Innovation of extraordinary chefs : development process or systemic phenomenon?

A highly rated current study on culinary innovation was found to be too product- and service-oriented and narrow, more appropriate to describe the culinary craft than the culinary art Creativity seems to be put into a box and is sold as a well-structured task. Creativity, however, is an ill-structured problem solving and a systemic phenomenon. It requires social validation from the gatekeepers of the domain and if accepted changes an existing domain or transforms an existing domain into a new one. These theoretical findings were supported by selected empirical data from 19 phenomenological interviews with extraordinary chefs from the UK, France, Spain, Austria and Germany. It emerged from the interview analysis that culinary innovation is more than just product or service development and that extraordinary chefs use ill-structured problem solving. Finally, it was shown that the field and the domain have significant influence on the individual chef and her/his creations

Multiple Different Explanations for Image Classifiers

Existing explanation tools for image classifiers usually give only one single explanation for an image. For many images, however, both humans and image classifiers accept more than one explanation for the image label. Thus, restricting the number of explanations to just one severely limits the insight into the behavior of the classifier. In this paper, we describe an algorithm and a tool, REX, for computing multiple explanations of the output of a black-box image classifier for a given image. Our algorithm uses a principled approach based on causal theory. We analyse its theoretical complexity and provide experimental results showing that REX finds multiple explanations on 7 times more images than the previous work on the ImageNet-mini benchmark

Letter from Mary Barr Munroe to John Muir, [ca. 1909 ?].

[in margin: 331] The [illegible]bs Dear Mr. MuirNo one was ever more delighted at receiving a remembrance than I was when I found your promised book among my mail one morning just before Christmas thank you and I do not believe that anyone ever enjoyed a talk with you more than I did, not even Professor Sargent himself.You made me, again04376 proud of being a Scotch woman but of that I am proud everyday. How I should delight to seeing you again, I hope I shall.Mr Munroe wishes to be remembered most kindly as I do, and believe me John Muiryour sincerefriend and admirerMary Barr MunroeCocoanut GroveFall CoFlorida P.O. Box 178

A portfolio approach to massively parallel Bayesian optimization

One way to reduce the time of conducting optimization studies is to evaluate designs in parallel rather than just one-at-a-time. For expensive-to-evaluate black-boxes, batch versions of Bayesian optimization have been proposed. They work by building a surrogate model of the black-box that can be used to select the designs to evaluate efficiently via an infill criterion. Still, with higher levels of parallelization becoming available, the strategies that work for a few tens of parallel evaluations become limiting, in particular due to the complexity of selecting more evaluations. It is even more crucial when the black-box is noisy, necessitating more evaluations as well as repeating experiments. Here we propose a scalable strategy that can keep up with massive batching natively, focused on the exploration/exploitation trade-off and a portfolio allocation. We compare the approach with related methods on deterministic and noisy functions, for mono and multiobjective optimization tasks. These experiments show similar or better performance than existing methods, while being orders of magnitude faster

THE EFFECT OF CHANGING-SPEED ON THE TOE HEIGHT ON TREADMILL RUNNING

The purpose of this investigation is to observe the differences of foot trajectory when having changing-speed running in treadmill. Subjects running on a treadmill at three different speeds and performing a dynamic data from the mark in toe box and heel counter. The result shows that with increased speed the first peak toe height just after toe-off and toe clearance (TC) increased significantly, and decreased significantly with decreased speed. The result has significant different from walking. In addition, one of four subjects has more obvious foot flat than other subjects. The reason of this phenomenon is still unclear, and we still expect that there will be more studies to establish the treadmill exercise model

Minimizing Supervision in Multi-label Categorization

Multiple categories of objects are present in most images. Treating this as a multi-class classification is not justified. We treat this as a multi-label classification problem. In this paper, we further aim to minimize the supervision required for providing supervision in multi-label classification. Specifically, we investigate an effective class of approaches that associate a weak localization with each category either in terms of the bounding box or segmentation mask. Doing so improves the accuracy of multi-label categorization. The approach we adopt is one of active learning, i.e., incrementally selecting a set of samples that need supervision based on the current model, obtaining supervision for these samples, retraining the model with the additional set of supervised samples and proceeding again to select the next set of samples. A crucial concern is the choice of the set of samples. In doing so, we provide a novel insight, and no specific measure succeeds in obtaining a consistently improved selection criterion. We, therefore, provide a selection criterion that consistently improves the overall baseline criterion by choosing the top k set of samples for a varied set of criteria. Using this criterion, we are able to show that we can retain more than 98% of the fully supervised performance with just 20% of samples (and more than 96% using 10%) of the dataset on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012. Also, our proposed approach consistently outperforms all other baseline metrics for all benchmark datasets and model combinations.Comment: Accepted in CVPR-W 202

