How is disaster aid allocated within poor villages?

How disaster aid is allocated within poor villages is little understood. This paper examines risk-sharing institutions and social hierarchies as village self-allocation mechanisms. Original survey data from Fiji contain rich information about cyclone damage, traditional kin status, and aid allocations over post-disaster phases, at both household and kin-group levels. The paper shows under what conditions the performance of targeting aid to victims can significantly differ from overall risk-sharing outcomes determined by private transfers and aid (i.e., targeting gap). Elite domination can occur not only in aid allocation independent of damage, but also in targeting on damage (i.e., targeting bias).

Associative access in persistent object stores : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Sciences in Information Systems at Massey University

Page 276 missing from original copy.The overall aim of the thesis is to study associative access in a Persistent Object Store (POS) providing necessary object storage and retrieval capabilities to an Object Oriented Database System (OODBS) (Delis, Kanitkar & Kollios, 1998 cited in Kirchberg & Tretiakov, 2002). Associative access in an OODBS often includes navigational access to referenced or referencing objects of the object being accessed (Kim. Kim. & Dale. 1989). The thesis reviews several existing approaches proposed to support associative and navigational access in an OODBS. It was found that the existing approaches proposed for associative access could not perform well when queries involve multiple paths or inheritance hierarchies. The thesis studies how associative access can be supported in a POS regardless of paths or inheritance hierarchies involved with a query. The thesis proposes extensions to a model of a POS such that approaches that are proposed for navigational access can be used to support associative access in the extended POS. The extensions include (1) approaches to cluster storage objects in a POS on their storage classes or values of attributes, and (2) approaches to distinguish references between storage objects in a POS based on criteria such as reference types - inheritance and association, storage classes of referenced storage objects or referencing storage objects, and reference names. The thesis implements Matrix-Index Coding (MIC) approach with the extended POS by several coding techniques. The implementation demonstrates that (1) a model of a POS extended by proposed extensions is capable of supporting associative access in an OODBS and (2) the MIC implemented with the extended POS can support a query that requires associative access in an OODBS and involves multiple paths or inheritance hierarchies. The implementation also provides proof of the concepts suggested by Kirchberg & Tretiakov (2002) that (1) the MIC can be made independent from a coding technique, and (2) data compression techniques should be considered as appropriate alternatives to implement the MIC because they could reduce the storage size required

Precision Test of Quark Mass Textures: A Model Independent Approach

Using a Monte Carlo method, we have directly extracted from the available measurements, the hierarchies among the different elements of the quark mass matrices. To do that, we have first introduced a model independent parameterization for two generic class of models: those based on Abelian symmetries and those inspired by a U(2) horizontal symmetry. So, matrix entries are proportional to some epsilon^t, with epsilon<<1 and the t's are different free exponents that we determine from the data through a statistically well defined procedure. We have found that the experimental data poorly constrain the Abelian scenarios. Instead, in non Abelian scenarios, these t-exponents are strongly constrained by the present data. We have found that contrary to a naive U(2) horizontal symmetry expectation, quark mass matrices turn out to be not symmetric. Two solutions emerge: one with M_{32}^{{down}}>> M_{23}^{down}} and M_{21}^{up}>> M_{12}^{{up}}; and a second one with slight asymmetries only in the light quark sector, namely M_{21}^{up} < M_{12}^{up} and M_{21}^{down}>M_{12}^{down}.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figure

Extracting tag hierarchies

Tagging items with descriptive annotations or keywords is a very natural way to compress and highlight information about the properties of the given entity. Over the years several methods have been proposed for extracting a hierarchy between the tags for systems with a "flat", egalitarian organization of the tags, which is very common when the tags correspond to free words given by numerous independent people. Here we present a complete framework for automated tag hierarchy extraction based on tag occurrence statistics. Along with proposing new algorithms, we are also introducing different quality measures enabling the detailed comparison of competing approaches from different aspects. Furthermore, we set up a synthetic, computer generated benchmark providing a versatile tool for testing, with a couple of tunable parameters capable of generating a wide range of test beds. Beside the computer generated input we also use real data in our studies, including a biological example with a pre-defined hierarchy between the tags. The encouraging similarity between the pre-defined and reconstructed hierarchy, as well as the seemingly meaningful hierarchies obtained for other real systems indicate that tag hierarchy extraction is a very promising direction for further research with a great potential for practical applications.Comment: 25 pages with 21 pages of supporting information, 25 figure

Multiple hierarchies : new aspects of an old solution

In this paper, we present the Multiple Annotation approach, which solves two problems: the problem of annotating overlapping structures, and the problem that occurs when documents should be annotated according to different, possibly heterogeneous tag sets. This approach has many advantages: it is based on XML, the modeling of alternative annotations is possible, each level can be viewed separately, and new levels can be added at any time. The files can be regarded as an interrelated unit, with the text serving as the implicit link. Two representations of the information contained in the multiple files (one in Prolog and one in XML) are described. These representations serve as a base for several applications