Is deliberation equitable ? evidence from transcripts of village meetings in south India

Deliberative decision-making processes are becoming increasingly important around the world to make important decisions about public and private goods allocation, but there is very little empirical evidence about how they actually work. In this paper the authors use data from India extracted from 131 transcripts of village meetings matched with data from household surveys conducted in the same villages prior to the meetings, to study whose preferences are reflected in the meetings. The meetings are constitutionally empowered to make decisions about public and private goods. The findings show that the more land a person owns, the higher the likelihood her preference is mentioned in the meeting, the longer the amount of time spent discussing this preference, and the higher the likelihood that a decision to provide or repair this public or private good is taken. At the same time, the voices of disadvantaged castes, while not dominating the meeting, are also heard. By contrast, the preferences of Muslims are given less time. High village literacy and the presence of higher level officials during village meetings mitigate the power of the landed, but political reservations for low castes for the post of village president increase the power of the landed.Access to Finance,Social Accountability,Peri-Urban Communities,Rural Urban Linkages,Anthropology

The Political Economy of Village Sanitation in South India: Capture or Poor Information?

Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, while also keeping major village roads reasonably well-served. Their decisions suggest, however, that they neither understand the health benefits of sanitation, nor the negative externalities to their own health if surrounding areas are poorly served. Our findings suggest that improving sanitary outcomes requires disseminating information on the public goods nature of their health benefits, as well as on the local government's responsibilities. It also requires putting public health regulations in place, along with measures to enable accountability in service provision.access to services; accountability; Accounting; affiliates; agricultural output; agriculture; air; air freight; air transport; Backbone; bank loans; Bank of Tanzania; Banking sector

Online Localization and Tracking of Multiple Moving Speakers in Reverberant Environments

We address the problem of online localization and tracking of multiple moving speakers in reverberant environments. The paper has the following contributions. We use the direct-path relative transfer function (DP-RTF), an inter-channel feature that encodes acoustic information robust against reverberation, and we propose an online algorithm well suited for estimating DP-RTFs associated with moving audio sources. Another crucial ingredient of the proposed method is its ability to properly assign DP-RTFs to audio-source directions. Towards this goal, we adopt a maximum-likelihood formulation and we propose to use an exponentiated gradient (EG) to efficiently update source-direction estimates starting from their currently available values. The problem of multiple speaker tracking is computationally intractable because the number of possible associations between observed source directions and physical speakers grows exponentially with time. We adopt a Bayesian framework and we propose a variational approximation of the posterior filtering distribution associated with multiple speaker tracking, as well as an efficient variational expectation-maximization (VEM) solver. The proposed online localization and tracking method is thoroughly evaluated using two datasets that contain recordings performed in real environments.Comment: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 201

Four "new political economy" essays.

The first two essays examine the functioning of two local governance institutions empowered or created by the 73rd amendment to the Indian constitution. First, I look at village meetings which were given real decision-making powers by the constitutional amendment, thus becoming real deliberative spaces. The setting of village meetings allows me to study deliberative democracy, a frequently discussed but infrequently empirically examined alternative to preference aggregation (such as through voting). In particular, by using village meetings transcripts and linking them with a household survey, I am able to investigate the relationship between group and individual characteristics, and voice. My main findings show that not all villagers are equally heard in the meetings. I find that the deliberations are not equitable, relative to norms of equal influence relative to group size, and of equal time dedicated to each participant. Second, I look at political reservations for women, mandated by the same constitutional amendment. By using a household survey that includes the household of the village leader, I am able to examine whether the leaders in reserved constituencies are token women, chosen from among the weak women of the village only to be controlled by the traditional elites. I find that the women leaders are not weak, as they are among the younger, wealthier and more knowledgeable women in the village. In addition to this finding about the selection of women, I am also comparing the policy outcomes between reserved and unreserved constituencies. I find that women perform no differently from men in terms of provision of public goods, but also that women perform worse than men in terms of meeting with upper level officials. A finding that emphasizes the antagonism between women leaders and the traditional elites, is that women leaders' performance is negatively affected by the concentration of landowner-ship in the hands of the upper castes. In the third essay I examine the role of gubernatorial political incentives in the provision of assistance to the elderly in the early years of social security in the United States. I find that assistance to the elderly is higher when the term limit is not binding. Furthermore, as predicted by my theoretic model, I find that the term limit effect is present only in the states where the fraction elderly takes on moderate values. In addition the term limit effect is smaller when political competition is less intense. These findings combined suggest that assistance to elderly is shaped by the electoral incentives of the state governor. Finally, in the fourth essay, I examine the change in the likelihood of voting due to a weather shock. In particular, I find that the decrease in the likelihood of voting due to rain during the election day is higher for less educated, relative to more educated individuals. One hypothesis that I put forward is that individuals who experience a lower drop in the likelihood of voting due to rain act strategically because they realize that their vote is likely to weigh more given that overall voting presence is reduced. An important assumption that I make is that, conditional on the comprehensive set of observable individual characteristics, the increase in the cost of voting due to rain is equal across individuals. Using measures of rain for specific time intervals during the election day I make comparisons between individuals for whom this important assumption may hold

