Racial Bias in Expert Quality Assessment: A Study of Newspaper Movie Reviews

Newspaper critics' movie reviews are often used by potential movie viewers as signals of expert quality assessment. In this paper, we assess if there is any racial bias in these critics' reviews, and if so, what impact these biases have on viewer demand. To do this, we develop a dataset that tracks ratings from 68 popular movie critics for 566 movies released in the U.S. between 2003 and 2007. The data also include measures of movie production costs, marketing expenditures, type of movie (i.e. genre, MPAA rating, etc.), actor and director quality measures, audience tastes and critics' gender, experience and race. Despite inclusion of all these controls for movie quality and other drivers of critic ratings, we find that ratings for movies with a black lead actor and all white supporting cast are approximately 6% lower than for other racial compositions. These results appear consistent with implicit discrimination. Using estimates of the impact of critics' ratings on movie revenues, we find that lower critic ratings for black lead-white support movies translate into lost revenues of up to 4% or about $2.57 million on average. In sum, prejudice concerning race roles (e.g., the race of the leader versus supporters/followers) can have a direct impact on critic quality assessment, and thereby alter market outcomes.racial bias, quality assessment, expert ratings, movies

A Hybrid Statistical and Prioritised Unequal Error Protection Scheme for IEEE 802.11n LDPC Codes

The combination of powerful error correcting codes such as (LDPC) codes and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) has been widely deployed in wireless communication standards such as the IEEE 802.11n and DVB-T2. Recently, several Unequal Error Protection schemes which exploit non-uniform degree distribution of bit nodes in irregular LDPC codes have been proposed. In parallel, schemes that exploit the inherent UEP characteristics of the QAM constellation have also been developed. In this paper, a hybrid UEP scheme is proposed for LDPC codes with QAM. The scheme uses statistical distribution of source symbols to map the systematic bits of the LDPC encoded symbols to the QAM constellation. Essentially, systematic symbols having highest probabilities of occurrence are mapped onto the low power region of the QAM constellation and those with a low probability of occurrence are mapped onto the high power region. The decrease in overall transmission power allows for an increased spacing between the QAM constellation points. Additionally, the scheme uses the distribution of the bit node degree of the LDPC code-word to map the parity bits having the highest degree onto prioritised QAM constellation points. Simulations with the IEEE 802.11n LDPC codes revealed that the proposed scheme can provide gains of up to 0.91 dB in Eb/No compared with other UEP schemes for a range of Bit Error Rate (BER) values

Survey of Landslide Warning Systems and their Applicability in Mauritius

Landslide is major problem in several countries causing loss of lives and major infrastructural damage. Several systems have been set-up for monitoring and predicting landslides in different countries where this problem is prevalent. These systems integrate sensing mechanism with communication systems and GPS to detect landslide conditions and alert concerned parties via sms, emails and other appropriate means. Wireless sensor networks have also been widely deployed for landslide monitoring. Mauritius which is an island nation situated in the Indian Ocean has recently faced several problems due to extreme climatic conditions such as torrential rains and flash floods that have led to major landslide problems in different parts of the island. However, to date, there is no adequate system in place to monitor landslides. This paper surveys the different landslide modelling and warning systems that have been deployed worldwide and assesses their suitability for Mauritius. Given the excellent mobile network coverage available in Mauritius, a landslide warning system based on sms notifications appears to be a viable solution for Mauritius. A potential framework for a landslide monitoring system for Mauritius is therefore proposed along with a feasibility analysis

Improving ADSL Performance with Selective QAM Mapping and Hybrid ARQ

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) is a high-rate transmission standard used for broadband access. Error performance and bandwidth efficiency are the two main concerns in ADSL transmission, hence prompting the need for appropriate techniques to provide improved error protection and noise robustness in ADSL systems. This paper proposes an enhanced ADSL transmission model which incorporates Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM), selective or prioritised QAM constellation mapping and Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest HARQ with diversity combining. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides a significant gain of over 3 dB in Eb/No over a conventional ADSL system which does not use HARQ. It also achieves a 30 percent gain in throughput over a conventional ADSL which uses HARQ without diversity combining.Keywords: ADSL, Selective QAM, TCM, HARQ, Diversity Combining.Cite as:A B N Goolamhossen, T P Fowdur "Improving ADSL Performance with Selective QAM Mapping and Hybrid ARQ ", ADBU J.Engg.Tech., 2(1)(2015) 0021103(7pp

Performance Of IEEE 802.11 OFDM With Multiple Frequency Transforms And Pulse Shaping Schemes

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is employed in various communication systems such as the IEEE 802.11 wireless standards, in which both frequency transform, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and pulse shaping filter, Square Root Raised Cosine (SRRC) are used. The main contribution of this paper is the analysis of the performance of different combinations of frequency transforms and pulse shaping schemes for the 802.11n standard. The frequency transforms which have been used are: Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) and Discrete Hartley Transform (DHT). The pulse shaping filters are the Raised Cosine (RC), SRRC and Flipped Exponential Pulse (FEXP). The IEEE 802.11 WLAN system with Additive White Gaussian (AWGN) has been used as the modelling environment. The results showed that the DWT-based OFDM system has a better performance than the DHT and FFT schemes and upon comparing the pulse shaping filters, the SRRC filter outperforms the FEXP and RC filters

Evaluation of Congestion Relief Proposals in a Capital City

This paper aims at analyzing three different solutions suggested for traffic congestion relief in Port Louis, the busiest city of Mauritius. It evaluates the impact of the three alternatives which are the use of Light Rail Transit (LRT) as an alternative mode of transport, the construction of a Ring road around Port Louis, and the upgrading of the current bus network into a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. The impact of these three solutions has been evaluated by performing Traffic Cellular Automata (TCA) simulations. Our studies reveal that the Ring road will lead to more congestion while introducing the LRT or upgrading the current bus network will reduce congestion significantly. Document type: Articl

Performance Analysis of a Real-Time Adaptive Prediction Algorithm for Traffic Congestion

Traffic congestion is a major factor to consider in the development of a sustainable urban road network. In the past, several mechanisms have been developed to predict congestion, but few have considered an adaptive real-time congestion prediction. This paper proposes two congestion prediction approaches are created. The approaches choose between five different prediction algorithms using the Root Mean Square Error model selection criterion. The implementation consisted of a Global Positioning System based transmitter connected to an Arduino board with a Global System for Mobile/General Packet Radio Service shield that relays the vehicles position to a cloud server. A control station then accesses the vehicles position in real-time, computes its speed. Based on the calculated speed, it estimates the congestion level and it applies the prediction algorithms to the congestion level to predict the congestion for future time intervals. The performance of the prediction algorithms was analysed, and it was observed that the proposed schemes provide the best prediction results with a lower Mean Square Error than all other prediction algorithms when compared with the actual traffic congestion states

Analysing Transportation Data with Open Source Big Data Analytic Tools

Big data analytics allows a vast amount of structured and unstructured data to be effectively processed so that correlations, hidden patterns, and other useful information can be mined from the data. Several open source big data analytic tools that can perform tasks such as dimensionality reduction, feature extraction, transformation, optimization, are now available. One interesting area where such tools can provide effective solutions is transportation. Big data analytics can be used to efficiently manage transport infrastructure assets such as roads, airports, bus stations or ports. In this paper an overview of two open source big data analytic tools is first provided followed by a simple demonstration of application of these tools on transport dataset