Adapting Binary Information Retrieval Evaluation Metrics for Segment-based Retrieval Tasks

This report describes metrics for the evaluation of the effectiveness of segment-based retrieval based on existing binary information retrieval metrics. This metrics are described in the context of a task for the hyperlinking of video segments. This evaluation approach re-uses existing evaluation measures from the standard Cranfield evaluation paradigm. Our adaptation approach can in principle be used with any kind of effectiveness measure that uses binary relevance, and for other segment-baed retrieval tasks. In our video hyperlinking setting, we use precision at a cut-off rank n and mean average precision.Comment: Explanation of evaluation measures for the linking task of the MediaEval Workshop 201

Corporate Governance in the Asian Financial Crisis

The "Asian Crisis" of 1997-98 affected all the "emerging markets" open to capital flows. Measures of corporate governance, particularly the effectiveness of protection for minority shareholders, explain the extent of depreciation and stock market decline better than do standard macroeconomic measures. A possible explanation is that in countries with weak corporate governance, worse economic prospects result in more expropriation by managers and thus a larger fall in asset prices.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39681/3/wp297.pd

An objective examination of consumer perception of nutrition information based on healthiness ratings

Objective. Previous research on nutrition labelling has mainly used subjective measures. This study examines the effectiveness of two types of nutrition label using two objective measures: eye movements and healthiness ratings. Design. Eye movements were recorded while participants made healthiness ratings for two types of nutrition label: standard and standard plus the Food Standards Agency’s ‘traffic light’ concept. Setting. University of Derby, UK. Subjects. 92 participants (mean age 31.5 years) were paid for their participation. None of the participants worked in the areas of food or nutrition. Results. For the standard nutrition label, participant eye movements lacked focus and their healthiness ratings lacked accuracy. The traffic light system helped to guide the attention of the consumer to the important nutrients and improved the accuracy of the healthiness ratings of nutrition labels. Conclusions. Consumer’s have a lack of knowledge regarding how to interpret nutrition information for standard labels. The traffic light concept helps to ameliorate this problem by indicating important nutrients to pay attention to

A Stochastic Volatility Model With Realized Measures for Option Pricing

Based on the fact that realized measures of volatility are affected by measurement errors, we introduce a new family of discrete-time stochastic volatility models having two measurement equations relating both observed returns and realized measures to the latent conditional variance. A semi-analytical option pricing framework is developed for this class of models. In addition, we provide analytical filtering and smoothing recursions for the basic specification of the model, and an effective MCMC algorithm for its richer variants. The empirical analysis shows the effectiveness of filtering and smoothing realized measures in inflating the latent volatility persistence—the crucial parameter in pricing Standard and Poor’s 500 Index options

Potential of differentiated payment levels based on standard cost approaches: A case study of selected rural development measures in Germany

In accordance with EU regulations, payment levels for several measures of rural development programs are calculated on the basis of standard cost approaches, using 'typical’ or average figures for costs incurred and income forgone. Resulting uniform payment rates have been frequently discussed and criticised as being inefficient, having a low cost-effectiveness and generating excessive windfall profits. However, few empirical studies exist which quantitatively examine potentials of a more differentiated standard cost approach. By using German farm accountancy data, this study analyses effects of a payment differentiation according to regional and farm individual characteristics on producer rents, budget expenditures and economic efficiency. Preliminary results show that though overcompensation could be reduced in most cases, savings in budget expenditure are often small and might be even offset by increasing administration costs. Generally our analysis indicates that potential benefits of differentiated standard cost approaches can be partly exploited if a) variances of the cost of participation in the universe of farms are high and the discriminatory natures of differentiation are significant, and b) positive correlations between costs and environmental benefits are strong.differentiated payment levels, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, standard cost approach, rural development schemes, agri-environmental measures,

Corporate Governance in the Asian Financial Crisis

The "Asian Crisis" of 1997-98 affected all the "emerging markets" open to capital flows. Measures of corporate governance, particularly the effectiveness of protection for minority shareholders, explain the extent of depreciation and stock market decline better than do standard macroeconomic measures. A possible explanation is that in countries with weak corporate governance, worse economic prospects result in more expropriation by managers and thus a larger fall in asset prices.

Using Parsimonious Language Models on Web Data

In this paper we explore the use of parsimonious language models for web retrieval. These models are smaller thus more efficient than the standard language models and are therefore well suited for large-scale web retrieval. We have conducted experiments on four TREC topic sets, and found that the parsimonious language model results in improvement of retrieval effectiveness over the standard language model for all data-sets and measures. In all cases the improvement is significant, and more substantial than in earlier experiments\ud on newspaper/newswire data

Characterization and application of objective pilling classification to patterned fabrics

Previously, the authors proposed a new, simple method of frequency domain analysis based on the two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform to objectively measure the pilling intensity in sample fabric images. The method was further characterized, and the results obtained indicate that standard deviation and variance are the most appropriate measures of the dispersion of wavelet details coefficients for analysis, that the relationship between wavelet analysis scale and fabric inter-yarn pitch was empirically confirmed, and, that fabrics with random patterns do not appear to impact on the effectiveness of the analysis method. <br /