Costa Rican pension system : options for reform

The Costa Rican Social Insurance Fund - the country's main social security institution - was established in 1941 to provide compulsory social insurance coverage for employees, through old-age, disability, and survivor pensions, as well as sickness and maternity benefits. The current status of the pension system is alarming, and reform is urgently needed. Among other things: 1) the system is costly to the government; 2) it promises generous benefits that are difficult to sustain; 3) contribution rates are low; 4) the link between contributions and benefits is weak; 5) inflation indexing is inadequate and ad hoc; 6) although there is no explicit early retirement system, individuals have found a substitute for early retirement in disability pensions; 7) health benefits to pensioners are paid out of pension contributions; and 8) the system's reserves have not been well invested. Reform of the system should be immediate. At a minimum, reform should include: reduced benefits; higher contribution rates; a higher retirement age; a stronger link between contributions and benefits; and the unbundling of health and pension accounts.Pensions&Retirement Systems,Information Technology,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Pensions&Retirement Systems,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Information Technology

Face Authentication using Speed Fractal Technique

In this paper, a new fractal based recognition method, Face Authentication using Speed Fractal Technique (FAST), is presented. The main contribution is the good compromise between memory requirements, execution time and recognition ratio. FAST is based on Iterated Function Systems (IFS) theory, largely studied in still image compression and indexing, but not yet widely used for face recognition. Indeed, Fractals are well known to be invariant to a large set of global transformations. FAST is robust with respect to meaningful variations in facial expression and to the small changes of illumination and pose. Another advantage of the FAST strategy consists in the speed up that it introduces. The typical slowness of fractal image compression is avoided by exploiting only the indexing phase, which requires time O(D log (D)), where D is the size of the domain pool. Lastly, the FAST algorithm compares well to a large set of other recognition methods, as underlined in the experimental results

Reviving the parameter revolution in semantics

Montague and Kaplan began a revolution in semantics, which promised to explain how a univocal expression could make distinct truth-conditional contributions in its various occurrences. The idea was to treat context as a parameter at which a sentence is semantically evaluated. But the revolution has stalled. One salient problem comes from recurring demonstratives: "He is tall and he is not tall". For the sentence to be true at a context, each occurrence of the demonstrative must make a different truth-conditional contribution. But this difference cannot be accounted for by standard parameter sensitivity. Semanticists, consoled by the thought that this ambiguity would ultimately be needed anyhow to explain anaphora, have been too content to posit massive ambiguities in demonstrative pronouns. This article aims to revived the parameter revolution by showing how to treat demonstrative pronouns as univocal while providing an account of anaphora that doesn't end up re-introducing the ambiguity

Indexing the Event Calculus with Kd-trees to Monitor Diabetes

Personal Health Systems (PHS) are mobile solutions tailored to monitoring patients affected by chronic non communicable diseases. A patient affected by a chronic disease can generate large amounts of events. Type 1 Diabetic patients generate several glucose events per day, ranging from at least 6 events per day (under normal monitoring) to 288 per day when wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that samples the blood every 5 minutes for several days. This is a large number of events to monitor for medical doctors, in particular when considering that they may have to take decisions concerning adjusting the treatment, which may impact the life of the patients for a long time. Given the need to analyse such a large stream of data, doctors need a simple approach towards physiological time series that allows them to promptly transfer their knowledge into queries to identify interesting patterns in the data. Achieving this with current technology is not an easy task, as on one hand it cannot be expected that medical doctors have the technical knowledge to query databases and on the other hand these time series include thousands of events, which requires to re-think the way data is indexed. In order to tackle the knowledge representation and efficiency problem, this contribution presents the kd-tree cached event calculus (\ceckd) an event calculus extension for knowledge engineering of temporal rules capable to handle many thousands events produced by a diabetic patient. \ceckd\ is built as a support to a graphical interface to represent monitoring rules for diabetes type 1. In addition, the paper evaluates the \ceckd\ with respect to the cached event calculus (CEC) to show how indexing events using kd-trees improves scalability with respect to the current state of the art.Comment: 24 pages, preliminary results calculated on an implementation of CECKD, precursor to Journal paper being submitted in 2017, with further indexing and results possibilities, put here for reference and chronological purposes to remember how the idea evolve

Theoretical X-ray absorption spectroscopy database analysis for oxidised 2D carbon nanomaterials

In this work we provide a proof of principle for a theoretical methodology to identify functionalisation patterns in oxidised carbon 2D nanomaterials. The methodology is based on calculating a large number of X-ray absorption spectra of individually excited carbon atoms in different chemical environments using density functional theory. Since each resulting spectrum gives a fingerprint of the local electronic structure surrounding the excited atom, we may relate each spectrum to the functionalisation pattern of that excited atom up to a desired neighbourhood radius. These functionalisation pattern-specific spectra are collected in a database, that allows fast composition of X-ray absorption spectra for arbitrary structures in density functional theory quality. Finally, we present an exemplary application of the database approach to estimate the relative amount of functional groups in two different experimental samples of carbon nanomaterials

An indexing model for stormwater quality assessment: stormwater management in the Gold Coast

In the age of climate change and rapid urbanisation, stormwater management and water sensitive urban design have become important issues for urban policy makers. This paper reports the initial findings of a research study that develops an indexing model for assessing stormwater quality in the Gold Coast

Post processing of multimedia information - concepts, problems, and techniques

Currently, most research work on multimedia information processing is focused on multimedia information storage and retrieval, especially indexing and content-based access of multimedia information. We consider multimedia information processing should include one more level-post-processing. Here &quot;post-processing&quot; means further processing of retrieved multimedia information, which includes fusion of multimedia information and reasoning with multimedia information to reach new conclusions. In this paper, the three levels of multimedia information processing storage, retrieval, and post-processing- are discussed. The concepts and problems of multimedia information post-processing are identified. Potential techniques that can be used in post-processing are suggested, By highlighting the problems in multimedia information post-processing, hopefully this paper will stimulate further research on this important but ignored topic.<br /