Tracking Multiple Persons Based on a Variational Bayesian Model

International audienceObject tracking is an ubiquitous problem in computer vision with many applications in human-machine and human-robot interaction, augmented reality, driving assistance, surveillance, etc. Although thoroughly investigated, tracking multiple persons remains a challenging and an open problem. In this paper, an online variational Bayesian model for multiple-person tracking is proposed. This yields a variational expectation-maximization (VEM) algorithm. The computational efficiency of the proposed method is due to closed-form expressions for both the posterior distributions of the latent variables and for the estimation of the model parameters. A stochastic process that handles person birth and person death enables the tracker to handle a varying number of persons over long periods of time. The proposed method is benchmarked using the MOT 2016 dataset

How to Improve Student Education in Cardiology? 13 Essential Answers Through Medical Simulation

DergiPark: 379021tmsjAims: Is there a difference, from a clinical point of view, between a first year resident and a 4th year one, in the branch of Cardiology? If so, do we need to diminish it? And more importantly, do we have the tools? In this study it is aimed to evaluate medical simulation and its applicability in cardiology as an education method contributing to make students and residents more experienced and sufficient. Methods: The descriptive, cross-sectional study based on a survey which was applied to the groups of students in Carol Davila’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy (146) and residents (33 out of which 18 in the first two years and 15 in the last 3 years) was conducted between November 2014 and January 2015. Responses regarding evaluation of medical simulation as an education method were analyzed by using descriptive statistics including frequencies and percentages.Results: The results showed that with the usage of medical simulation as an education method 128 (87.6 %) students would have felt more confident and learnt faster, while 113 (77.5%) students would have found studying more appealing. Furthermore 10 (68%) of residents in the 3rd, 4th, 5th year would have felt more experienced, if they actually encountered rare simulated pathologies; thus 16 (91%) of the residents in the 1st, 2nd year thought the risks would have decreased for patients.Conclusion: Medical Simulation remains a necessity as an education method to improve practical skills of both students and residents in branch of cardiolog

A Cascaded Multiple-Speaker Localization and Tracking System

International audienceThis paper presents an online multiple-speaker localization and tracking method, as the INRIA-Perception contribution to the LOCATA Challenge 2018. First, the recursive least-square method is used to adaptively estimate the direct-path relative transfer function as an interchannel localization feature. The feature is assumed to associate with a single speaker at each time-frequency bin. Second, a complex Gaussian mixture model (CGMM) is used as a generative model of the features. The weight of each CGMM component represents the probability that this component corresponds to an active speaker, and is adaptively estimated with an online optimization algorithm. Finally, taking the CGMM component weights as observations, a Bayesian multiple-speaker tracking method based on the variational expectation maximization algorithm is used. The tracker accounts for the variation of active speakers and the localization miss measurements, by introducing speaker birth and sleeping processes. The experiments carried out on the development dataset of the challenge are reported