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Limited by the types of sensors, the state information available for musculoskeletal robots with highly redundant, nonlinear muscles is often incomplete, which makes the control face a bottleneck problem. The aim of this paper is to design a method to improve the motion performance of musculoskeletal robots in partially observable scenarios, and to leverage the ontology knowledge to enhance the algorithm’s adaptability to musculoskeletal robots that have undergone changes.

A memory and attention-based reinforcement learning method is proposed for musculoskeletal robots with prior knowledge of muscle synergies. First, to deal with partially observed states available to musculoskeletal robots, a memory and attention-based network architecture is proposed for inferring more sufficient and intrinsic states. Second, inspired by muscle synergy hypothesis in neuroscience, prior knowledge of a musculoskeletal robot’s muscle synergies is embedded in network structure and reward shaping.

Based on systematic validation, it is found that the proposed method demonstrates superiority over the traditional twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradients (TD3) algorithm. A musculoskeletal robot with highly redundant, nonlinear muscles is adopted to implement goal-directed tasks. In the case of 21-dimensional states, the learning efficiency and accuracy are significantly improved compared with the traditional TD3 algorithm; in the case of 13-dimensional states without velocities and information from the end effector, the traditional TD3 is unable to complete the reaching tasks, while the proposed method breaks through this bottleneck problem.

In this paper, a novel memory and attention-based reinforcement learning method with prior knowledge of muscle synergies is proposed for musculoskeletal robots to deal with partially observable scenarios. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed method effectively improves the performance. Furthermore, this paper promotes the fusion of neuroscience and robotics.

The purpose of this article is to challenge the balanced budget practices of U.S. state governments and offer alternatives that may lead to better fiscal, economic and policy outcomes. We contend that the norm of balance may be leading U.S. states to make fiscal decisions that result in less-than-ideal outcomes, especially during economic downturns.

This is a normative article. We examine the scholarly evidence regarding balanced budget practices to assess the appropriateness of balanced budget norms. We also examine the fiscal rules followed by Eurozone countries to draw potential lessons for U.S. states.

We conclude that state governments should move away from strict norms of budget balance and seek more flexible approaches. We suggest that instead of following strict rules and norms of balance, U.S. states should consider implementing escape clauses, debt and deficit ceilings, and fiscal councils. We also suggest that the Federal Reserve be open to lending directly to states during fiscal crises to ensure that states have access to affordable credit.

The balanced budget norm has become ingrained in U.S. state budgeting practices, so much so that public officials and scholars alike rarely question it. The novel contribution of our article is to question this practice in a systematic way and propose alternative approaches.

Public-private partnership (PPP) highway projects in India are undertaken at both state and national levels, such that differences exist in how the procuring authorities manage project risk during the development and construction phase under different institutional frameworks. This study assesses the performance implication of the different administrative positionings of the procuring authority.

A data set of 516 PPP highway projects implemented in India formed the basis of this study. Means comparison, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and seemingly unrelated regression were used to assess the impact of procuring authority on schedule performance.

The findings suggest that the state and the national highway projects were no different in achieving financial closure. However, the administrative positioning of the procuring authorities had a significant impact on other schedule performance variables. The construction of the state highway projects started quickly after the financial closure compared to the national highway projects. Moreover, the state highway projects were not only planned to be implemented at a faster rate but they were actually implemented at a faster rate and had a lower time overrun.

Procuring authorities under the state governments, being closer to the project, are better placed to manage project risk than those under the national government.

The administrative distance of the procuring authority from the PPP project and its implication on performance has never been studied.

The COVID19 crisis has thrown wide open the debate on Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union’s (EMU) future. Next Generation EU (NGEU) has broken the stalemate over a central fiscal capacity. The open question is whether NGEU is a one-off or a first step. The suspension of the Stability and Growth Pact has given new urgency to the debate on reforming EMU’s fiscal rules.

There is no debate as yet about how these two prospects relate to each other. This paper argues that a permanent fiscal capacity and revised rules should be seen as alternatives.

