The geography, economics, and politics of lottery adoption

Since New Hampshire introduced the first modern state-sponsored lottery in 1964, 41 other states plus the District of Columbia have adopted lotteries. Lottery ticket sales in the United States topped $48 billion in 2004, with state governments reaping nearly$14 billion in net lottery revenue. In this paper the authors attempt to answer the question of why some states have adopted lotteries and others have not. First, they establish a framework for analyzing the determination of public policies that highlights the roles of individual voters, interest groups, and politicians within a state as well as the influence of policies in neighboring states. The authors then introduce some general explanations for the adoption of a new tax that stress the role of economic development, fiscal health, election cycles, political parties, and geography. Next, because the lottery adoption decision is more than simply a tax decision, a number of factors specific to this decision are identified. State income, lottery adoption by neighboring states, the timing of elections, and the role of organized interest groups, especially the opposition of certain religious organizations, are significant factors explaining lottery adoption.Gambling industry

Surfactant as a drug carrier

Drug delivery using a surfactant vehicle has the potential to prevent systemic side effects by delivering therapeutic agents directly to the respiratory system. The inherent chemical properties of surfactant allows it to readily distribute throughout the respiratory system. Therapeutic agents delivered by surfactant can primarily confer additional benefits but have potential to improve surfactant function. It is critically important that additional agents do not interefere with the innate surface tension lowering function of surfactant. Systemic evaluation through benchtop, translational and human trials are required to translate this potential technique into clinical practice

Fast Deep Matting for Portrait Animation on Mobile Phone

Image matting plays an important role in image and video editing. However, the formulation of image matting is inherently ill-posed. Traditional methods usually employ interaction to deal with the image matting problem with trimaps and strokes, and cannot run on the mobile phone in real-time. In this paper, we propose a real-time automatic deep matting approach for mobile devices. By leveraging the densely connected blocks and the dilated convolution, a light full convolutional network is designed to predict a coarse binary mask for portrait images. And a feathering block, which is edge-preserving and matting adaptive, is further developed to learn the guided filter and transform the binary mask into alpha matte. Finally, an automatic portrait animation system based on fast deep matting is built on mobile devices, which does not need any interaction and can realize real-time matting with 15 fps. The experiments show that the proposed approach achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art matting solvers.Comment: ACM Multimedia Conference (MM) 2017 camera-read

Anthropology Curriculum Map 2013-2014

This map displays degree requirements, courses, faculty information, clubs & organizations, and Library resources associated with anthropology across the seven Claremont Colleges (7Cs) for the 2013-14 academic year. It was compiled using public information drawn from Colleges websites, course schedules and catalogs, and the Claremont Colleges Library website. This project was completed as part of an IMLS Sparks! Ignition grant in 2013-14