Rethinking the Informal Economy: Linkages with the Formal Economy and the Formal Regulatory Environment

This paper explores the relationship of the informal economy to the formal economy and the formal regulatory environment. It begins with a discussion of the concept of the informal economy and its size, composition, and segmentation. It then discusses the linkages between the informal economy and the formal economy and the formal regulatory environment. The conclusion suggests why and how more equitable linkages between the informal economy and the formal economy should be promoted through an appropriate inclusive policy and regulatory environment.informal sector, informal economy, informal enterprises, informal workers, formal economy, formal regulatory environment, linkages, formalization

Rethinking the Informal Economy: Linkages with the Formal Economy and the Formal Regulatory Environment

informal sector, legality, gender, regulation, policy

Informal Workers and Collective Action: A Global Perspective

[Excerpt] Around the world, in countries as far flung as Cambodia and Brazil and in industries as diverse as transportation and hospitality, workers in informal employment, who labor every day with no legal or social protection, are organizing and negotiating for better conditions. Some of them are self-employed; others work for wages in either formal or informal enterprises. Some used to have jobs in the formal sector with a union contract; others have always worked informally. To achieve their goals they are mounting collective action campaigns that draw on the repertoire of past generations of workers, but they often recombine them or innovate to fit their unique contexts. Informal workers, their organizations and their campaigns, represent the leading edge of the most significant change in the global labor movement in more than a century. This book tells the story of nine such campaigns

Search and hyperlinking task at MediaEval 2012

The Search and Hyperlinking Task was one of the Brave New Tasks at MediaEval 2012. The Task consisted of two subtasks which focused on search and linking in retrieval from a collection of semi-professional video content. These tasks followed up on research carried out within the MediaEval 2011 Rich Speech Retrieval (RSR) Task and the VideoCLEF 2009 Linking Task

Generalized Munchausen Reinforcement Learning using Tsallis KL Divergence

Many policy optimization approaches in reinforcement learning incorporate a Kullback-Leilbler (KL) divergence to the previous policy, to prevent the policy from changing too quickly. This idea was initially proposed in a seminal paper on Conservative Policy Iteration, with approximations given by algorithms like TRPO and Munchausen Value Iteration (MVI). We continue this line of work by investigating a generalized KL divergence -- called the Tsallis KL divergence -- which use the $q$-logarithm in the definition. The approach is a strict generalization, as $q = 1$ corresponds to the standard KL divergence; $q > 1$ provides a range of new options. We characterize the types of policies learned under the Tsallis KL, and motivate when $q >1$ could be beneficial. To obtain a practical algorithm that incorporates Tsallis KL regularization, we extend MVI, which is one of the simplest approaches to incorporate KL regularization. We show that this generalized MVI($q$) obtains significant improvements over the standard MVI($q = 1$) across 35 Atari games.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202

Predicting one-year mortality among elderly survivors of hospitalization for an acute myocardial infarction: results from the Cooperative Cardiovascular Project

AbstractOBJECTIVESWe sought to develop a model based on information available from the medical record that would accurately stratify elderly patients who survive hospitalization with an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) according to their risk of one-year mortality.BACKGROUNDPrediction of the risk of mortality among older survivors of an AMI has many uses, yet few studies have determined the prognostic importance of demographic, clinical and functional data that are available on discharge in a population-based sample.METHODSIn a cohort of patients aged ≥65 years who survived hospitalization for a confirmed AMI from 1994 to 1995 at acute care, nongovernmental hospitals in the U.S., we developed a parsimonious model to stratify patients by their risk of one-year mortality.RESULTSThe study sample of 103,164 patients, with a mean age of 76.8 years, had a one-year mortality of 22%. The factors with the strongest association with mortality were older age, urinary incontinence, assisted mobility, presence of heart failure or cardiomegaly any time before discharge, presence of peripheral vascular disease, body mass index <20 kg/m2, renal dysfunction (defined as creatinine >2.5 mg/dl or blood urea nitrogen >40 mg/dl) and left ventricular dysfunction (left ventricular ejection fraction <40%). On the basis of the coefficients in the model, patients were stratified into risk groups ranging from 7% to 49%.CONCLUSIONSWe demonstrate that a simple risk model can stratify older patients well by their risk of death one year after discharge for AMI

Red Note New Music Festival Composition Competition and Workshop Announcement, 2014

The RED NOTE New Music Festival at Illinois State University is a week-long event which features outstanding performances of contemporary concert music.https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/rnf/1015/thumbnail.jp