Catastrophe Modeling with Financial Applications

Catastrophe modeling is used to prepare for losses caused by natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or tornadoes and man-made catastrophes such as terrorism. Modeled data can be used to create a comprehensive distribution of possible disasters. The distribution gives probabilities of potential catastrophes of different severities occurring over a certain time frame. Calculating potential losses and probability of those losses occurring allows insurance companies to plan and reserve enough money to protect themselves from catastrophic events. Using a catastrophe case study posted online from the Casualty Actuarial Society and R software, this paper shows the use of statistical techniques to create an Exceedance Probability plot for possible losses from a set of hurricanes with varying loss severity (CAS 18). The creation of the probability plot will then be used on a set of data called “SP500_2000to2015_SM” to show how the use of catastrophe modeling can apply to financial data

Sampling and handling of desert soils

Sampling and handling of desert soils - area site, transportation, processing, and storag

Studies in Additive Number Theory by Circles of Partition

In this paper we introduce and develop the circle embedding method. This method hinges essentially on a Combinatorial structure which we choose to call circles of partition. We provide applications in the context of problems relating to deciding on the feasibility of partitioning numbers into certain class of integers. In particular, our method allows us to partition any sufficiently large number $n\in\mathbb{N}$ into any set $\mathbb{H}$ with natural density greater than $\frac{1}{2}$. This possibility could herald an unprecedented progress on class of problems of similar flavour. The paper finishes by giving a partial proof of the binary Goldbach conjecture.Comment: 43 pages; a partial proof of the binary Goldbach conjecture adde

Increasing Women’s Healthcare Access at a Student Run Free Clinic by Creating a Women’s Health Coalition

Introduction/Problem: The Indiana University Student Outreach Clinic (IU-SOC) was established to bridge gaps in primary care-based medical, dental, social and legal services to uninsured and underinsured Indiana residents. A bimonthly women’s clinic was later created to provide medical care to those with obstetric and gynecologic needs. Even with the introduction of a women’s clinic, mammogram referrals were not always being conducted, Pap smears were being deferred, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) were not being treated appropriately. Here, we describe how the concept of the women’s clinic was expanded to a multidisciplinary coalition of medical students and a certified OB/GYN physician advisor dedicated to women’s health to address women-specific concerns. Methods/Interventions: A 62 person team was created ​to address each of the needs we identified in the clinic regarding women’s health. This team consisted of a finance chair, volunteer chair, clinic managers (CM), patient navigators (PN), appointment coordinators (AC), WH liaisons, education specialists, and quality improvement (QI) researchers. Eleven team leaders were created to assist with managing the different elements of the growing team. Results: Fifty-eight patients were referred to the WH PN team to help assist patients obtaining higher level care, 11 of which were successfully referred to date. Eight pregnant patients were seen at the clinic this year, an increase from six over the past three years combined. Fifty-six pap smears were completed this year, an increase from 37 over the past five years combined. STI, HIV, and hepatitis testing was performed on 281 patients, an increase from 149 from the past five years combined. Thirty-one patients were referred to a new twice monthly WH clinic to be evaluated by an OB/GYN or obstetrics-trained family medicine provider not previously accessible at the clinic. Labetalol, RhoGAM, and glucose tolerance tests were added to clinic resources to improve prenatal care. Protocols were written for sexual assault, abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB), dysmenorrhea, HPV, and medications approved in pregnancy to standarize patient care. A new microscope was obtained to improve the ability to perform wet mounts. Conclusion: With the creation of the WHC, our volunteers have bridged gaps in medical care. Important and prevalent female reproductive and sexual health issues, like AUB, IPV, cervical and breast cancer screenings, and others are handled with the appropriate level of urgency and thoroughness they require. Nearly equally as important, we have trained and built a community of students who are passionate about women’s health ensuring sustainability

Complex Circles of Partition and the Squeeze Principle

In this paper we continue the development of the circles of partition by introducing the notion of complex circles of partition. This is anenhancement of such structures from subsets of the natural numbers as base sets to the complex area as base and bearing set. The squeeze principle as a basic tool for studying the possibilities of partitioning of numbers is demonstrated.Comment: 12 page

Classifier Fusion for SVM-Based Multimedia Semantic Indexing

International audienceConcept indexing in multimedia libraries is very useful for users searching and browsing but it is a very challenging research problem as well. Combining several modalities, features or concepts is one of the key issues for bridging the gap between signal and semantics. In this pa- per, we present three fusion schemes inspired from the classical early and late fusion schemes. First, we present a kernel-based fusion scheme which takes advantage of the kernel basis of classifiers such as SVMs. Second, we integrate a new normalization process into the early fusion scheme. Third, we present a contextual late fusion scheme to merge classification scores of several concepts. We conducted experiments in the framework of the official TRECVID'06 evaluation campaign and we obtained signif- icant improvements with the proposed fusion schemes relatively to usual fusion schemes