Adherence of Prime-Time Television Advertising Disclosures to the “Clear and Conspicuous Standard: 1990 vs. 2002

In 1990, one-fourth of all national television commercials contained disclosures, yet none of the disclosures adhered to all of the Federal Trade Commission\u27s clear and conspicuous standard (CCS). As a result of marketplace changes and a 2001 Federal Trade Commission and National Advertising Division joint workshop, the authors anticipate an increase in the number of disclosures and greater adherence to the CCS. The authors find a significant increase in disclosure incidence; however, adherence declines or remains unchanged for most individual guidelines. Finally, the authors provide public policy implications and offer suggestions to increase adherence to the CCS

For the Benefit of All: Strategic Recommendations to Enhance the State's Role in the Integration of Immigrants in Illinois (Report of the New Americans Policy Council, Year One)

On November 19, 2005, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich signed the New Americans Executive Order, a first-in-the-nation attempt to adopt a coherent, strategic, and proactive state government approach to integrate the rapidly growing immigrant population of Illinois. For this purpose, the Executive Order created a New Americans Policy Council comprised of 24 prominent Illinois business, faith, labor, community, philanthropic, and governmental leaders with experience in this field. While Illinois has undertaken several efforts to advance immigrant integration, neither it nor any other state has developed a comprehensive and strategic integration policy. Given the rapidly evolving demographics; the fast paced changes of an increasingly global economy; and the growing demand for both high-skilled and low-skilled workers; immigrant integration is one of the most overlooked issues of governance. The Policy Council's strategic approach emphasizes strategies that allow immigrants to be empowered to participate to the fullest extent possible in our economic and civic life, while fostering social cohesion with their new neighbors.This is the report of the New Americans Policy Council for the first year of the New Americans Executive Order project, published in 2006

Low-Rank Matrices on Graphs: Generalized Recovery & Applications

Many real world datasets subsume a linear or non-linear low-rank structure in a very low-dimensional space. Unfortunately, one often has very little or no information about the geometry of the space, resulting in a highly under-determined recovery problem. Under certain circumstances, state-of-the-art algorithms provide an exact recovery for linear low-rank structures but at the expense of highly inscalable algorithms which use nuclear norm. However, the case of non-linear structures remains unresolved. We revisit the problem of low-rank recovery from a totally different perspective, involving graphs which encode pairwise similarity between the data samples and features. Surprisingly, our analysis confirms that it is possible to recover many approximate linear and non-linear low-rank structures with recovery guarantees with a set of highly scalable and efficient algorithms. We call such data matrices as \textit{Low-Rank matrices on graphs} and show that many real world datasets satisfy this assumption approximately due to underlying stationarity. Our detailed theoretical and experimental analysis unveils the power of the simple, yet very novel recovery framework \textit{Fast Robust PCA on Graphs

BMP treatment technologies, monitoring needs, and knowledge gaps: status of the knowledge and relevance within the Tahoe Basin

This Technical memorandum fulfills Task 2 for Agreement 03-495 between El Dorado County and the Office of Water Programs at California State University Sacramento and their co-authors, Bachand & Associates and the University of California Tahoe Research Group: 1) a review of current stormwater treatment Best Management Practices (BMP) in the Tahoe Basin and their potential effectiveness in removing fine particles and reducing nutrient concentrations; 2) an assessment of the potential for improving the performance of different types of existing BMPs through retrofitting or better maintenance practices; 3) a review of additional promising treatment technologies not currently in use in the Tahoe Basin; and 4) a list of recommendations to help address the knowledge gaps in BMP design and performance. ... (PDF contains 67 pages

The Wiltshire Wills Feasibility Study

The Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office has nearly ninety thousand wills in its care. These records are neither adequately catalogued nor secured against loss by facsimile microfilm copies. With support from the Heritage Lottery Fund the Record Office has begun to produce suitable finding aids for the material. Beginning with this feasibility study the Record Office is developing a strategy to ensure the that facsimiles to protect the collection against risk of loss or damage and to improve public access are created.<p></p> This feasibility study explores the different methodologies that can be used to assist the preservation and conservation of the collection and improve public access to it. The study aims to produce a strategy that will enable the Record Office to create digital facsimiles of the Wills in its care for access purposes and to also create preservation quality microfilms. The strategy aims to seek the most cost effective and time efficient approach to the problem and identifies ways to optimise the processes by drawing on the experience of other similar projects. This report provides a set of guidelines and recommendations to ensure the best use of the resources available for to provide the most robust preservation strategy and to ensure that future access to the Wills as an information resource can be flexible, both local and remote, and sustainable

Learning Adaptive Display Exposure for Real-Time Advertising

In E-commerce advertising, where product recommendations and product ads are presented to users simultaneously, the traditional setting is to display ads at fixed positions. However, under such a setting, the advertising system loses the flexibility to control the number and positions of ads, resulting in sub-optimal platform revenue and user experience. Consequently, major e-commerce platforms (e.g., Taobao.com) have begun to consider more flexible ways to display ads. In this paper, we investigate the problem of advertising with adaptive exposure: can we dynamically determine the number and positions of ads for each user visit under certain business constraints so that the platform revenue can be increased? More specifically, we consider two types of constraints: request-level constraint ensures user experience for each user visit, and platform-level constraint controls the overall platform monetization rate. We model this problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process with per-state constraint (psCMDP) and propose a constrained two-level reinforcement learning approach to decompose the original problem into two relatively independent sub-problems. To accelerate policy learning, we also devise a constrained hindsight experience replay mechanism. Experimental evaluations on industry-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the merits of our approach in both obtaining higher revenue under the constraints and the effectiveness of the constrained hindsight experience replay mechanism.Comment: accepted by CIKM201