PARETO-IMPROVING WATER MANAGEMENT OVER SPACE AND TIME

Proposals for marginal cost water pricing have often been found to be politically infeasible because current users will have to pay a higher price even though future users will be better off. We show how efficiency pricing can be rendered Pareto-improving, and thus politically feasible, by compensating the users suffering a loss due to higher prices. We also provide a method for determining efficient spatial and inter-temporal water management for a system with consumption at significantly different elevations supplied from a renewable coastal aquifer, which is subject to salinity if over-extracted.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Combine to compete: improving fiscal forecast accuracy over time

Budget forecasts have become increasingly important as a tool of fiscal management to influence expectations of bond markets and the public at large. The inherent difficulty in projecting macroeconomic variables – together with political bias – thwart the accuracy of budget forecasts. We improve accuracy by combining the forecasts of both private and public agencies for Italy over the period 1993-2012. A weighted combined forecast of the deficit/ ratio is superior to any single forecast. Deficits are hard to predict due to shifting economic conditions and political events. We test and compare predictive accuracy over time and although a weighted combined forecast is robust to breaks, there is no significant improvement over a simple RW model

Evaluating the Impact of Charter Schools on Student Achievement: A Longitudinal Look at the Great Lakes States

This study looks at student achievement in math and reading in charter and traditional public schools over a five-year period in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The primary finding is that student achievement in charter schools in these six states is lower than in traditional public schools. The study also finds, however, that student achievement in charter schools is improving over time

Improving Time and Position Resolution of RPC detectors using Time Over Threshold Information

INO-ICAL is a proposed underground particle physics experiment to study the neutrino oscillation parameters by detecting neutrinos produced in the atmospheric air showers. Iron CALorimeter (ICAL) is to have 151 layers of iron stacked vertically, with active detector elements in between the iron layers. The iron layers will be magnetized to enable the measurement of momentum and charge of the $\mu^-$ (or $\mu^+$) produced by $\nu_\mu$ (or $\bar{\nu}_\mu$) interactions. Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) have been chosen as the active detector elements due to their large area coverage, uncompromised sensitivity, consistent performance for decades, as well as cost effectiveness. The major factors that decide the physics potential of the ICAL experiment are efficiency, position resolution and time resolution of the large area RPCs. A prototype detector called miniICAL (with 11 iron layers) was commissioned to understand the engineering challenges in building the large scale magnet and its ancillary systems, and also to study the performance of the RPC detectors and readout electronics developed by the INO collaboration. As part of the performance study of the RPC detectors, an attempt is made to improve the position and time resolution of them. Even a small improvement in the position and time resolution will help to improve the measurements of momentum and directionality of the neutrinos in ICAL. The Time-over-Threshold (ToT) of the RPC pulses (signals) is recorded by the readout electronics. ToT is a measure of the pulse width and consequently the amplitude. This information is used to improve the time and position resolution of the RPCs and consequently INO physics potential

Positive Surgical Margins in the 10 Most Common Solid Cancers.

A positive surgical margin (PSM) following cancer resection oftentimes necessitates adjuvant treatments and carries significant financial and prognostic implications. We sought to compare PSM rates for the ten most common solid cancers in the United States, and to assess trends over time. Over 10 million patients were identified in the National Cancer Data Base from 1998-2012, and 6.5 million had surgical margin data. PSM rates were compared between two time periods, 1998-2002 and 2008-2012. PSM was positively correlated with tumor category and grade. Ovarian and prostate cancers had the highest PSM prevalence in women and men, respectively. The highest PSM rates for cancers affecting both genders were seen for oral cavity tumors. PSM rates for breast cancer and lung and bronchus cancer in both men and women declined over the study period. PSM increases were seen for bladder, colon and rectum, and kidney and renal pelvis cancers. This large-scale analysis appraises the magnitude of PSM in the United States in order to focus future efforts on improving oncologic surgical care with the goal of optimizing value and improving patient outcomes

MEDQUAL: Improving Medical Web Search over Time with Dynamic Credibility Heuristics

Performing a search on the World Wide Web (WWW) and traversing the resulting links is an adventure in which one encounters both credible and incredible web pages. Search engines, such as Google, rely on macroscopic Web topology patterns and even highly ranked 'authoritative' web sites may be a mixture of informed and uninformed opinions. Without credibility heuristics to guide the user in a maze of facts, assertions, and inferences, the Web remains an ineffective knowledge delivery platform. This report presents the design and implementation of a modular extension to the popular Google search engine, MEDQUAL, which provisions both URL and content-based heuristic credibility rules to reorder raw Google rankings in the medical domain. MEDQUAL, a software system written in Java, starts with a bootstrap configuration file which loads in basic heuristics in XML format. It then provides a subscription mechanism so users can join birds of feather specialty groups, for example Pediatrics, in order to load specialized heuristics as well. The platform features a coordination mechanism whereby information seekers can effectively become secondary authors, contributing by consensus vote additional credibility heuristics. MEDQUAL uses standard XML namespace conventions to divide opinion groups so that competing groups can be supported simultaneously. The net effect is a merger of basic and supplied heuristics so that the system continues to adapt and improve itself over time to changing web content, changing opinions, and new opinion groups. The key goal of leveraging the intelligence of a large-scale and diffuse WWW user community is met and we conclude by discussing our plans to develop MEDQUAL further and evaluate it

Pareto-Improving Water Management over Space and Time: The Honolulu Case

Despite a voluminous literature on groundwater management, proposals to induce efficient use through pricing or quantity regulations have often been politically infeasible. The common problem with these proposals is that current users are called on to sacrifice in order that future users will be better off. Although total welfare gains are greater than losses, present users are politically more influential than future users (some of whom are unborn) and are therefore able to block reforms. To avoid this problem of political infeasibility, a mechanism for compensating those who lose welfare due to efficient management can be provided. Compensation possibilities to enhance political feasibility have been discussed in general but have not been explicitly developed in an inter-temporal framework. Using the urban Honolulu water district, our objectives are to: 1) compute the efficient allocation of water across time and across locations, 2) compute efficiency prices needed at the margin to support the efficient allocation as a decentralized equilibrium, 3) simulate the effects of the status quo policy of pricing water at average cost of extraction and distribution, 4) estimate the topographic and temporal distribution of welfare gain/loss to users by switching from the status quo to efficiency pricing, and 5) define a lump sum compensation scheme such that the switch to efficiency pricing causes no user to be a net loser