A comparison of two legislative approaches to the pay-as-you-go pension system in terms of adequacy. The Italian case

The aim of our work is to evaluate a new legislative proposal of the Italian pension system due to Giuliano Cazzola e Tiziano Treu and to compare it with the system in force due to former Minister Elsa Fornero. The evaluation is made in terms of adequacy. We make use of a mathematical model which, under the hypothesis of demographic equilibrium, formalizes the legislative changes of the pay-as-you-go pension system. The model is tested using Italian demographic and socio-economic data.The pay-as-you-go pension system in force is notional defined contribution and has the huge drawback that the replacement rate (the ratio between the monthly pension and the last wage perceived by the worker) is very low. We compare the two pension systems evaluating the dynamics of the replacement rate.     

Establishment of heterodinuclear replacement complexation and its application to direct determination of iron in natural water with dibromo-o-nitrophenylfluorone

The chromophore dibromo-o-nitrophenylfluorone (DBNPF) was used to complex Fe(III) and Cu(II) at pH 5.88. Fe(III) can competitively replace Cu(II) from its dinuclear complex Cu(DBNPF)Cu, and forms the Cu(DBNPF)Fe heterodinuclear complex. The Fe-DBNPF and Cu-DBNPF complexes were also characterized by the spectral correction technique. The heterodinuclear replacement complexation (HRC) is proposed and first used for the quantitative detection of iron in trace level with high sensitivity and good selectivity by the light-absorption ratio variation approach. The limit of detection of Fe is 1.0 μg L⁻¹. The method has been successfully applied to the direct determination of Fe(II, III) dissolved and bound to suspended substances in natural water.     

Design of Potent Mannose 6‐Phosphate Analogues for the Functionalization of Lysosomal Enzymes To Improve the Treatment of Pompe Disease

Improving therapeutics delivery in enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) for lysosomal storage disorders is a challenge. Herein, we present the synthesis of novel analogues of mannose 6‐phosphate (M6P), known as AMFAs and functionalized at the anomeric position for enzyme grafting. AMFAs are non‐phosphate serum‐resistant derivatives that efficiently bind the cation‐independent mannose 6‐phosphate receptor (CI‐M6PR), which is the main pathway to address enzymes to lysosomes. One of the AMFAs was used to improve the treatment of the lysosomal myopathy Pompe disease, in which acid α‐glucosidase (GAA) is defective. AMFA grafting on a M6P‐free recombinant GAA led to a higher uptake of the GAA in adult Pompe fibroblasts in culture as compared to Myozyme, the M6P recombinant GAA. Moreover, the treatment of Pompe adult mice with the AMFA‐grafted recombinant enzyme led to a remarkable improvement, even at low doses, in muscle functionality and regeneration, whereas Myozyme had limited efficacy.     

Categorical Approach to Horizontal Structuring and Refinement of High-Level Replacement Systems

Based on the well-known theory of high-level replacement systems – a categorical formulation of graph grammars – we present new results concerning refinement of high-level replacement systems. Motivated by Petri nets, where refinement is often given by morphisms, we give a categorical notion of refinement. This concept is called Q-transformations and is established within the framework of high-level replacement systems. The main idea is to supply rules with an additional morphism, which belongs to a specific class Q of morphisms. This leads to the new notions of Q-rules and Q-transformations. Moreover, several concepts and results of high-level replacement systems are extended to Q-transformations. These are sequential and parallel transformations, union, and fusion, based on different colimit constructions. The main results concern the compatibility of these constructions with Q-transformations that is the corresponding theorems for usual transformations are extended to Q-transformations. Finally, we demonstrate the application of these techniques for the special case of Petri nets to a case study concerning the requirements engineering of a medical information system.     

竞争环境下基于退换货的网购供应链动态均衡研究

研究竞争环境下基于退换货的网购供应链动态均衡模型.此供应链包含多个生产商、电商、快递商及需求市场.将快递商的运输速度作为竞争的一个重要因素进行研究.通过正弦函数说明,网购供应链的市场需求也呈季节性变化.利用纳什均衡及变分不等式得到各层决策者的竞争均衡解.通过分析换货比重得出电商应减少消费者的退货率,以提高整条供应链的利润和竞争能力.并利用数值算例说明模型的正确性与合理性.     

An optimal control problem in estimating the cooling condition for a cemented hip replacement system

An optimal control problem utilizing the Levenberg–Marquardt method (LMM) is examined in this study to determine the unknown optimal control heat flux function for a cemented hip replacement system based on the desired temperature distributions at the cement–bone interface to prevent the death of bone tissues. The validation of this optimal control problem is verified by using the numerical experiments. Results show that an optimal control function can be obtained using the present algorithm for the test cases considered in this work to reduce the temperature variation and to save the bone tissues at the cement–bone interface.     

Optimal periodic replacement policy for repairable products under free-repair warranty

This paper investigates the effects of a free-repair warranty on the periodic replacement policy for a repairable product. Cost models are developed for both a warranted and a non-warranted product, and the corresponding optimal periodic replacement policies are derived such that the long-run expected cost rate is minimized. For a product with an increasing failure rate function, structural properties of these optimal policies are obtained. By comparing these optimal policies, we show that the optimal replacement period for a warranted product should be adjusted toward the end of the warranty period. Finally, examples are given to numerically illustrate the impact of a product warranty on the optimal periodic replacement policy.     

On Conservative Confidence Intervals

The subject of the paper – (conservative) confidence intervals – originates in applications to auditing. Auditors are interested in upper confidence bounds for an unknown mean for all sample sizes n. The samples are drawn from populations such that often only a few observations are nonzero. The conditional distribution of an observation given that it is nonzero usually has a very irregular shape. However, it can be assumed that observations are bounded. We propose a way to reduce the problem to inequalities for tail probabilities of certain relevant statistics. Note that a traditional approach involving limit theorems forces to impose additional conditions on regularity of samples and leads to approximate or asymptotic bounds. In the case of , as a statistic we can use sample mean, say , and we have to use Hoeffding [7] inequalities, since currently they are the best available. This leads to upper confidence bounds for which are of (asymptotic) size at most in the case of risk =0.05, where is the unknown standard deviation. We have , where is the bound in a model with normally distributed observations. It seems that the bound is very robust and can be improved replacing Hoeffding's inequalities by more refined ones. The commonly used Stringer bound (it is still not known whether it is an upper confidence bound) is of asymptotic size c with equality only for Bernoulli distributions, and the ratio c / can be arbitrary large already for rather simple distributions. Our bounds can involve a priori information (professional judgment of an auditor) of type ₀ or/and ₀, which leads to improvements. Most of the results also hold for sampling without replacement from finite populations. The i.i.d. condition can be replaced by a martingale-type dependence assumption. Finally, the results can be extended to the noni.i.d. case and for settings with several samples.     

Comparison of Sampling Schemes with and without Replacement

An urn contains colored balls, ~balls of each of different colors. The balls are drawn sequentially and equiprobably, one ball at a time, and then each drawn ball drawn is either returned to the urn (sampling with replacement) or left outside the urn (sampling without replacement). The drawing continues until some colors are drawn at least ~times each. Observable statistics are the numbers , , of colors that have appeared precisely ~times each by the stopping time. The asymptotic behavior as of these values for each of the two sampling models is studied; the possibility of their use for identifying the model is discussed.