This study makes two claims: first, a fiscal capacity renders a reformed pact unnecessary and second, that is an optimal solution politically. A fiscal capacity would provide an efficient asymmetric shock absorber and therefore reduce the need for pre-emptive action against negative cross-border externalities. It would also provide an abundant supply of an EU-wide safe asset around which to structure the EU’s financial system, thus rendering unnecessary the backstopping of member states' debts.

This would restore democratic accountability while eliminating moral hazard and enforcement problems.

Since the core issue of Chinese economics is to elucidate the logical relationship between socialism and the market economy, it necessitates a robust foundation for microeconomic analysis to uncover the behavioral patterns and characteristics of microeconomic agents in a socialist market economy and identify the conditions and methods for the functioning of market mechanisms.

The core issue of microeconomics with Chinese characteristics is to identify the economic logic of how market mechanisms play a decisive role in resource allocation under the basic socialist economic system based on China's reform.

The core issue in building the foundation of microeconomic analysis of Chinese economics is addressing the compatibility issue between SOEs and a market economy.

In the author’s view, this can be achieved under the logic of classified reform so as to build the microeconomic foundation for the effective functioning of a socialist market economy.

Public Act 95‐234, An Act Establishing a Commu‐nications Grant Program for Schools and Libraries and the Connecticut Library Network was passed by the Connecticut General Assembly in 1995. This act directs the Connecticut State Library to plan and develop the Connecticut Library Network (CLN). The act specifies that the CLN shall 1) be an expansion of the State Library's existing statewide database, 2) have the potential to link all school, public, and academic libraries and municipal government offices, and 3) for the purpose of making the State Library's information resources accessible through the state via the network, incorporate the linkage of the State Library to the library automation system of the Connecticut State University.

‐‐ The purpose of this paper is to identify internet resources that offer comparisons of the 50 US states in various subject areas.Design/methodology/approach ‐‐ Organizations, agencies, and businesses offering state comparisons as part of multi‐ or single‐topic presentations are included as an overview of available resources.Findings ‐‐ Many reliable, detailed, current, and usable comparison statistics are available on a variety of issues and subjects for all 50 states.Originality/value ‐‐ Awareness of these resources is of value to librarians assisting students and researchers. Familiarity with the variety of state comparison web resources freely available facilitates ease of information location for librarians, students, and researchers.

The authors consider parallel four-state tandem open queueing network. The queue capacity is infinite. Passenger arrival rate is Poisson distribution and service rate is exponential distribution. The queue is constructed in the form of tandem queue, and each and every queue of tandem queue is single server (M/M/1) queue. In tandem queue, passengers will leave the system once they receive service from both the states. The purpose of this paper is to provide performance analysis for four-state tandem open queue network, and a governing equation is formulated with the help of transition diagram. Using Burke theorem, the authors formulated equation for average number of passenger in the system, average waiting time of passenger in the system, average number of passenger in the queue and average waiting time of passenger in the queue.

This paper used Burke’s theorem.

In this paper, performance analysis is done for parallel four-state tandem open queueing network and performance measure solved using Burkes theorem formula. K. Sreekanth et al. has done performance analysis for single tandem queue with three states. In this paper, the authors have done performance analysis for two tandem queues parallel with four states. This four-state tandem open queueing network is suitable for real world applications. This paper can extend for more number of service states and multi-server states according to the application, and in such case, the authors have to prove and explain with numerical examples. This analysis is more useful for the applications such as airports, railway stations, bus-stands and banks.

In this paper, parallel four-state tandem open queueing network and performance measure has been solved using Burke’s theorem formula.

A common justification for state term commodity contracts is that they are beneficial to taxpayers because of savings that result from the price concessions expected from volume purchasing. With the growing popularity of performance based budgeting in state legislatures, there is a clear need for performance measures to document these taxpayer benefits. Based on a survey of state purchasing offices and a review of the major purchasing associations and the academic literature, this paper develops guidelines and a set of performance measures for evaluating the financial benefits of state term commodity contracts.

Outlines the efforts of the State Library of North Carolina to provide access to the Internet and to electronic information resources for libraries in the state. The major challenge of finding a cost‐effective alternative to its statewide network, which was terminated by a 1993 legislative mandate, has led to opportunities to provide better services and resources by switching public libraries to point‐to‐point protocol (PPP) accounts and by migrating the State library’s information resources to an Internet‐accessible workstation.