The Effect of Patient's Asymmetric Information Problem on Medical Care Utilization with Consideration of a Patient's Ex-ante Health Status

Even if a patient's access to health information has been enhanced, a patient still doesn't have enough ability to utilize it. Therefore, a doctor's effort to sincerely communicate with a patient might affect the patient's use of medical care. This paper builds up the empirical model and found the effect of a doctor's effort on patient's medical care use was significant and according to the ex-ante health status of a patient, a doctor's effort influenced a patient's medical care use in different way.asymmetry of information between doctor and patient, patient's medical care use, doctor's effort to effectively communicate with patients, patient's ex-ante health status

Design and implementation of heterogeneous surface gateway for underwater acoustic sensor network

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) are used for diverse purposes such as pollution monitoring, disaster prevention and industrial sensing in the oceans. Especially, UASNs are mainly focusing on monitoring various underwater environmental data and delivering the data to a monitoring center where nearby or far from the deployed area. To reliably deliver the data, a surface gateway should convert acoustic signal to RF (Radio Frequency) signal. In this paper, we devise a multiple interfaces-based surface gateway that can connect both a cellular network and a Zigbee network. Depends on the service requirement, the surface gateway can easily adopt each wireless interface and relay the data to a low power ZigBee network or a long range CDMA network

DELIVERY AND ASSESSMENT OF A SYSTEMS ANALYSIS COURSE DURING COVID-19

In this paper, we review and reflect on our experience in the teaching of a Systems Analysis (SA) course in Semester 1, 2020, in Victoria, Australia, during COVID-19 lockdown. The SA course is a second-year course for all Bachelor of IT programs in our university, and it ran on three campuses and online. Students work in groups of three to analyse and document the system requirements of Australia Post. This paper describes the design of an SA course, how all students moved to online mode and the design of the final assessment to replace the traditional face-to-face exam in response to COVID-19 lockdown. We also describe the content of the course, method of instruction, assessment tools, the learning outcomes during online, what we have learned from running this course, recommendations for future offerings and how others can adapt and apply the practice

Backbone Can Not be Trained at Once: Rolling Back to Pre-trained Network for Person Re-Identification

In person re-identification (ReID) task, because of its shortage of trainable dataset, it is common to utilize fine-tuning method using a classification network pre-trained on a large dataset. However, it is relatively difficult to sufficiently fine-tune the low-level layers of the network due to the gradient vanishing problem. In this work, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy that allows low-level layers to be sufficiently trained by rolling back the weights of high-level layers to their initial pre-trained weights. Our strategy alleviates the problem of gradient vanishing in low-level layers and robustly trains the low-level layers to fit the ReID dataset, thereby increasing the performance of ReID tasks. The improved performance of the proposed strategy is validated via several experiments. Furthermore, without any add-ons such as pose estimation or segmentation, our strategy exhibits state-of-the-art performance using only vanilla deep convolutional neural network architecture.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201

Perceived parental warmth and depression in early adolescents: path analysis on the role of self-esteem as a mediator

The prevalence of depression in Malaysia instigated the twofold objectives of the present study. First, the relationship between perceived parental warmth, self-esteem and depression was examined, followed by the exploration on the role of self-esteem as a mediator between perceived parental warmth and depression among early adolescents. The model for early adolescent's depression was guided by Beck's cognitive theory of depression and parental acceptance-rejection theory. A total of 1394 adolescents aged 13 to 15 years, who reported living with both married and biological parents, provided complete self-report data on the measures (Conger's subscale for parental warmth, Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale, Beck Depression Inventory for Malays) for the three observed variables (namely, perceived parental warmth, self-esteem and depression). In order to determine the role of self-esteem as a mediator, Pearson correlation was first conducted to ensure that the initial variable (perceived parental warmth) was related to the outcome (depression) and mediator (self-esteem) variable as suggested by Baron and Kenny (1986). Path analysis was then employed to establish the mediating effect of self-esteem. Results revealed that the data from the study fitted the model and that perceived parental warmth had an indirect effect on depression through self-esteem. Findings also revealed that self-esteem was a complete mediator in the relationship between perceived parental warmth and depression. Implications for the alternative approach in preventing depression were further discussed

Polystyrene-Al2O3 composite solid polymer electrolyte for lithium secondary battery

In a common salt-in-polymer electrolyte, a polymer which has polar groups in the molecular chain is necessary because the polar groups dissolve lithium salt and coordinate cations. Based on the above point of view, polystyrene [PS] that has nonpolar groups is not suitable for the polymer matrix. However, in this PS-based composite polymer-in-salt system, the transport of cations is not by segmental motion but by ion-hopping through a lithium percolation path made of high content lithium salt. Moreover, Al2O3 can dissolve salt, instead of polar groups of polymer matrix, by the Lewis acid-base interactions between the surface group of Al2O3 and salt. Notably, the maximum enhancement of ionic conductivity is found in acidic Al2O3 compared with neutral and basic Al2O3 arising from the increase of free ion fraction by dissociation of salt. It was revealed that PS-Al2O3 composite solid polymer electrolyte containing 70 wt.% salt and 10 wt.% acidic Al2O3 showed the highest ionic conductivity of 9.78 × 10-5 Scm-1 at room temperature