Tradeoffs among Free-flow Speed, Capacity, Cost, and Environmental Footprint in Highway Design

This paper investigates differentiated design standards as a source of capacity additions that are more affordable and have smaller aesthetic and environmental impacts than expressways. We consider several tradeoffs, including narrow versus wide lanes and shoulders on an expressway of a given total width, and high-speed expressway versus lower-speed arterial. We quantify the situations in which off-peak traffic is sufficiently great to make it worthwhile to spend more on construction, or to give up some capacity, in order to provide very high off-peak speeds even if peak speeds are limited by congestion. We also consider the implications of differing accident rates. The results support expanding the range of highway designs that are considered when adding capacity to ameliorate urban road congestion.Highway design; Capacity; Free-flow speed; Parkway

RECRUITING CIVILIAN EXPERTISE: DEVELOPING A SKILLS-BASED HIRING MODEL FOR DIRECT ACCESSION INTO THE MILITARY

The Singapore military is exploring how to implement skills-based hiring in light of the government's emphasis and its growing adoption worldwide. This research presents a proof-of-concept methodology on how the military can employ skills-based hiring to recruit civilians with relevant skills to join its ranks as well as a novel way to quantify its merit using market data. I chose aircraft maintenance as the research subject, given that the skills for the military and civilian jobs are largely similar. Employing LinkedIn and various market data, I found that the value of skills-based hiring over traditional hiring depends on the job's context—whether it attracts the right profile of workers that the organization needs. In the study's context, skills-based hiring incentivizes younger technicians with more diverse skill sets, attracting more workers at the ME3-1 and ME3-2 ranks. Consequentially, highly skilled civilians at these ranks are accorded a higher entry rank compared to military technicians with average performance, which can create discontentment among the latter. Informed by the results, the study proposes that the military evaluate its manning and expertise gaps in deciding on the adoption of skills-based hiring and perhaps consider a hybrid model that can marry the merits of skills-based and traditional hiring practices. The methodology can also be used to quantify the value of skills-based hiring for other jobs beyond the military.Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.Major, Republic of Singapore Nav

The Power of Satire: an analysis of Gado’s Cartoons in The Standard newspapers

Editorial cartoons form a key part of newspapers, offering much-needed comic relief to acres of news stories. Godfrey Mwapembwa, popularly known by his pen name Gado, has been described by the Financial Times as East Africa’s most important syndicated cartoonist. Yet no extensive scholarly study has been done on the way Gado frames his drawings. This study analysed how politics, politicians and political issues are framed in Gado’s editorial cartoons by looking at his illustrations published by The Standard between November 1, 2018 and October 31, 2019. It starts with a brief look at modern trends in editorial cartoons. The study was guided by three objectives: (i) to determine the main characters and symbols in Gado’s political cartoons; (ii) to analyse the dominant themes in Gado’s political cartoons, and; (iii) to analyse the framing of politics, politicians and political issues in Gado’s political cartoons. To answer the research questions, guided by the framing theory, the study collected 60 cartoons through a systematic random sampling technique and employed a thematic analysis to understand and interpret the data. By executing a framing analysis of select cartoons, this study found that characters, symbols and words –the main elements used by Gado to frame the messages in his illustrations- help advance and push the boundaries of press freedom in saying the unsayable and writing the unprintable in a way no other media can do and in ways that are more provocative than in traditional media. The study also concluded that Gado’s interpretations of news events deepen and extend newspaper readers understanding of news developments and that by use of simple lines, words, characters and symbols, cartoonists effectively breakdown and communicate complex developments for the masses

Improving Palliative Care with Deep Learning

Improving the quality of end-of-life care for hospitalized patients is a priority for healthcare organizations. Studies have shown that physicians tend to over-estimate prognoses, which in combination with treatment inertia results in a mismatch between patients wishes and actual care at the end of life. We describe a method to address this problem using Deep Learning and Electronic Health Record (EHR) data, which is currently being piloted, with Institutional Review Board approval, at an academic medical center. The EHR data of admitted patients are automatically evaluated by an algorithm, which brings patients who are likely to benefit from palliative care services to the attention of the Palliative Care team. The algorithm is a Deep Neural Network trained on the EHR data from previous years, to predict all-cause 3-12 month mortality of patients as a proxy for patients that could benefit from palliative care. Our predictions enable the Palliative Care team to take a proactive approach in reaching out to such patients, rather than relying on referrals from treating physicians, or conduct time consuming chart reviews of all patients. We also present a novel interpretation technique which we use to provide explanations of the model's predictions.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine 201

