Hybrid Approach for the Maintenance of Materialized Webviews

In this paper, we have developed an approach to specify when updating materialized webviews. A webview is a web page that is automatically constructed from a structured database. We have introduced a new update policy called “early ondemand” update which is based on the user preferences. Then we have combines this policy with the on-demand one to update the materialized webviews. Our experiments showed that the proposed hybrid approach guarantees strong consistency of data and allows reducing latency of updating webviews. In addition, they prove that our solution decreases the server overload (access+ update cost) significantly better that the on-demand and the immediate policies

Aging Watch, April 20, 2012, Vol. 12, no. 1

The reintroduction of the Iowa Department on Aging legislative and policy update, now known as “Aging Watch.” The Department is providing this update to better inform you about policy affecting older Iowans. In addition to policy updates from the statehouse and the nation’s capitol, you’ll learn about Department programs and changes affecting the landscape. As you’ll learn reading this and future editions, big changes are coming for the Iowa Aging Network. Over the next year the Department will be reducing the number of local Area Agencies on Aging, as required by legislative action. Not surprisingly, this is a major change for everyone

Delegation in a Cheap-Talk Game: A Voting Example

Suppose an agent is contemplating an action with state-contingent payoffs, and has a prior belief about the probability of the states. She hires an expert to update her priors before the action. Experts may be both informed as well as uninformed, and are not necessarily truthful. The question asked in this paper is when, if at all, is it better for the agent to assign the task of playing with experts and deciding on the action to another agent with a different set of priors. In particular, can an agent increase her payoff in a cheap-talk game by delegating to others to play on her behalf? This paper shows that such profitable delegation is possible and characterizes the agents to whom a given agent may delegate the responsibility. While this generic problem can arise in many contexts, we have chosen to model it in a simple voting situation where the electoral issue is whether a certain policy with contingent outcomes should or should not be implemented. Voters have different priors about probable states of the world, and hence their expected pay-offs from the policy vary. The elected decision-maker can use the institution of an advisor before deciding whether to implement the policy. We show that unless the median voter has very sure beliefs about the probable states, she would be better off getting someone else elected than herself as the decision-maker. In particular, if the median is predisposed to (against) the policy action, she would be better off choosing a candidate more (less) pro-action than herself. The optimal choice of the decision-maker is shown to depend on the cost of misdirected policy, i.e. of implementing it when it is actually unwarranted.Delegation; cheap-talk games; median voter; Bayesian updating