Business start-ups and productive efficiency

This paper studies efficient allocation of resources in an economy in which agents are initially heterogeneous with regard to their wealth levels and whether they have ideas or not. An agent with an idea can start a business that generates random returns. Agents have private information about (1) their initial types, (2) how they allocate their resources, and (3) the realized returns. The unobservability of returns creates a novel motive for subsidizing agents who have ideas but lack resources to invest in them. To analyze this motive in isolation, the paper assumes that agents are risk-neutral and abstracts away from equality and insurance considerations. The unobservability of initial types and actions implies that the subsidy that poor agents with ideas receive is limited by incentive compatibility: the society should provide other agents with enough incentives so that they do not claim to be poor and have ideas. The paper then provides an implementation of the constrained-efficient allocation in an incomplete markets setup that is similar to the U.S. Small Business Administration's Business Loan Program. Finally, the paper extends the model in several dimensions to show that the results are robust to these generalizations of the model.Productivity

Implementation of Adaptive Unsharp Masking as a pre-filtering method for watermark detection and extraction

Digital watermarking has been one of the focal points of research interests in order to provide multimedia security in the last decade. Watermark data, belonging to the user, are embedded on an original work such as text, audio, image, and video and thus, product ownership can be proved. Various robust watermarking algorithms have been developed in order to extract/detect the watermark against such attacks. Although watermarking algorithms in the transform domain differ from others by different combinations of transform techniques, it is difficult to decide on an algorithm for a specific application. Therefore, instead of developing a new watermarking algorithm with different combinations of transform techniques, we propose a novel and effective watermark extraction and detection method by pre-filtering, namely Adaptive Unsharp Masking (AUM). In spite of the fact that Unsharp Masking (UM) based pre-filtering is used for watermark extraction/detection in the literature by causing the details of the watermarked image become more manifest, effectiveness of UM may decrease in some cases of attacks. In this study, AUM has been proposed for pre-filtering as a solution to the disadvantages of UM. Experimental results show that AUM performs better up to 11\% in objective quality metrics than that of the results when pre-filtering is not used. Moreover; AUM proposed for pre-filtering in the transform domain image watermarking is as effective as that of used in image enhancement and can be applied in an algorithm-independent way for pre-filtering in transform domain image watermarking

On the Optimal Skill Distribution in a Mirrleesian Economy

People are heterogenous in the skills by which they turn eort into output. A central question in normative public economics is how to redistribute resources from more- to less-skilled individuals eciently. In addition to income taxation, this paper considers another policy tool of redistribution by allowing planner to choose the dispersion of skill distribution given the average skill level of the economy. We nd that, depending on the parameters of the model, either perfectly unequal skill distribution in which one group has a very high skill level and the rest are completely unskilled, or perfectly equal skill distribution in which all agents have the same skill level, is socially optimal, but an interior level of skill inequality is never optimal. We then provide conditions on the parameters under which perfectly equal and perfectly unequal skill distributions are optimal.Skill Distribution, Mirrleesian Taxation, Redistribution, Eciency

Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of the exceptional pulsar PSR B0628-28

PSR B0628-28 is a radio pulsar which was first detected in the X-ray band by ROSAT and then later observed with Chandra and XMM-Newton. The Chandra observation yielded an X-ray luminosity two orders of magnitude higher than what is expected for spin-powered pulsars, also there were no pulsations detected. The XMM-Newton observation, however, reveals pulsations at the expected radio period, P=1.244 s. The simultaneously analyzed spectra also gives a luminosity (in cgs) Log Lx=30.34, which is ~350 times greater than what would be expected from the correlation between Lx-Edot.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, to be published in ApJ

Human abnormal behavior impact on speaker verification systems

Human behavior plays a major role in improving human-machine communication. The performance must be affected by abnormal behavior as systems are trained using normal utterances. The abnormal behavior is often associated with a change in the human emotional state. Different emotional states cause physiological changes in the human body that affect the vocal tract. Fear, anger, or even happiness we recognize as a deviation from a normal behavior. The whole spectrum of human-machine application is susceptible to behavioral changes. Abnormal behavior is a major factor, especially for security applications such as verification systems. Face, fingerprint, iris, or speaker verification is a group of the most common approaches to biometric authentication today. This paper discusses human normal and abnormal behavior and its impact on the accuracy and effectiveness of automatic speaker verification (ASV). The support vector machines classifier inputs are Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and their dynamic changes. For this purpose, the Berlin Database of Emotional Speech was used. Research has shown that abnormal behavior has a major impact on the accuracy of verification, where the equal error rate increase to 37 %. This paper also describes a new design and application of the ASV system that is much more immune to the rejection of a target user with abnormal behavior.Web of Science6401274012

The Effect of Interfacial Chemical Bonding in TiO2-SiO2 Composites on their Photocatalytic NOx Abatement Performance

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Grant Ref: EP/M003299/1) and the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51461135005) International Joint Research Project (EPSRC-NSFC).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Revisi UU Bantuan Hukum demi Meningkatkan Pemenuhan Hak Korban untuk Mendapatkan Bantuan Hukum

Undang-Undang Nomor 16 Tahun 2011 tentang Bantuan Hukum dipandang belum optimal dalam memberikan bantuan hukum termasuk kepada korban tindak pidana meski bantuan hukum tersebut sesungguhnya diperlukan untuk mengurangi penderitaan korban atas tindak pidana yang dialaminya serta juga dapat mencegah terjadinya intimidasi terhadap korban. Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk memberikan gambaran tentang kelemahan Undang-Undang Nomor 16 Tahun 2011 tentang Bantuan Hukum sehingga penting dilakukan revisi terhadap Undang-Undang tersebut demi meningkatkan pemenuhan hak korban atas bantuan hukum serta usulan reformulasi perundangan bantuan hukum demi meningkatkan pemenuhan hak korban atas bantuan hukum. Penelitian normatif empiris ini dilakukan secara kualitatif melalui wawancara menggunakan aplikasi zoom dan studi pustaka. Analisis data dilakukan dengan menggunakan analisis kualitatif berdasarkan model interaktif dari Miles dan Huberman. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa Undang-Undang 16/2011 masih memiliki kelemahan yakni belum sejalan dengan ketentuan peraturan perundangan lain serta belum optimal dalam memberikan jaminan dan perlindungan hak dan kebutuhan korban dan kelompok rentan lainnya untuk mendapatkan bantuan hukum. Oleh karena itu, Undang-Undang 16/2011 perlu direvisi untuk menjamin terlindunginya hak korban atas bantuan hukum, antara lain melalui sinkronisasi peraturan, perluasan konsep penerima bantuan hukum, serta kesetaraan bantuan litigasi dan non-litigasi bagi pelaku dan korban