, we need to develop an integrated design process. Third, we identify the challenge of interdisciplinarity. Current research on self-organizing hybrid societies stretches over many different fields and hence requires the re-use and synthesis of methods at intersections between disciplines. We then conclude by presenting our perspective for future approaches with high potential in this area

Broadband infrastructure, ICT use and firm performance: evidence for UK firms

The recent economics literature has begun to recognise that ICT is a heterogeneous technology altering information storage, processing and communication in distinct ways. In this paper we use the arrival of a new communication technology, ADSL broadband, to study the effects of heterogeneous types of ICT on firm performance. To do so free from endogeneity bias, we construct instruments using postcode-level geographic variation in the infrastructure underlying broadband internet - the pre-existing telephone network. We show that after placing various restrictions on the sample, instruments based on the timing of ADSL broadband enablement and the cable distance to the local telephone exchange satisfy the conditions for instrument relevancy and validity. We find in turn, that ICT causally affects firm size (captured by either sales or employment) but not productivity