Labor effects of adult mortality in Tanzanian households

Due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, sub-Saharan populations are challenged with increasing adult mortality rates that have potentially profound economic implications. Yet, little is known about the impact of adult deaths in African households. Using panel data from Tanzania, this paper will explore how prime-age adult mortality impacts the time allocation of surviving household members and the portfolio of household farming activities. Analysis of farm and chore hours across demographic groups generally found small and insignificant changes in labor supply of individuals in households experiencing a prime-age adult death. While some farm activities are temporarily scaled back and wage employment falls after a male death, households did not shift cultivation towards subsistence food farming and did not appear to have reduced their diversification over income sources more than six months after a death.Demographics,Public Health Promotion,Health Economics&Finance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Housing&Human Habitats,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Demographics,Housing&Human Habitats

Representation of virtual choreographies in learning dashboards of interoperable LMS analytics

Learning management systems (LMS) collect a large amount of data from user interaction, and it isn't easy to analyze this data in a reliable and context-independent manner. This research seeks to comprehend how virtual choreographies can be represented in interoperable LMS analytics dashboards. In order to gain a better understanding of the problem, this objective has been divided into three sub-goals: determining which interactions can be gathered from LMS contexts, identifying virtual choreographies from LMS logs, and representing virtual choreographies in learning dashboards. To achieve these objectives, we first conducted a Systematic Literature Review to comprehend the behaviors and interactions other authors have investigated in LMS contexts. Then, by applying these findings to this dissertation's case study, a methodical procedure for extracting valuable choreographies from the logs was outlined. The Design Science Research methodology was then applied to transforming logs into virtual choreographies and their representation in learning dashboards. It was implemented two services: one responsible for identifying virtual choreographies from data logs and transforming the logs into statements, recipes, and choreographies, following xAPI specification elements; and the other translates the information from the backend service into dashboard visualizations, allowing the user to view representations for statements, recipes, choreographies, and various visualizations. These artifacts provide a new flexible and cost-efficient solution for the identification of virtual choreographies, thereby facilitating the widespread adoption of their use

Faculty burnout and its relationship to social and institutional support

The purpose of this sequential explanatory study was to determine if there was a relationship between faculty burnout, social support, institutional support, or salary, as well as establish if any college at a regional public university in the Midwest was less burned out than the others. Participants (n = 111) completed a survey that contained qualifying as well as demographic questions, Maslach's Burnout Inventory, Cutrona and Russell's Social Provisions Scale, and the institutional support section of Conklin and Desselle's Multidimensional Work Satisfaction Scale. Social support in the form of guidance and reassurance of worth, as well as institutional support, were found to mitigate burnout. The College of Education, Health and Human Studies had a lower burnout score than other colleges. In semi-structured interviews with faculty, it was determined that personal accomplishment, as well as colleagues, department chairs, and deans who create a culture of support, can reduce burnout.Includes bibliographical reference

Division of indivisible items : fairness, efficiency, and strategyproofness

This thesis theoretically studies fairness, efficiency, and strategyproofness, in the model of assigning a set of indivisible items to multiple agents. Fairness, with an interpretation of social justice, ensures that everyone is treated unbiasedly. Efficiency, a quantitative indicator, measures the utilization of the total resource. Strategyproofness, a desired property of the assignment protocol, inhibits the strategic behavior of misreporting information from participants. This work, first in Chapter 3, focuses on the allocation of chores (items with non-positive value) and studies two envy-based and two share-based fairness criteria. The analysis provides the connections between fairness criteria and also investigates, in the worst-case scenario, the efficiency loss when requiring allocations to be fair by establishing the corresponding price of fairness. This thesis, then in Chapter 4, studies two relaxations of equitability, a fairness notion that ensures agents the same level of value. This chapter cares about both cases of goods (items with non-negative value) and chores. The chapter first investigates the trade-off between efficiency and fairness and then provides the picture of the computational complexity of (i) deciding the existence of approximately equitable and welfare-maximizing allocation; (ii) computing a welfare maximizer among all approximately equitable allocation. Chapter 5 considers the setting where agents’ preferences over items are their private information and not publicly known anymore. Agents are required to report their preferences so that assignment procedures can be carried on. Agents can and will report false information if they are able to receive additional value by doing so. This chapter proposes deterministic and randomised (group) strategyproof mechanisms in which each agent’s (expected) value is maximized when she reports the true preference. Besides strategyproofness, the proposed mechanisms can output efficient allocations that capture a certain degree of fairness