Optimal Investment in Defined Contribution Pension Schemes with Forward Utility Preferences

Optimal investment strategies of an individual worker during the accumulation phase in the defined contribution pension scheme have been well studied in the literature. Most of them adopted the classical backward model and approach, but any pre-specifications of retirement time, preferences, and market environment models do not often hold in such a prolonged horizon of the pension scheme. Pre-commitment to ensure the time-consistency of an optimal investment strategy derived from the backward model and approach leads the supposedly optimal strategy to be sub-optimal in the actual realizations. This paper revisits the optimal investment problem for the worker during the accumulation phase in the defined contribution pension scheme, via the forward preferences, in which an environment-adapting strategy is able to hold optimality and time-consistency together. Stochastic partial differential equation representation for the worker's forward preferences is illustrated. This paper constructs two of the forward utility preferences and solves the corresponding optimal investment strategies, in the cases of initial power and exponential utility functions

Contrastive Learning in Distilled Models

Natural Language Processing models like BERT can provide state-of-the-art word embeddings for downstream NLP tasks. However, these models yet to perform well on Semantic Textual Similarity, and may be too large to be deployed as lightweight edge applications. We seek to apply a suitable contrastive learning method based on the SimCSE paper, to a model architecture adapted from a knowledge distillation based model, DistilBERT, to address these two issues. Our final lightweight model DistilFace achieves an average of 72.1 in Spearman's correlation on STS tasks, a 34.2 percent improvement over BERT base

La liberté herméneutique chez Heidegger

Sommes-nous libres ou sommes-nous déterminés ? La liberté est-elle simplement une illusion dans un cours des choses gouverné par la nécessité ? Il semble que la question sur la liberté ne saurait trouver de réponse certaine si elle reste ainsi posée dans ces termes qui sont ceux de la troisième antinomie kantienne. Notre étude tentera de montrer, à l’aide du corpus heideggérien, que poser la question de la liberté dans le cadre de la causalité, c’est d’emblée mécomprendre l’essence de l’être humain, de la liberté et du monde. Ce n’est qu’en redécouvrant une liberté plus originaire que l’on pourrait comprendre en quoi nous sommes essentiellement libres. La thèse de notre étude est que la « liberté herméneutique » chez Heidegger correspond à cette liberté originaire. Notre mémoire retracera, en trois parties, l’évolution du concept de liberté chez Heidegger de l’époque de Sein und Zeit jusqu’à sa pensée tardive. La première partie de notre étude s’intéresse au Dasein en tant qu’il est être-au monde : en reproblématisant la relation de l’être humain avec son monde, nous montrerons que l’être humain est essentiellement libre en tant qu’il se caractérise par son ouverture herméneutique au monde. La deuxième partie cherche à éclaircir le lien entre liberté et vérité : le Dasein, en tant qu’il est libre, est aussi dans la vérité entendue comme ouverture. Nous pourrons ainsi mettre en évidence dans la dernière partie de notre mémoire la continuité entre le concept de la liberté lors du « tournant » avec celui de l’époque d’Être et Temps et approfondir la notion de l’authenticité au-delà d’Être et Temps.Do we have free will or are determined? Is freedom only an illusion in a course of the world governed by necessity? It seems that the question of liberty cannot find a definitive answer if it remains thus posed in these terms which are those of the third Kantian antinomy. Our study will try to show, with the help of Heidegger’s work, that asking the question of liberty within the framework of causality is to misunderstand from the outset the essence of human being, of liberty and of the world. It is only by discovering a more radical liberty, freed from this framework, that one could understand how we are essentially free. The thesis of our study is that “hermeneutical freedom” in Heidegger corresponds to this radical freedom. Our thesis will retrace, in its three parts, the evolution of the concept of freedom in Heidegger from the time of Sein und Zeit until his later period. The first part of our study will look into Dasein as being-in-the-world: by problematizing the relationship between the human being and its world, we will show that freedom is essentially characterized as a hermeneutical openness to the world. The second part seeks to clarify the link between freedom and truth: Dasein, as it is free, is also truth understood as openness. We will thus be able to highlight in the last part of our study the continuity between the concept of freedom at the time of the "turn" with that at the time of “Being and Time” and be able to deepen the notion of authenticity beyond “Being and Time”

The influence of corporate income taxes on investment location: Evidence from corporate headquarters relocations

working paper available at https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soa_research/1588/</p