Poor pricing progress: price disclosure isn’t the answer to high drug prices

This report argues that Australia has a long way to go before consumers pay fair prices for pharmaceuticals.OverviewGrattan Institute’s March 2013 report, Australia’s bad drug deal, showed that Australians paid more than $1 billion a year too much for prescription drugs. The problem is how the government sets prices. Vested interests are involved in price negotiations, there is no cap on expenditure, and the price cuts when a drug goes off patent are far smaller than in many other countries.The problem hasn’t gone away. Current policies aren’t doing nearly enough to bring prices down. In December, the Commonwealth Government’s “price disclosure” policy led to price cuts for seven generic drugs. Price disclosure tracks discounts that manufacturers and wholesalers give to pharmacies. Then the government cuts prices to reflect what pharmacies actually pay.The price cuts in December averaged 34 per cent. In three cases the cuts were big enough to reduce out-of-pocket costs for patients. As a result patients without a concession now save around$5 for each box of pills.That sounds like a lot. But this report compares prices after these cuts with prices in the UK, New Zealand and the Canadian province of Ontario. On average, Australian prices remain almost 16 times higher than the best price in these three places. Our prices are more than 14 times higher than those in the UK.High prices are very costly for taxpayers and for consumers. Many Australians pay both through their taxes and then at the pharmacy.Once again, benchmarking against prices in other countries would get a much better deal. Of the seven drugs that had their prices reduced in December, patients would pay less for all of them, instead of just three. The out-of-pocket saving would also be much higher, averaging more than $21 per drug.The money we spend on high drug prices could be much better spent. But this isn’t just about saving money. Almost one in 10 Australians don’t take their prescribed medicine because of the cost. Better prices would help more people to buy the medicine they need.The Government should take three steps to cut the extremely high prices we pay for generic drugs. First, it should ask the Department of Health to release annual international comparisons of Australia’s drug prices. Everyone would then be able to see whether we are getting value for money.Second, when the current pricing agreement expires in July next year, there should be one-off benchmarking to get fair market prices. Finally, an independent drug pricing body should be established to make sure prices stay low in the future

Distribution of Agricultural NRAs across Countries and Products, 1955-84 and 1985-2007

The global database developed as an integral part of the World Bank's research project on Distortions to Agricultural Incentives, which is publicly available at www.worldbank.org/agdistortions, provides around 30,000 estimates of nominal rates of assistance to agricultural industries (NRAs) and associated consumer tax equivalents for 75 countries that together account for between 90 and 95 percent of the world’s population, farmers, agricultural output and total GDP. They also account for more than 85 percent of farm production and employment in each of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the transition economies of Europe and Central Asia as well as all OECD countries. More than 70 products are included (an average of 11 per country), which represents around 70 percent of the gross value of agricultural production in each of the focus countries, and just under two-thirds of global farm production valued at undistorted prices over the period covered. Not all countries had data for all of the entire 1955-2007 period, but the average number of years covered is 41 per country. This paper provides details of the coverage of the database. It also summarizes the distributions of the NRAs by showing two sets of Box plots for 1955-84 and 1985-2007, one set for various regions of the world, the other for all the covered products for each focus country.Distorted incentives, agricultural and trade policy reforms, national agricultural development, Agricultural price and trade policies, nominal rates of assistance, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade, F13, F14, Q17, Q18, F59, H20, N50, O13,

The UK Code of Corpoate Governance Link between Compliance and Firm Performance

Listed companies in the UK are required to comply or give reasons for non-compliance with the recommendations of the UK code of corporate governance called ‘The Combined Code’. Prior studies investigating the relationship between compliance and firm performance have found the link to be either non-existent or at best weak. This study, taking a more holistic view of compliance develops an index of non-compliance for a panel of FTSE 350 companies for four years (2000 -2003 inclusive). Using total shareholder return (TSR) i.e. the sum of capital gain and dividend yield, as the main measure of firm performance, we find that the Index is inversely related to the TSR, implying that more compliant firms enjoy higher TSR in our sample of companies. Contrary to the widely held assumption in the literature that governance variables are generally endogenous, our direct test for the endogeneity of the Index, finds no evidence of endogeneity. This implies that the causality most likely runs from the Index to performance, rather than the other way round. One reason for the clear contrast of our findings with previous work could be our choice of performance measure. Assuming that compliance with the Code is essentially a means of signalling to the investors that firms are well governed and by implication working in the interest of the shareholders, the effects of such positive perception can be argued to fall more on market driven measures of firm performance than on measures which rely more on accounting based values, such as the various proxies for Tobin’s Q. Another reason could be the emphasis on constructing a finely tuned, comprehensive Index, incorporating elements of compliance with both the letter as well as the spirit of the Code. Overall, our results suggest that for today’s informed and discerning investors, compliance matters not just as a box ticking exercise but as a real change in the governance of large listed companies, for which they are willing to pay a premium.The Combined Code, corporate governance, compliance index and firm perfornace