How effective is lifeline banking in assisting the 'unbanked'?

Many consumers who lack checking accounts are paying relatively high costs to access the nation's payments system. Legislation aimed at opening the system to these unbanked individuals has centered on requiring commercial banks to offer low-cost "lifeline" accounts. But will cost savings alone motivate these consumers to access the payments system through banks?Checking accounts ; Banks and banking - Service charges ; Poverty

Simulated evaluation of faceted browsing based on feature selection

In this paper we explore the limitations of facet based browsing which uses sub-needs of an information need for querying and organising the search process in video retrieval. The underlying assumption of this approach is that the search effectiveness will be enhanced if such an approach is employed for interactive video retrieval using textual and visual features. We explore the performance bounds of a faceted system by carrying out a simulated user evaluation on TRECVid data sets, and also on the logs of a prior user experiment with the system. We first present a methodology to reduce the dimensionality of features by selecting the most important ones. Then, we discuss the simulated evaluation strategies employed in our evaluation and the effect on the use of both textual and visual features. Facets created by users are simulated by clustering video shots using textual and visual features. The experimental results of our study demonstrate that the faceted browser can potentially improve the search effectiveness

2002-2003 Mostly Schubert

https://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_otherseasonalconcerts/1069/thumbnail.jp

Quantum social networks

We introduce a physical approach to social networks (SNs) in which each actor is characterized by a yes-no test on a physical system. This allows us to consider SNs beyond those originated by interactions based on pre-existing properties, as in a classical SN (CSN). As an example of SNs beyond CSNs, we introduce quantum SNs (QSNs) in which actor is characterized by a test of whether or not the system is in a quantum state. We show that QSNs outperform CSNs for a certain task and some graphs. We identify the simplest of these graphs and show that graphs in which QSNs outperform CSNs are increasingly frequent as the number of vertices increases. We also discuss more general SNs and identify the simplest graphs in which QSNs cannot be outperformed.Comment: REVTeX4, 6 pages, 3 figure

Basic exclusivity graphs in quantum correlations

A fundamental problem is to understand why quantum theory only violates some noncontextuality (NC) inequalities and identify the physical principles that prevent higher-than-quantum violations. We prove that quantum theory only violates those NC inequalities whose exclusivity graphs contain, as induced subgraphs, odd cycles of length five or more, and/or their complements. In addition, we show that odd cycles are the exclusivity graphs of a well-known family of NC inequalities and that there is also a family of NC inequalities whose exclusivity graphs are the complements of odd cycles. We characterize the maximum noncontextual and quantum values of these inequalities, and provide evidence supporting the conjecture that the maximum quantum violation of these inequalities is exactly singled out by the exclusivity principle.Comment: REVTeX4, 7 pages, 2 figure

Simulation of Axisymmetric Flows with Swirl in Vorticity- Stream Function Variables Using the Lattice Boltzmann Method

In the present work, a Lattice Boltzmann formulation in vorticity-stream function variables is proposed for axisymmetric flows with swirl. For this purpose, several source terms are proposed and implemented. Although containing velocity gradients, these sources are in the Lattice Boltzmann framework and fulfill the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations in their conservative form. The main characteristics of the proposed method are: First, the momentum equation is solved using a unified Lattice Boltzmann solver; second, the proposed sources are consistent with the nonviscous and viscous momentum equations; and third, the implemented method is second-order accurate in space. Numerical tests on the Taylor-Couette flow with finite aspect ratio of 3.8 and the lid-driven cylindrical cavity flow were carried out showing good agreement with numerical and experimental results found in the literature, evidencing the ability of the implemented method to solve axisymmetric flows with swirl. In the case of the lid-driven cylindrical cavity flow, the implemented method is able to correctly reproduce some qualitative characteristics of this flow such as the vortex breakdown close to the cavity axis at different Reynolds numbers and cavity aspect ratio