Economics Of Freedom: An Empirical Analysis

Human freedom, and therefore, quality of life in many countries of the world have been restricted and diminished. Economic freedom and a controversial issue of interrelationship between economic and political freedom are empirically examined here. In several empirical estimations, embodying 155 countries of the world, some tight as well as statistically significant relationships are detected between economic freedom, on the one hand, and civil liberties, political rights, and political freedom, on the other

Influence of shock wave propagation on dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuator performance

Interest in plasma actuators as active flow control devices is growing rapidly due to their lack of mechanical parts, light weight and high response frequency. Although the flow induced by these actuators has received much attention, the effect that the external flow has on the performance of the actuator itself must also be considered, especially the influence of unsteady high-speed flows which are fast becoming a norm in the operating flight envelopes. The primary objective of this study is to examine the characteristics of a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuator when exposed to an unsteady flow generated by a shock tube. This type of flow, which is often used in different studies, contains a range of flow regimes from sudden pressure and density changes to relatively uniform high-speed flow regions. A small circular shock tube is employed along with the schlieren photography technique to visualize the flow. The voltage and current traces of the plasma actuator are monitored throughout, and using the well-established shock tube theory the change in the actuator characteristics are related to the physical processes which occur inside the shock tube. The results show that not only is the shear layer outside of the shock tube affected by the plasma but the passage of the shock front and high-speed flow behind it also greatly influences the properties of the plasma

Airport Performance and Ownership Structure: Evidence from the United Kingdom, United States, and Latin America

This study investigates the operational and financial efficiency of airports in selected countries using a cross-regional analysis. A total factor productivity (TFP) approach is used to examine the operational and financial efficiencies of selected airports in the United States, the United Kingdom, and several Latin American countries. The empirical results indicate mixed implications and suggest that the privatized airports in the United Kingdom outperform the partially privatized, government-owned airports in Latin America; however, the evidence also suggests that the selected United States airports outperform the other two groups for each year of this investigation (2000– 2010). The ambivalence of these results suggests that airport efficiency and productivity may be better evaluated in terms of market structure and competition rather than on the basis of ownership

Indigenous people living with cancer: Developing a mobile health application for improving their psychological well-being

© 2017 AIS/ICIS Administrative Office. All Rights Reserved. Poor cancer outcomes experienced by Indigenous Australians result from advanced cancer stages at diagnosis, poorer uptake of and adherence to treatments, higher levels of co-morbidity, and poorer access to inclusive and culturally appropriate care compared with non-Indigenous Australians. Socio-economics and social support can mitigate these problems. Technology-based interventions hold considerable promise for enhancing social support. This paper asks what are the key features of a mobile health application designed to improve the social support and consequently psychological well-being of Indigenous Australians living with cancer? To answer this question, a comprehensive literature review of studies conducted in information systems and health disciplines has been undertaken and a theoretical model is proposed. This study contributes to the existing knowledge base through the development of a new theoretical model and the introduction of the features of a mobile health application that may have a positive impact among Indigenous Australian cancer patients’ psychological well-being

Identifying and understanding digital exclusion: a mixed-methods study

\ua9 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.Many of our transactions and interactions are now exclusively online; however, whilst we live in a world which is becoming ubiquitously digital, digital exclusion remains a complex societal issue. This study aimed to identify the scale and characteristics of ‘digitally excluded’ individuals in one borough in North East England and investigate factors influencing experiences of digital exclusion. A two-phase, sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was used. Phase One utilised a survey which was sent to every household in the borough (N = >98,000). The surveys (N = 9181) were analysed using exploratory univariate analysis, followed by a two-staged regression model. Of those responses, 1130 individuals (12.3%) were identified as digitally excluded. Older adults with disability, no or low-level education, and residing in specific (micro) geographical areas, were at higher risk of digital exclusion. Smaller household sizes and lower income also contributed to digitally exclusion. To further enhance inclusivity, three focus groups were conducted with groups who were identified as being at higher risk of digital exclusion (N = 10). Discussions highlighted the complexities of digital exclusion and digital use across communities and within individual circumstances. Digital exclusion is multi-factored and complex. It requires regional institutions and local communities to collaborate in an integrated governance framework to improve digital inclusion

Scalable and Interpretable One-class SVMs with Deep Learning and Random Fourier features