Real-World Choreographies

Choreographies are a relatively new tool for designing distributed systems from a global viewpoint. Moreover, choreographies are also free from deadlocks and race conditions by design. Recent theoretical results defined proper Endpoint Projection (EPP) functions to compile choreographic specifications into their single components. Since EPPs are behavioural preserving, projected systems also enjoy freedom from deadlocks and races by construction. Aim of this PhD is to formalise non-trivial features of distributed systems with choreographies and to translate our theoretical results into the practice of implemented systems. To this purpose, we provide two main contributions. The first contribution tackles one of the most challenging features of distributed development: programming correct and consistent runtime updates of distributed systems. Our solution is a theoretical model of dynamic choreographies that provides a clear definition of which components and behaviours can be updated. We prove that compiled choreographic specifications are correct and consistent after any update. We also refine our theoretical model to provide a finer control over updates. On this refinement, we develop a framework for programming adaptable distributed systems. The second contribution covers one of the main issues of implementing theoretical results on choreographies: formalising the compilation from choreographies to executable programs. There is a sensible departure between the present choreographic frameworks and their theoretical models because their theories abstract communications with synchronisation on names (a la CCS/π-calculus) yet they compile to Jolie programs, an executable language that uses correlation — a renown technology of Service-Oriented Computing — for message routing. Our solution is a theory of Applied Choreographies (AC) that models correlation-based message passing. We pinpoint the key theoretical problems and formalise the principles that developers should follow to obtain correct implementations. Finally, we prove our approach by defining a correct compiler from AC to the calculus behind the Jolie language

Effects of technology integration in K-12 settings

This review of literature assessed the use and effect of technology in the K-12 public school setting. Local, state and federal governments annually invest billions of dollars to purchase technology; yet, there is still a great deal of uncertainty and debate about the ability of technology to improve classroom teaching and learning. Several types of technologies are available to enhance student learning in the classroom. Everything from audio and video content to handheld technologies and notebook computing has been used in classrooms, and new WEB 2.0-based technology such as Wikis and Blogs are emerging. While it is impossible for any one researcher to present information for all technologies in use in public classrooms across the United States, the goal of this review is to show what is available, who is in control of the technology and how it can be used in the classroom to enhance the learning process. A primary issue of concern for administrators and policy makers in determining whether or not to implement technology is the lack of statistically significant data indicating the effectiveness of current technologies. While not measured by quantitative analyses of standardized tests, findings suggest that the positive influences of technology integration are revealed through more qualitative research

Variable autonomy assignment algorithms for human-robot interactions.

As robotic agents become increasingly present in human environments, task completion rates during human-robot interaction has grown into an increasingly important topic of research. Safe collaborative robots executing tasks under human supervision often augment their perception and planning capabilities through traded or shared control schemes. However, such systems are often proscribed only at the most abstract level, with the meticulous details of implementation left to the designer\u27s prerogative. Without a rigorous structure for implementing controls, the work of design is frequently left to ad hoc mechanism with only bespoke guarantees of systematic efficacy, if any such proof is forthcoming at all. Herein, I present two quantitatively defined models for implementing sliding-scale variable autonomy, in which levels of autonomy are determined by the relative efficacy of autonomous subroutines. I experimentally test the resulting Variable Autonomy Planning (VAP) algorithm and against a traditional traded control scheme in a pick-and-place task, and apply the Variable Autonomy Tasking algorithm to the implementation of a robot performing a complex sanitation task in real-world environs. Results show that prioritizing autonomy levels with higher success rates, as encoded into VAP, allows users to effectively and intuitively select optimal autonomy levels for efficient task completion. Further, the Pareto optimal design structure of the VAP+ algorithm allows for significant performance improvements to be made through intervention planning based on systematic input determining failure probabilities through sensorized measurements. This thesis describes the design, analysis, and implementation of these two algorithms, with a particular focus on the VAP+ algorithm. The core conceit is that they are methods for rigorously defining locally optimal plans for traded control being shared between a human and one or more autonomous processes. It is derived from an earlier algorithmic model, the VAP algorithm, developed to address the issue of rigorous, repeatable assignment of autonomy levels based on system data which provides guarantees on basis of the failure-rate sorting of paired autonomous and manual subtask achievement systems. Using only probability ranking to define levels of autonomy, the VAP algorithm is able to sort modules into optimizable ordered sets, but is limited to only solving sequential task assignments. By constructing a joint cost metric for the entire plan, and by implementing a back-to-front calculation scheme for this metric, it is possible for the VAP+ algorithm to generate optimal planning solutions which minimize the expected cost, as amortized over time, funds, accuracy, or any metric combination thereof. The algorithm is additionally very efficient, and able to perform on-line assessments of environmental changes to the conditional probabilities associated with plan choices, should a suitable model for determining these probabilities be present. This system, as a paired set of two algorithms and a design augmentation, form the VAP+ algorithm in full

Patently Obvious: A Dual Standard Solution to the Diverging Needs of the Information Technology and Pharmaceutical Patent Industries

This Comment proposes the use of a specifically tailored obviousness standard as a new solution to the IT and pharmaceutical patent industries\u27 divergent needs. Part I summarizes the obviousness standard\u27s history in patent law. Part II illustrates how the IT and pharmaceutical industries have divergent needs. Part III describes why using a single standard for the obviousness inquiry is inadequate to meet the needs of both the IT and pharmaceutical industries. Part IV illustrates why the obviousness standard needs to be specifically tailored for the IT and pharmaceutical industries. Finally, Part V concludes that a dual standard for obviousness is needed to effectively address the IT and pharmaceutical industries\u27 needs