Wronskians, dualities and FZZT-Cardy branes

The resolvent operator plays a central role in matrix models. For instance, with utilizing the loop equation, all of the perturbative amplitudes including correlators, the free-energy and those of instanton corrections can be obtained from the spectral curve of the resolvent operator. However, at the level of non-perturbative completion, the resolvent operator is generally not sufficient to recover all the information from the loop equations. Therefore it is necessary to find a sufficient set of operators which provide the missing non-perturbative information. In this paper, we study generalized Wronskians of the Baker-Akhiezer systems as a manifestation of these new degrees of freedom. In particular, we derive their isomonodromy systems and then extend several spectral dualities to these systems. In addition, we discuss how these Wronskian operators are naturally aligned on the Kac table. Since they are consistent with the Seiberg-Shih relation, we propose that these new degrees of freedom can be identified as FZZT-Cardy branes in Liouville theory. This means that FZZT-Cardy branes are the bound states of elemental FZZT branes (i.e. the twisted fermions) rather than the bound states of principal FZZT-brane (i.e. the resolvent operator).Comment: 131 pages, 4 figure

Financial Wellbeing of Older Persons in Peninsular Malaysia

The purpose of the study was to investigate the financial wellbeing of older Malaysians and its association with fmancial status, financial literacy, money attitude, financial practices and financial problems. Data for h s cross-sectional study was obtained through interview with 1,841 older persons (55 years and above) in Peninsular Malaysia. Systematically, Seventy-five out of the national total 1,173 sub-&vision/muh (provided by Department of Statistic) was chosen and four Enumeraaon Blocks (EBs) with hghest number of older persons age 55-75 were selected from each sub-&vision. The findmgs of the study revealed that majority of older Malaysians have negative net worth, low in financial literacy, money attitude and moderate financial practices. One thud of the respondents have at least one financial problem over the last year. Respondents who are financially literate have less financial problems. A sipficant relationshp was found between money attitude and financial practices, and also between financial practices and financial satisfaction. Determinants that sipficantly contributed to financial satisfaction were health, income adequacy, financial literacy, money attitude, fmancial practices, financial problems, net worth, home ownership, and ethnicity. However, through an open-ended question, some new factors such as comfortable life, able to cover expenses, pilgnrnage to Mecca, hardworking, phdanthropy are also contributed to the feelmg of financial wellbeing. It is important to educate the population about personal finance, inculcate a positive money attitude and financial practices to public as these d eventually lead to financial wellbeing of an individual

Living Standard, Living Level and Economic Wellbeing of Older Persons: Similarity and Differences in Measuring These Concepts

The number of older persons is increasing throughout the world and the consequences of ageing population; specifically in economics of aging was deserved to be being attention. The main issue in economics of aging is the way in indentifying the economically vulnerable group and how the allocate government’s limited resources to the needed group. However, various methods, either using objective approach (income, consumption, net flow, net worth) or subjective approach (self-rated income adequacy, perceived financial satisfaction) were employed to identify the vulnerable group. This paper aims to link concept of economic status, economic well being with living level and living standard. It recommended that those who want to study the concept of economic well being should start from the understanding of living level and living standard. Key words: Older person; living level and living standardRésumé: Le nombre de personnes âgées est en augmentation partout dans le monde et les conséquences du vieillissement de la population, en particulier dans l'économie du vieillissement, méritaient d'être suivies de près. La question principale dans l'économie du vieillissement est la façon d'identifier le groupe économiquement vulnérable et comment allouer les ressources limitées du gouvernement au groupe de besoin. Or, des méthodes diverses, soit en utilisant l'approche objective (le revenu, la consommation, le flux net, la valeur nette) ou l'approche subjective (l'adéquation du revenu auto-évalué, la satisfaction financière perçue) ont été utilisées pour identifier les groupes vulnérables. Ce document vise à relier la notion de statut économique, du bien-être économique avec le niveau de vie et le standard vie. Il a recommandé que ceux qui voulaient étudier la notion de bien-être économique devraient commencer par la compréhension du niveau de vie et du standard de vie.Mots-clés: personnes âgées, standard de vie et niveau de vi

Unbinned Profiled Unfolding

Unfolding is an important procedure in particle physics experiments which corrects for detector effects and provides differential cross section measurements that can be used for a number of downstream tasks, such as extracting fundamental physics parameters. Traditionally, unfolding is done by discretizing the target phase space into a finite number of bins and is limited in the number of unfolded variables. Recently, there have been a number of proposals to perform unbinned unfolding with machine learning. However, none of these methods (like most unfolding methods) allow for simultaneously constraining (profiling) nuisance parameters. We propose a new machine learning-based unfolding method that results in an unbinned differential cross section and can profile nuisance parameters. The machine learning loss function is the full likelihood function, based on binned inputs at detector-level. We first demonstrate the method with simple Gaussian examples and then show the impact on a simulated Higgs boson cross section measurement.Comment: Fixed a referenc

MOOCs Meet Measurement Theory: A Topic-Modelling Approach

This paper adapts topic models to the psychometric testing of MOOC students based on their online forum postings. Measurement theory from education and psychology provides statistical models for quantifying a person's attainment of intangible attributes such as attitudes, abilities or intelligence. Such models infer latent skill levels by relating them to individuals' observed responses on a series of items such as quiz questions. The set of items can be used to measure a latent skill if individuals' responses on them conform to a Guttman scale. Such well-scaled items differentiate between individuals and inferred levels span the entire range from most basic to the advanced. In practice, education researchers manually devise items (quiz questions) while optimising well-scaled conformance. Due to the costly nature and expert requirements of this process, psychometric testing has found limited use in everyday teaching. We aim to develop usable measurement models for highly-instrumented MOOC delivery platforms, by using participation in automatically-extracted online forum topics as items. The challenge is to formalise the Guttman scale educational constraint and incorporate it into topic models. To favour topics that automatically conform to a Guttman scale, we introduce a novel regularisation into non-negative matrix factorisation-based topic modelling. We demonstrate the suitability of our approach with both quantitative experiments on three Coursera MOOCs, and with a qualitative survey of topic interpretability on two MOOCs by domain expert interviews.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures; accepted into AAAI'201

Strictly local Union-Find

Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires classical hardware to perform the decoding necessary for error correction. The Union-Find decoder is one of the best candidates for this. It has remarkably organic characteristics, involving the growth and merger of data structures through nearest-neighbour steps; this naturally suggests the possibility of realising Union-Find using a lattice of very simple processors with strictly nearest-neighbour links. In this way the computational load can be distributed with near-ideal parallelism. Here we build on earlier work to show for the first time that this strict (rather than partial) locality is practical, with a worst-case runtime $\mathcal O(d^3)$ and mean runtime subquadratic in $d$ where $d$ is the surface code distance. A novel parity-calculation scheme is employed, which can also simplify previously proposed architectures. We compare our strictly local realisation with one augmented by long-range links; while the latter is of course faster, we note that local asynchronous logic could largely negate the difference.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure