You Must Have Clicked on this Ad by Mistake! Data-Driven Identification of Accidental Clicks on Mobile Ads with Applications to Advertiser Cost Discounting and Click-Through Rate Prediction

In the cost per click (CPC) pricing model, an advertiser pays an ad network only when a user clicks on an ad; in turn, the ad network gives a share of that revenue to the publisher where the ad was impressed. Still, advertisers may be unsatisfied with ad networks charging them for "valueless" clicks, or so-called accidental clicks. [...] Charging advertisers for such clicks is detrimental in the long term as the advertiser may decide to run their campaigns on other ad networks. In addition, machine-learned click models trained to predict which ad will bring the highest revenue may overestimate an ad click-through rate, and as a consequence negatively impacting revenue for both the ad network and the publisher. In this work, we propose a data-driven method to detect accidental clicks from the perspective of the ad network. We collect observations of time spent by users on a large set of ad landing pages - i.e., dwell time. We notice that the majority of per-ad distributions of dwell time fit to a mixture of distributions, where each component may correspond to a particular type of clicks, the first one being accidental. We then estimate dwell time thresholds of accidental clicks from that component. Using our method to identify accidental clicks, we then propose a technique that smoothly discounts the advertiser's cost of accidental clicks at billing time. Experiments conducted on a large dataset of ads served on Yahoo mobile apps confirm that our thresholds are stable over time, and revenue loss in the short term is marginal. We also compare the performance of an existing machine-learned click model trained on all ad clicks with that of the same model trained only on non-accidental clicks. There, we observe an increase in both ad click-through rate (+3.9%) and revenue (+0.2%) on ads served by the Yahoo Gemini network when using the latter. [...

Nutrition Students’ Perception of OSCE & its effect on Perceived Readiness to Clinical Placement

Objective: Explore nutrition and dietetic students’ perception of the educational value of Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE) and to examine the change in their perceived readiness to practice after completing three OSCEs. Participants: Students from the Schools of Public Health (SPH) and Allied Health Professions (SAHP) enrolled in Medical Nutrition Therapy course, mean age 26.6±5.4 years, 95% females (n=37). Methods: Mixed-method sequential exploratory design. Three focus group discussions (11 participants) were conducted as part of the qualitative phase to elicit themes related to perception of OSCE as an education tool. In the quantitative phase, a pre-post test design was used to explore the change in students’ perceived readiness after completing 3 OSCEs that included reading related article, watching a video, reviewing patient’s chart, counseling a standardized patient, charting, and discussing findings with other healthcare professionals and finally self reflecting. Students answered Perceived Readiness for Dietetic Practice (PRDP) questionnaire before and after OSCE completion. Statistical Analysis: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to analyze qualitative data. The PRDP score changes over time were examined using Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test. A Mixed Factorial Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) examined changes in PRDP subscale scores between SAHP and SPH students over time. Results: Both qualitative and quantitative strands showed high levels of acceptability of OSCE and improved readiness to clinical placement. Most of the students (76%) students found OSCE to be superior to medical center experience and 78% agreed that collaboration with other health care professionals helped prepare them for the dietetic role. Five major themes emerged from the data to describe the student’s perceptions of the OSCE include bridge to clinical practice, a comprehensive learning tool, realistic experience, student challenges and curriculum considerations. OSCE significantly improved students’ mean readiness to practice their role as clinical dietitians (4.9±2.5 vs. 5.8±1.9, p= 0.03). There was a significant improvement in the professional role p=0.04 and charting p=0.01. Students improved in all the areas, however, not all areas reached statistical significance. Conclusion: The OSCE experience improved student’s perceived clinical skills. It can provide a realistic and holistic patient experience for dietetic students to develop their patient evaluation and counseling skills

Niños fruto de violaciones a mujeres refugiadas, y apátridas, en Egipto

Es necesario simplificar el proceso de inscripción del nacimiento en el registro para los hijos nacidos a raíz de una violación —especialmente en el caso de mujeres refugiadas— para evitar la apatridia

Applying the Technology Acceptance Model to Online Learning in the Egyptian Universities

AbstractThe purpose of the research is to identify the determinants of students’ acceptance of online learning and to investigate how these determinants can shape students’ intention to use online learning. A conceptual framework based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was modified. A questionnaire was developed and used to solicit information from the 153 undergraduate students who used online learning in DBMU. The results reveal that students’ perception of ease of use, usefulness, attitudes towards online learning, and the social influence of students’ referent group were identified as significant determinants of students’ intention to practice online learning. The possibility of using the social influence of students’ referent group, students’ perceived ease of use, students’ perceived usefulness and their attitudes towards online learning to predict their behavioral intention to use online learning was also confirmed

A Comprehensive Model for Idea Evaluation at Early-Stage Level (Pre-Seed)

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceNowadays, governments encourage people to be an entrepreneur and start their businesses. Because small and medium enterprises play a critical role in economic growth as well as social subjects. However, statistics show a larger number of start-ups eventually fail due to several reasons. Among all, the cause of this failure could be a lack of correct evaluation of the idea at the early stage. Therefore, this study is seeking the most crucial criteria of the idea evaluation process to aid entrepreneurs to take the right assessment and prevent failure. The study uses a mixed method, which consists of narratives and systematic review, and then follows a series of qualitative interviews with start-up coaches, business investors, and both successful and failed start-up founders to have comprehensive opinions about the explored criteria. In the conclusion, the study suggests a framework of idea evaluation that is consists of the 16 most significant idea evaluation criteria which distributed among four stages. This framework could be considered as a feed for future studies to use artificial intelligence for assessing start-up ideas at the early stage

Magnitude of behavioral deficits varies with job-related chlorpyrifos exposure levels among Egyptian pesticide workers.

Chronic occupational exposure to organophosphorus pesticides (OPs) is consistently associated with deficits on behavioral tests when compared to unexposed comparison groups. However, a dose-response relationship has yet to be established, leading some to doubt an association between occupational OP exposure and behavioral deficits. Pesticide application teams in Egypt who are primarily exposed to one OP, chlorpyrifos (CPF), were recruited into a field assessment. Trail Making A and the more challenging Trail Making B tests were administered to 54 engineers (who supervise the pesticide application process, usually from the side of the field), 59 technicians (who guide the pesticide applicators in the field), 31 applicators (who mix and apply pesticides using knapsack sprayers), and 150 controls (who did not work in the fields) at two different times during the OP application season as well as immediately after applications had ended and 1.5 months later. All participants were males since only males work on pesticide application teams in Egypt. Urinary levels of 3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinol (TCPy), a specific metabolite of CPF, confirmed the pattern of lower to higher CPF exposures from engineers to technicians to applicators, and these were all greater than urinary metabolite levels in controls. A consistent relationship between job title and performance speed on the behavioral task was observed: Controls had the best (fastest) performance on Trail Making A and B tests throughout the application season, and applicators had significantly slower performance than engineers on Trail Making A (p = 0.015) and B (p = 0.003). However, individual urinary TCPy, blood acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE) levels did not predict individual performance. This study identifies a dose-related effect based on job title, which serves as a surrogate for chronic exposure in that differing job titles exhibit varying group exposure levels. The results establish that chronic occupational exposure to chlorpyrifos is neurotoxic and suggest that the classic biomarkers of recent CPF exposure are not predictive of chronic exposure effects

Villanescas of the Virtuosi: Lasso and the Commedia dell\u27arte

Little is known about the music of the 16th- and 17th-c. Commedia dell\u27arte due to the improvisatory nature of the genre. The most detailed account of a commedia performance is in the composer Massimo Troiano\u27s Discorsi... describing the festivities on the occasion of the wedding of Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria and Renee of Lorraine (1568). This account only mentions a few musical pieces: the music between acts and one internal song by Roland de Lassus, the kapellmeister. It is possible that Troiano did not mention all the music; close scrutiny of Lassus\u27s 1581 Libri di villanelle... reveals that some of these pieces might have been used in commedia, including the 1568 performance. (Adams, Sarah

Embed and Conquer: Scalable Embeddings for Kernel k-Means on MapReduce

The kernel $k$-means is an effective method for data clustering which extends the commonly-used $k$-means algorithm to work on a similarity matrix over complex data structures. The kernel $k$-means algorithm is however computationally very complex as it requires the complete data matrix to be calculated and stored. Further, the kernelized nature of the kernel $k$-means algorithm hinders the parallelization of its computations on modern infrastructures for distributed computing. In this paper, we are defining a family of kernel-based low-dimensional embeddings that allows for scaling kernel $k$-means on MapReduce via an efficient and unified parallelization strategy. Afterwards, we propose two methods for low-dimensional embedding that adhere to our definition of the embedding family. Exploiting the proposed parallelization strategy, we present two scalable MapReduce algorithms for kernel $k$-means. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms through an empirical evaluation on benchmark data sets.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), 201