Stakeholders in pension finance

This dissertation examines three stakeholders in pension finance: the individual, the policymaker, and the pension provider (e.g., an insurer or a pension fund). In a setting beset by unforeseen financial market circumstances and demographic changes that disfavor financial security in retirement, a re-evaluation of these stakeholders' role is necessary. We explore the regulation and design of retirement plans by incorporating features that characterize the future retirement landscape, such as the increasing burden of risk borne by the individual, and the potential involvement of market investors in the provision of retirement contracts. The implications of our findings encompass guidance for individuals in managing longevity risk, evaluation of the appeal of longevity risk exposure to investors, insights on contract design for the pension provider, and proposals to the policymaker on regulatory measures that foster a sustainable retirement environment

Game-Theoretic Pricing and Selection with Fading Channels

We consider pricing and selection with fading channels in a Stackelberg game framework. A channel server decides the channel prices and a client chooses which channel to use based on the remote estimation quality. We prove the existence of an optimal deterministic and Markovian policy for the client, and show that the optimal policies of both the server and the client have threshold structures when the time horizon is finite. Value iteration algorithm is applied to obtain the optimal solutions for both the server and client, and numerical simulations and examples are given to demonstrate the developed result.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted by the 2017 Asian Control Conferenc

Dielectric Elastomer Sensors

Dielectric elastomers (DEs) represent a class of electroactive polymers (EAPs) that exhibit a significant electromechanical effect, which has made them very attractive over the last several decades for use as soft actuators, sensors and generators. Based on the principle of a plane‐parallel capacitor, dielectric elastomer sensors consist of a flexible and stretchable dielectric polymer sandwiched between two compliant electrodes. With the development of elastic polymers and stretchable conductors, flexible and sensitive dielectric elastomer tactile sensors, similar to human skin, have been used for measuring mechanical deformations, such as pressure, strain, shear and torsion. For high sensitivity and fast response, air gaps and microstructural dielectric layers are employed in pressure sensors or multiaxial force sensors. Multimodal dielectric elastomer sensors have been reported that can detect mechanical deformation but can also sense temperature, humidity, as well as chemical and biological stimulation in human‐activity monitoring and personal healthcare. Hence, dielectric elastomer sensors have great potential for applications in soft robotics, wearable devices, medical diagnostic and structural health monitoring, because of their large deformation, low cost, ease of fabrication and ease of integration into monitored structures

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A HORTICULTURE THERAPY CLASS ON PERCEIVED EMOTIONS FOR COLLEGE NURSING STUDENTS: A PRELIMINARY STUDY

poster abstractObjective: Horticultural therapy (HT) is a dynamic, guided therapeutic process that involves healthcare providers teaching patients to work with plants and natural materials. Through engaging in horticultural activities, patients achieve specific goals such as improved physical strength, memory, cognitive abilities, task initiation, language skills, and socialization. The aim of the study was to evaluate the efficacy of a horticultural therapy (HT) class for college nursing students who perceive high levels of stress in their academic and clinical nursing studies. Method: The study was conducted at a health science university in an urban city of northern Taiwan. After explaining the procedure to and receiving consent from participants, a total of 116 college, nursing students, aged 20-39 years, mean age 26.90 (4.72), all females were recruited into the study. One group pretest and posttest design and convenient sampling were adopted. Participants received a pretest one week prior to the three-week HT class. The three-week HT class was conducted once per week with two hours for each section. Learning was evaluated with a posttest one week after the end of the HT class. Personal characteristics and outcome data was collected by a constructed questionnaire including five parts: the demographic section, the attitude towards HT, the knowledge of HT, the perceived emotional status, and the Chinese State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (C-STAI). Results: After the three-week HT class, student-perceived emotional management and status significantly improved. While students perceived greater HT knowledge, there was no significant difference in the HT knowledge pre and post-test scores. While a decrease in anxiety was found, it failed to reach a 0.05 level of significance. It showed relationships between pretest emotional status and previous experience with the decreased level of anxiety in the results of the multiple regression analysis. Conclusion: Engaging students in experiencing HT during an academic class could improve college nursing students' emotional status. Further refinement of the HT class and research design are suggested, such as adding a control group and involving more therapeutic activities into the class

COVID-19 Pandemic: An Unseen’s Evolution War

This is a new beginning. It started just like a fiction movie.In December 2019, a new cluster of pneumonia caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was first identified in Wuhan, China. Without any mercy, it became a pandemic and left no time for grief. It was not only life-threatening but also challenged our healthcare system, economy, culture, lifestyle and belief. It forced us to make changes. We need to evolve, and we must evolve. Malaysia, a multi-ethnicity and multireligiouscountry which is located in Southeast Asia, has a population of 32 million with a median age of 28.9 years in 2019. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, Malaysia has experienced rapid globalization and is the 19th leading exporter in the world. It is an upper-middle-income country with a gross domestic product (GDP) of 370 billion USD in 2019, of which 4.5% is funded to the healthcare system

Mixed Transportation Network Design under a Sustainable Development Perspective

A mixed transportation network design problem considering sustainable development was studied in this paper. Based on the discretization of continuous link-grade decision variables, a bilevel programming model was proposed to describe the problem, in which sustainability factors, including vehicle exhaust emissions, land-use scale, link load, and financial budget, are considered. The objective of the model is to minimize the total amount of resources exploited under the premise of meeting all the construction goals. A heuristic algorithm, which combined the simulated annealing and path-based gradient projection algorithm, was developed to solve the model. The numerical example shows that the transportation network optimized with the method above not only significantly alleviates the congestion on the link, but also reduces vehicle exhaust emissions within the network by up to 41.56%