367,027 research outputs found

    Where in the world are you ? Assessing the importance of circumstance and effort in a world of different mean country incomes and (almost) no migration

    Get PDF
    Suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics: country where they live and income class within that country. Assume further that there is no migration. This paper shows that 90 percent of variability in people's global income position (percentile in world income distribution) is explained by only these two pieces of information. Mean country income (circumstance) explains 60 percent, and income class (both circumstance and effort) 30 percent of global income position. The author finds that about two-thirds of the latter number is due to circumstance (approximated by the estimated parental income class under various social mobility assumptions), which makes the overall share of circumstance unlikely to be less than 75-80 percent. On average,"drawing"one-notch higher income class (on a twenty-class scale) is equivalent to living in a 12 percent richer country. Once people are allocated their income class, it becomes important, not only whether the country they are allocated to is rich or poor, but whether it is egalitarian or not. This is particularly important for the people who"draw"low or high classes; for the middle classes, the country's income distribution is much less important than mean country income.Inequality,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Income,Poverty Diagnostics

    Retrieving with good sense

    Get PDF
    Although always present in text, word sense ambiguity only recently became regarded as a problem to information retrieval which was potentially solvable. The growth of interest in word senses resulted from new directions taken in disambiguation research. This paper first outlines this research and surveys the resulting efforts in information retrieval. Although the majority of attempts to improve retrieval effectiveness were unsuccessful, much was learnt from the research. Most notably a notion of under what circumstance disambiguation may prove of use to retrieval

    Travel choices in Scotland - the effect of local accessibility on non-work travel

    Get PDF
    Accessibility features prominently in the developing transport policies of both the United Kingdom Government and the devolved Scottish Executive which aim to promote social inclusion in particular and the integration of transport and land use planning more generally. It follows that a detailed understanding of the relationship between accessibility, personal mobility and travel behaviour is critical to the successful implementation of these policies. This paper presents the results of a disaggregate, multi-variate analysis of the Scottish Household Survey (SHS) dataset and attempts to unravel the complex relationship between socio-economical circumstance, geographical access to local services and public transport and revealed non-work travel choices. The socio-economical and geographical diversity of Scotland offers an excellent opportunity to undertake an analysis of this nature. The SHS is a continuous, cross-sectional survey funded by the Scottish Executive and undertaken by face-to-face interview based on a sample of the general population in private residences in Scotland. It seeks to provide information on the composition, characteristics and behaviour of Scottish households. The survey collects information in two parts - firstly the highest income householder provides household level data including household composition and income, key attributes of household members, transport resources available to the household including access to public transport; secondly a randomly selected adult from the household provides information on inter alia personal travel (including the completion of a one-day travel diary on the previous day) and personal views on transport, the neighbourhood and local services. The dataset analysed in this paper was collected between 1999 and 2003 and contains over 75,000 surveyed households and over 49,000 completed travel diaries. Two other variables were matched with the residential location of SHS respondents and added to the dataset; namely, an index representing proximity to local services at electoral ward level derived in the Scottish Indices of Deprivation 2003 study and a locational classification for each respondent which captures settlement size and wider regional accessibility. The primary focus of the analysis presented in this paper is an examination of the extent to which the quality of local access to services affects distance travelled for non-work purposes. Within this analysis individual and household socio-economical circumstance, available transport resources (both car ownership and local access to public transport) and the wider regional geographical context are also taken into account. It is hypothesised that good local access is negatively associated with distance travelled and that there also exists the possibility of significant interaction between local access and socio-economical circumstance and available transport resources. Regression models are developed for non-work travel which test the statistical significance of these explanatory variables. The results of the analysis reported here will add to the existing evidence base on the relationship between accessibility and travel choice. Its conclusions are expected to inform the development of strategies to enhance social inclusion and reduce overall travel which are tailored to socio-economical and geographical circumstance

    Identifying harmonic attributes from online partial discharge data

    Get PDF
    Partial discharge (PD) monitoring is a key method of tracking fault progression and degradation of insulation systems. Recent research discovered that the harmonic regime experienced by the plant also affects the PD pattern, questioning the conclusions about equipment health drawn from PD data. This paper presents the design and creation of an online system for harmonic circumstance monitoring of distribution cables, using only PD data. Based on machine learning techniques, the system can assess the prevalence of the 5th and 7th harmonic orders over the monitoring period. This information is key for asset managers to draw correct conclusions about the remaining life of polymeric cable insulation, and prevent overestimation of the degradation trend
    corecore