International Developments in Self-Directed Care

Highlights innovative self-directed care programs in Europe and the United States that allow patients to choose home and community-based services, within a budget, in managing mental illness and chronic conditions. Examines outcomes and lessons learned

Sources of Output Growth in Indian Agriculture during the Post-Reform Period

Economic growth has failed to be sufficiently inclusive, particularly after the mid-nineties. Although agriculture is still a single major sector providing livelihood to more than 60 percent of the population, it has lost its growth momentum and the share has been declining continuously for a variety of reasons like low income due to inadequate output growth, low productivity, lack of credit at reasonable rates, natural calamities and unavailability of proper extension services. Realizing the importance of this sector and its current crisis, the Eleventh Plan aims to reverse this trend. Output growth could be possible by increasing input growth, technical progress and improvement in technical efficiency. In order to identify the source of the problem, this paper attempts to decompose the agricultural output growth obtained in 15 major states for the period 1994-95 to 2003-04 into the above three components using the random coefficients frontier production function model. Results of the study indicate that the efficiency has declined over time for all the states and the average technical efficiency is only 72 percent. This means that there is a potential to increase the existing output by 28 percent without increasing inputs.We found that inmost of the states, growth was only due to higher inputs. Investment in extension services along with sustained investment in agricultural research and development, and infrastructure is the need of the hour. West Bengal is the most efficient state in applying labor and fertilizer inputs and also has a very high over all efficiency. This can be linked to the successful land reform policies of the state.economic growth, technical efficiency, Eleventh Plan, frontier production function, land reform

Preserving Stabilization while Practically Bounding State Space

Stabilization is a key dependability property for dealing with unanticipated transient faults, as it guarantees that even in the presence of such faults, the system will recover to states where it satisfies its specification. One of the desirable attributes of stabilization is the use of bounded space for each variable. In this paper, we present an algorithm that transforms a stabilizing program that uses variables with unbounded domain into a stabilizing program that uses bounded variables and (practically bounded) physical time. While non-stabilizing programs (that do not handle transient faults) can deal with unbounded variables by assigning large enough but bounded space, stabilizing programs that need to deal with arbitrary transient faults cannot do the same since a transient fault may corrupt the variable to its maximum value. We show that our transformation algorithm is applicable to several problems including logical clocks, vector clocks, mutual exclusion, leader election, diffusing computations, Paxos based consensus, and so on. Moreover, our approach can also be used to bound counters used in an earlier work by Katz and Perry for adding stabilization to a non-stabilizing program. By combining our algorithm with that earlier work by Katz and Perry, it would be possible to provide stabilization for a rich class of problems, by assigning large enough but bounded space for variables.Comment: Moved some content from the Appendix to the main paper, added some details to the transformation algorithm and to its descriptio

Homo economicus in visual search

How do reward outcomes affect early visual performance? Previous studies found a suboptimal influence, but they ignored the non-linearity in how subjects perceived the reward outcomes. In contrast, we find that when the non-linearity is accounted for, humans behave optimally and maximize expected reward. Our subjects were asked to detect the presence of a familiar target object in a cluttered scene. They were rewarded according to their performance. We systematically varied the target frequency and the reward/penalty policy for detecting/missing the targets. We find that 1) decreasing the target frequency will decrease the detection rates, in accordance with the literature. 2) Contrary to previous studies, increasing the target detection rewards will compensate for target rarity and restore detection performance. 3) A quantitative model based on reward maximization accurately predicts human detection behavior in all target frequency and reward conditions; thus, reward schemes can be designed to obtain desired detection rates for rare targets. 4) Subjects quickly learn the optimal decision strategy; we propose a neurally plausible model that exhibits the same properties. Potential applications include designing reward schemes to improve detection of life-critical, rare targets (e.g., cancers in medical images)

New Query Lower Bounds for Submodular Function Minimization

We consider submodular function minimization in the oracle model: given black-box access to a submodular set function $f:2^{[n]}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$, find an element of $\arg\min_S \{f(S)\}$ using as few queries to $f(\cdot)$ as possible. State-of-the-art algorithms succeed with $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ queries [LeeSW15], yet the best-known lower bound has never been improved beyond $n$ [Harvey08]. We provide a query lower bound of $2n$ for submodular function minimization, a $3n/2-2$ query lower bound for the non-trivial minimizer of a symmetric submodular function, and a $\binom{n}{2}$ query lower bound for the non-trivial minimizer of an asymmetric submodular function. Our $3n/2-2$ lower bound results from a connection between SFM lower bounds and a novel concept we term the cut dimension of a graph. Interestingly, this yields a $3n/2-2$ cut-query lower bound for finding the global mincut in an undirected, weighted graph, but we also prove it cannot yield a lower bound better than $n+1$ for $s$-$t$ mincut, even in a directed, weighted graph

Monoclonal antibodies in fish and shellfish health management in India

The paper describes the superiority of monoclonal antibodies (MAb) over conventional polyclonal antisera. Studies undertaken indicate that Aeromonas hydrophila isolates are highly heterogenous and variation exists even between isolates from a farm, requiring a large number of MAbs for classification and use of information in vaccine development. However, some of the MAbs could be used for detection of homologous isolates in fish kidney by immunodot assay and evaluation and standardization of biofilm of A. hydrophila for oral vaccination in carps