14,526 research outputs found
Family-Personalized Dietary Planning with Temporal Dynamics
Poor diet and nutrition in the United States has immense financial and health
costs, and development of new tools for diet planning could help families
better balance their financial and temporal constraints with the quality of
their diet and meals. This paper formulates a novel model for dietary planning
that incorporates two types of temporal constraints (i.e., dynamics on the
perishability of raw ingredients over time, and constraints on the time
required to prepare meals) by explicitly incorporating the relationship between
raw ingredients and selected food recipes. Our formulation is a diet planning
model with integer-valued decision variables, and so we study the problem of
designing approximation algorithms (i.e, algorithms with polynomial-time
computation and guarantees on the quality of the computed solution) for our
dietary model. We develop a deterministic approximation algorithm that is based
on a deterministic variant of randomized rounding, and then evaluate our
deterministic approximation algorithm with numerical experiments of dietary
planning using a database of about 2000 food recipes and 150 raw ingredients
Flexibility and access: implications of blended learning for higher education
Many institutions are developing policies aimed at widening participation and encouraging students from non-traditional backgrounds to engage in Higher Education. A number of studies have noted the potential benefits possible in this context through the use of online learning as part of overall blended approaches, to offer students flexibility in when and where they engage with study materials. Little research, however, has been undertaken in to whether students with significant levels of home commitment find such flexibility of particular use. This paper reports on a small scale exploratory study involving a group of postgraduate students which investigated how the student’s perception of the benefits of flexibility offered by online learning related to their level of home commitment. Analysis of the data gives some initial support to the idea that students with a greater level of home commitments are more likely to view flexibility of access as being of benefit. Consideration is given to the implications of the results for balancing face to face and online component in blended approaches and proposals are made for possible more in depth studies that could provide useful information for those involved in course design in the Higher Education context
Long-Term Affordable Housing Strategies in Hot Housing Markets
This paper inventories strategies for maintaining affordable housing toward perpetuity in hot markets in an increasing number of locales. Long-term affordable housing strategies answer the call to make affordable housing resources last longer as federal funding for affordable housing diminishes, rental affordability programs expire, and owners prematurely buy their way out of affordable mortgages. The need is especially acute in hot-market cities, like New York City, that have seen large development programs end without any adequate replacements. The strategies span rental and homeownership delivery mechanisms, subsidy and equity sharing, cooperatives and community governance, land regulation, extending existing termed programs, and amassing funds to sustain affordable housing, with a focus on producing long-term affordable units through inclusionary zoning. Interviews with national policymakers and experienced affordable and mixed-income housing developers bring new light to the success of these mechanisms.This study finds that neither relying on inclusionary zoning nor extending affordable housing programs should be considered a replacement for federal subsidies. Innovating new programs means setting numbers of units produced against longevity, affordability and occupants' capacity to generate equity. Recommendations are given first in terms of challenges, tensions, trade-offs and new questions that these strategies create, and then to specific actors in the policymaking arena. Nonprofits should focus on monitoring long-term affordability and accountability. Municipalities and local governments should better regulate sources and uses of housing trust funds, focus on helping fund first-time homebuyers, consider input from local developers, consider long-term inclusionary zoning regulation, and monitor productivity and long-term regulation. Policymakers and researchers should consider why potential homebuyers have selected riskier subprime mortgage products over more secure equitysharing products and might want to better advertise equity-sharing options. Finally, New York City should expand its voluntary inclusionary program to more neighborhoods and better track its production and longevity
The Changing Structure of Tax Policies for Foreign Direct Investment in Developing Countries
Developing countries keen to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) have typically used various preferential tax policies to be competitive. Tax holidays have been especially prevalent in the 1980s (Mintz [1990] and Shah [1995]) since they provide new foreign investors a low-tax regime for a qualifying period on the presumption that a company needs time to establish good levels of profitability.Working Paper Number 04-46
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