Differential Mortality and Retirement Benefits in the Health and Retirement Study

This analysis uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine the sources of variation in mortality for individuals of varying socio-economic status (SES). The use of the HRS allows a distinction between education and a measure of career earnings as primary determinants of socio-economic status for men and women separately. We use those predictions of mortality to estimate the distribution of annual and lifetime OASDI benefits for different birth cohorts spanning the birth years from 1900 to 1950. We find differential rates of mortality have had substantial effects in altering the distribution lifetime benefits in favor of higher income individuals

The use of the spline function in computer-aided type design

The traditional type designer works with pen, in and paper. The characters that he designs go through many changes before the whole font is finalized and set in the printing medium. Further alterations to the font may occur after he prints and evaluates a sample piece of text. Computer-aided type design presents the type designer with a new design tool. Computers have been used in the printing industry for typesetting; the automation of type design is a logical next step. Freeing the designer from the repetitive tasks of the design cycle is one obvious advantage cf using computers. But computer-aided type design makes its real contribution when a designer can use it with the same facility that he uses traditional design tools like pen, ink and paper. This research investigates the use of the spline curve in type design. Contemporary type designers are expected to perform a variety of tasks. On the one hand, they may design characters that will last because of their artistic merit and singular characteristics. On the other hand, they may design characters that can be recognized by machines. A computer-aided type design tool should be flexible enough to meet these demands and con venient to use. The focus of the research will be on the input requirements for drawing the spline curves that form the characters. First, the mathematics of the spline functions and their use in two dimensional graphics is discussed. Next, a brief survey of the use of the spline curve in computer-aided type design is given. In order to investigate further the problems of designing characters, a pilot system was written to design basic character shapes, using raster based graphics. The system was designed with the objective of having input specifications which would be familiar to a type designer. This system is described in the last section

An Investigation Into the Detection of New Information

This paper explores new-information detection, describing a strategy for filtering a stream of documents to present only information that is fresh. We focus on multi-document summarization and seek to efficiently use more linguistic information than is often seen in such systems. We experimented with our linguistic system and with a more traditional sentence-based, vector-space system and found that a combination of the two approaches boosted performance over each one alone

An Investigation Into the Detection of New Information

This paper explores new-information detection, describing a strategy for filtering a stream of documents to present only information that is fresh. We focus on multi-document summarization and seek to efficiently use more linguistic information than is often seen in such systems. We experimented with our linguistic system and with a more traditional sentence-based, vector-space system and found that a combination of the two approaches boosted performance over each one alone

Machine Learning and Text Segmentation in Novelty Detection

This paper explores a combination of machine learning, approximate text segmentation and a vector-space model to distinguish novel information from repeated information. In experiments with the data from the Novelty Track at the Text Retrieval Conference, we show improvements over a variety of approaches, in particular in raising precision scores on this data, while maintaining a reasonable amount of recall

Question Answering using Integrated Information Retrieval and Information Extraction

This paper addresses the task of providing extended responses to questions regarding specialized topics. This task is an amalgam of information retrieval, topical summarization, and Information Extraction (IE). We present an approach which draws on methods from each of these areas, and compare the effectiveness of this approach with a query-focused summarization approach. The two systems are evaluated in the context of the prosecution queries like those in the DARPA GALE distillation evaluation

Context and Learning in Novelty Detection

We demonstrate the value of using context in a new-information detection system that achieved the highest precision scores at the Text Retrieval Conference's Novelty Track in 2004. In order to determine whether information within a sentence has been seen in material read previously, our system integrates information about the context of the sentence with novel words and named entities within the sentence, and uses a specialized learning algorithm to tune the system parameters