Effects of Saving and Spending Patterns on Holding Time Distribution

The effects of saving and spending patterns on holding time distribution of money are investigated based on the ideal gas-like models. We show the steady-state distribution obeys an exponential law when the saving factor is set uniformly, and a power law when the saving factor is set diversely. The power distribution can also be obtained by proposing a new model where the preferential spending behavior is considered. The association of the distribution with the probability of money to be exchanged has also been discussed.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Blowfish Privacy: Tuning Privacy-Utility Trade-offs using Policies

Privacy definitions provide ways for trading-off the privacy of individuals in a statistical database for the utility of downstream analysis of the data. In this paper, we present Blowfish, a class of privacy definitions inspired by the Pufferfish framework, that provides a rich interface for this trade-off. In particular, we allow data publishers to extend differential privacy using a policy, which specifies (a) secrets, or information that must be kept secret, and (b) constraints that may be known about the data. While the secret specification allows increased utility by lessening protection for certain individual properties, the constraint specification provides added protection against an adversary who knows correlations in the data (arising from constraints). We formalize policies and present novel algorithms that can handle general specifications of sensitive information and certain count constraints. We show that there are reasonable policies under which our privacy mechanisms for k-means clustering, histograms and range queries introduce significantly lesser noise than their differentially private counterparts. We quantify the privacy-utility trade-offs for various policies analytically and empirically on real datasets.Comment: Full version of the paper at SIGMOD'14 Snowbird, Utah US

A multi-candidate electronic voting scheme with unlimited participants

In this paper a new multi-candidate electronic voting scheme is constructed with unlimited participants. The main idea is to express a ballot to allow voting for up to k out of the m candidates and unlimited participants. The purpose of vote is to select more than one winner among $m$ candidates. Our result is complementary to the result by Sun peiyong$'$ s scheme, in the sense, their scheme is not amenable for large-scale electronic voting due to flaw of ballot structure. In our scheme the vote is split and hidden, and tallying is made for $G\ddot{o}del$ encoding in decimal base without any trusted third party, and the result does not rely on any traditional cryptography or computational intractable assumption. Thus the proposed scheme not only solves the problem of ballot structure, but also achieves the security including perfect ballot secrecy, receipt-free, robustness, fairness and dispute-freeness.Comment: 6 page

Linear and Range Counting under Metric-based Local Differential Privacy

Local differential privacy (LDP) enables private data sharing and analytics without the need for a trusted data collector. Error-optimal primitives (for, e.g., estimating means and item frequencies) under LDP have been well studied. For analytical tasks such as range queries, however, the best known error bound is dependent on the domain size of private data, which is potentially prohibitive. This deficiency is inherent as LDP protects the same level of indistinguishability between any pair of private data values for each data downer. In this paper, we utilize an extension of $\epsilon$-LDP called Metric-LDP or $E$-LDP, where a metric $E$ defines heterogeneous privacy guarantees for different pairs of private data values and thus provides a more flexible knob than $\epsilon$ does to relax LDP and tune utility-privacy trade-offs. We show that, under such privacy relaxations, for analytical workloads such as linear counting, multi-dimensional range counting queries, and quantile queries, we can achieve significant gains in utility. In particular, for range queries under $E$-LDP where the metric $E$ is the $L^1$-distance function scaled by $\epsilon$, we design mechanisms with errors independent on the domain sizes; instead, their errors depend on the metric $E$, which specifies in what granularity the private data is protected. We believe that the primitives we design for $E$-LDP will be useful in developing mechanisms for other analytical tasks, and encourage the adoption of LDP in practice

Infrared Spectroscopy of Organoclays Synthesized with the Surfactant Octadecyltrimethylammonium Bormide

Infrared spectroscopy using a smart endurance single bounce diamond ATR cell has been used to study the changes in the spectra of the surfactant octadecyltrimethylammonium bromide upon intercalation into a sodium montmorillonite. The wavenumbers of bands attributed to CH stretching and bending vibrations in general decrease as the concentration of the surfactant measured in terms of the cation exchange capacity (CEC) up to 1.0 CEC. After this point the bands increase approaching a value the same as that of the surfactant. Significant changes occur in the HCH deformation modes of the methyl groups of the surfactant. These changes are attributed to the methyl groups locking into the siloxane surface of the montmorillonite. Such a concept is supported by changes in the SiO stretching bands of the montmorillonite siloxane surfac

Vacuum induced transparency and photon number resolved Autler-Townes splitting in a three-level system

We study the absorption spectrum of a probe field by a {\Lambda}-type three-level system, which is coupled to a quantized control field through the two upper energy levels. The probe field is applied to the ground and the second excited states. When the quantized control field is in vacuum, we derive a threshold condition to discern vacuum induced transparency (VIT) and vacuum induced Autler- Townes splitting (ATS). We also find that the parameter change from VIT to vacuum induced ATS is very similar to that from broken PT symmetry to PT symmetry. Moreover, we find the photon number resolved spectrum in the parameter regime of vacuum induced ATS when the mean photon number of the quantized control field is changed from zero (vacuum) to a finite number. However, there is no photon number resolved spectrum in the parameter regime of VIT even that the quantized control field contains the finite number of photons. Finally, we further discuss possible experimental realization

A Customer Experience Study Based on Vienna Hotel Data

With rapid economic development, there is also an increasing demand for consumer experience. Therefore, we need to make changes to the hotel’s customer service based on a study of customer experience theory. This will help improve customer satisfaction and enhance the hotel’s competitiveness. Based on the theory of customer experience, this study aims to investigate the customer service at the Vienna Hotel. The service status of each department will be assessed through a questionnaire survey. By analyzing the data and identifying the problems in the customer service at the Vienna Hotel, appropriate solution strategies will be proposed. Hebi Vienna Hotel needs improvement in staff service ability and quality, hardware facilities and equipment, management mechanisms, and personalized service. Therefore, the hotel needs to improve its infrastructure, train its employees to enhance their service skills, innovate personalized services to improve the quality of customer service, and enhance customer satisfaction and the check-in experience