Economic evaluation of mental health effects of flooding using Bayesian networks

The appraisal of appropriate levels of investment for devising flooding mitigation and to support recovery interventions is a complex and challenging task. Evaluation must account for social, political, environmental and other conditions, such as flood state expectations and local priorities. The evaluation method should be able to quickly identify evolving investment needs as the incidence and magnitude of flood events continue to grow. Quantification is essential and must consider multiple direct and indirect effects on flood related outcomes. The method proposed is this study is a Bayesian network, which may be used ex-post for evaluation, but also ex-ante for future assessment, and near real-time for the reallocation of investment into interventions. The particular case we study is the effect of flood interventions upon mental health, which is a gap in current investment analyses. Natural events such as floods expose people to negative mental health disorders including anxiety, distress and post-traumatic stress disorder. Such outcomes can be mitigated or exacerbated not only by state funded interventions, but by individual and community skills and experience. Success is also dampened when vulnerable and previously exposed victims are affected. Current measures evaluate solely the effectiveness of interventions to reduce physical damage to people and assets. This paper contributes a design for a Bayesian network that exposes causal pathways and conditional probabilities between interventions and mental health outcomes as well as providing a tool that can readily indicate the level of investment needed in alternative interventions based on desired mental health outcomes

A low cost and highly accurate technique for big data spatial-temporal interpolation

The high velocity, variety and volume of data generation by today's systems have necessitated Big Data (BD) analytic techniques. This has penetrated a wide range of industries; BD as a notion has various types and characteristics, and therefore a variety of analytic techniques would be required. The traditional analysis methods are typically unable to analyse spatial-temporal BD. Interpolation is required to approximate the values between the already existing data points, yet since there exist both location and time dimensions, only a multivariate interpolation would be appropriate. Nevertheless, existing software are unable to perform such complex interpolations. To overcome this challenge, this paper presents a layer by layer interpolation approach for spatial-temporal BD. Developing this layered structure provides the opportunity for working with much smaller linear system of equations. Consequently, this structure increases the accuracy and stability of numerical structure of the considered BD interpolation. To construct this layer by layer interpolation, we have used the good properties of Radial Basis Functions (RBFs). The proposed new approach is applied to numerical examples in spatial-temporal big data and the obtained results confirm the high accuracy and low computational cost. Finally, our approach is applied to explore one of the air pollution indices, i.e. daily PM2.5 concentration, based on different stations in the contiguous United States, and it is evaluated by leave-one-out cross validation

Vulnerability considerations for power line communication's supervisory control and data acquisition

Due to the increasing importance of communication networking, the power line (PL) channel has been considered as a good candidate for the communication medium. Power line communications (PLC) term stands for the technologies for the data communication over the electrical power supply network. The PL channels were not designed to transmit high speed data; therefore, they exhibit hostile medium for communication signal transmission. There are many factors such as noises, attenuation, distance, etc. affecting the quality of the transmission over PL channels. This paper presents PL model in the first sections of the work. Then it covers the security assessment of the PL system in the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) context

The effect of acceptance and commitment therapy on insomnia and sleep quality: A systematic review

Background Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), as a type of behavioral therapy, attempts to respond to changes in people’s performance and their relationship to events. ACT can affect sleep quality by providing techniques to enhance the flexibility of patients’ thoughts, yet maintaining mindfullness. Therefore, for the first time, a systematic review on the effects of ACT on sleep quality has been conducted. Methods This systematic review was performed to determine the effect of ACT on insomnia and sleep quality. To collect articles, the PubMed, Web of Science (WOS), Cochrane library, Embase, Scopus, Science Direct, ProQuest, Mag Iran, Irandoc, and Google Scholar databases were searched, without a lower time-limit, and until April 2020. Results Related articles were derived from 9 research repositories, with no lower time-limit and until April 2020. After assessing 1409 collected studies, 278 repetitive studies were excluded. Moreover, following the primary and secondary evaluations of the remaining articles, 1112 other studies were removed, and finally a total of 19 intervention studies were included in the systematic review process. Within the remaining articles, a sample of 1577 people had been assessed for insomnia and sleep quality. Conclusion The results of this study indicate that ACT has a significant effect on primary and comorbid insomnia and sleep quality, and therefore, it can be used as an appropriate treatment method to control and improve insomnia

Sustainability of Strategic Information Systems in Emergent vs. Prescriptive Strategic Management

Since the introduction of the ‘Strategic Information Systems’ (SIS) concept by Wiseman in 1985, there have been numerous efforts in incorporation of such systems by businesses for the very main reason of gaining competitive advantage. Considering the broad categorization of Strategic Management into emergent and prescriptive types, integration of SIS into business processes seems to be dissimilar in these two categories. This paper initially outlines the phases in the two types of strategic management approaches. It then intends to produce a framework for integration of SIS in each of the two methods. Lastly, the sustainability of SIS in emergent and prescriptive strategic management is compared. Our points of views on the Modern SIS have been presented

Philosophising data: A critical reflection on the ‘hidden’ issues

This paper aims to critically reflect on the processes, agendas and use of Big Data by presenting existing issues and problems in place and consolidating our points of views presented from different angles. This paper also describes current practices of handling Big Data, including considerations of smaller scale data analysis and the use of data visualisation to improve business decisions and prediction of market trends. The paper concludes that alongside any data collection, analysis and visualisation, the ‘researcher’ should be fully aware of the limitations of the data, by considering the data from different perspectives, angles and lenses. Not only will this add the validation and validity of the data, but it will also provide a ‘thinking tool’ by which to explore the data. Arguably providing the ‘human skill’ required in a process apparently destined to be automated by machines and algorithms

Adoption of social media as communication channels in government agencies

Social media has become an integral part of many people’s lives around the world. The main use of this communication channel is to connect with social circles. Social media is also widely used for commercial and business purposes. Governments are also attempting to use social media to communicate with their citizens as an alternative to the traditional communication channels. Nonetheless, when the level of use of social media in the government is compared to other fields, e.g. social and commercial sectors, a clear gap becomes apparent. This chapter investigates the issue of adopting social media as a communication channel between citizens and public agencies (including government departments) and considers a wide range of factors that affect the issue from the perspective of public agencies. The purpose of the chapter is to provide an extensive literature review and propose a framework that organises the critical factors that affect public agencies’ efforts while implementing social media and to provide a list of hypotheses to validate and evaluate the significance of these factors. The validation and evaluation of critical factors will hopefully help the decision makers to better understand the concerns and challenges, and thereby enabling them to concentrate on efforts to propose the best practices to overcome the barriers to adopting social media