One-class support vector machine (OC-SVM) for a long time has been one of the most effective anomaly detection methods and extensively adopted in both research as well as industrial applications. The biggest issue for OC-SVM is yet the capability to operate with large and high-dimensional datasets due to optimization complexity. Those problems might be mitigated via dimensionality reduction techniques such as manifold learning or autoencoder. However, previous work often treats representation learning and anomaly prediction separately. In this paper, we propose autoencoder based one-class support vector machine (AE-1SVM) that brings OC-SVM, with the aid of random Fourier features to approximate the radial basis kernel, into deep learning context by combining it with a representation learning architecture and jointly exploit stochastic gradient descent to obtain end-to-end training. Interestingly, this also opens up the possible use of gradient-based attribution methods to explain the decision making for anomaly detection, which has ever been challenging as a result of the implicit mappings between the input space and the kernel space. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study the interpretability of deep learning in anomaly detection. We evaluate our method on a wide range of unsupervised anomaly detection tasks in which our end-to-end training architecture achieves a performance significantly better than the previous work using separate training.Comment: Accepted at European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD) 201

LDReg: Local Dimensionality Regularized Self-Supervised Learning

Representations learned via self-supervised learning (SSL) can be susceptible to dimensional collapse, where the learned representation subspace is of extremely low dimensionality and thus fails to represent the full data distribution and modalities. Dimensional collapse also known as the "underfilling" phenomenon is one of the major causes of degraded performance on downstream tasks. Previous work has investigated the dimensional collapse problem of SSL at a global level. In this paper, we demonstrate that representations can span over high dimensional space globally, but collapse locally. To address this, we propose a method called $\textit{local dimensionality regularization (LDReg)}$. Our formulation is based on the derivation of the Fisher-Rao metric to compare and optimize local distance distributions at an asymptotically small radius for each data point. By increasing the local intrinsic dimensionality, we demonstrate through a range of experiments that LDReg improves the representation quality of SSL. The results also show that LDReg can regularize dimensionality at both local and global levels.Comment: ICLR 202

Dilaton stabilization by massive fermion matter

The study started in a former work about the Dilaton mean field stabilization thanks to the effective potential generated by the existence of massive fermions, is here extended. Three loop corrections are evaluated in addition to the previously calculated two loop terms. The results indicate that the Dilaton vacuum field tend to be fixed at a high value close to the Planck scale, in accordance with the need for predicting Einstein gravity from string theory. The mass of the Dilaton is evaluated to be also a high value close to the Planck mass, which implies the absence of Dilaton scalar signals in modern cosmological observations. These properties arise when the fermion mass is chosen to be either at a lower bound corresponding to the top quark mass, or alternatively, at a very much higher value assumed to be in the grand unification energy range. One of the three 3-loop terms is exactly evaluated in terms of Master integrals. The other two graphs are however evaluated in their leading logarithm correction in the perturbative expansion. The calculation of the non leading logarithmic contribution and the inclusion of higher loops terms could made more precise the numerical estimates of the vacuum field value and masses, but seemingly are expected not to change the qualitative behavior obtained. The validity of the here employed Yukawa model approximation is argued for small value of the fermion masses with respect to the Planck one. A correction to the two loop calculation done in the previous work is here underlined.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, the study was extended and corrections on the former calculations and redaction were done. The paper had been accepted for publication in "Astrophysics and Space Science

Polymorphisms in the CD28/CTLA4/ICOS genes: Role in malignant melanoma susceptibility and prognosis?

The appearance of vitiligo and spontaneous regression of the primary lesion in melanoma patients illustrate a relationship between tumor immunity and autoimmunity. T lymphocytes play a major role both in tumor immunity and autoimmunity. CD28, Cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen 4 (CTLA4) and inducible costimulator (ICOS) molecules are important secondary signal molecules in the T lymphocyte activation. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the CD28/CTLA4/ICOS gene region were reported to be associated with several autoimmune diseases including, type-1 diabetes, SLE, autoimmune thyroid diseases and celiac disease. In this study, we investigated the association of SNPs in the CD28, CTLA4 and ICOS genes with the risk of melanoma. We also assessed the prognostic effect of the different polymorphisms in melanoma patients. Twenty-four tagging SNPs across the three genes and four additional SNPs were genotyped in a cohort of 763 German melanoma patients and 734 healthy German controls. Influence on prognosis was determined in 587 melanoma cases belonging to stage I or II of the disease. In general, no differences in genotype or allele frequencies were detected between melanoma patients and controls. However, the variant alleles for two polymorphisms in the CD28 gene were differentially distributed in cases and controls. Similarly no association of any polymorphism with prognosis, except for the rs3181098 polymorphism in the CD28 gene, was observed. In addition, individuals with AA genotype for rs11571323 polymorphism in the ICOS gene showed reduced overall survival. However, keeping in view the correction for multiple hypothesis testing our results suggest that the polymorphisms in the CD28, CTLA4 and ICOS genes at least do not modulate risk of melanoma and nor do those influence the disease prognosis in the investigated population