Implicitly estimating the cost of mental illness in Australia: a standard-of-living approach

Background Estimating the costs of mental illness provides useful policy and managerial information to improve the quality of life of people living with a mental illness and their families. Objective This paper estimates the costs of mental health in Australia using the standard-of-living approach. Methods The cost of mental illness was estimated implicitly using a standard of living approach. We analyse data from 16 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (HILDA) using 209,871 observations. Unobserved heterogeneity was mitigated using an extended random-effects estimator. Results The equivalised disposable income of people with mental illness, measured by a self-reported mental health condition, needs to be 50% higher to achieve a similar living standard as those without a mental illness. The cost estimates vary considerably with measures of mental illness and standard of living. An alternative measure of mental illness using the first quintile of the SF-36 mental health score distribution resulted in an increase of estimated costs to 80% equivalised disposable income. Conclusion People with mental illness need to increase equivalised disposable income, which includes existing financial supports, by 50%-80% to achieve a similar level of financial satisfaction as those without a mental illness. The cost estimate can be substantially higher if the overall life satisfaction is used to proxy for standard of living

Application of geographic Information system and remote sensing in multiple criteria analysis to identify priority areas for biodiversity conservation in Vietnam

There has been an increasing need for methods to define priority areas for biodiversity conservation since the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation in protected areas planning depends on available resources (human resources and funds) for the conservation. The identification of priority areas requires the integration of biodiversity data together with social data on human pressures and responses. However, the deficit of comprehensive data and reliable methods are key challenges in zoning where the demand for conservation is most urgent and where the outcomes of conservation strategies can be maximized. In order to fill this gap, the environmental model Pressure–State–Response (PSR) was applied to suggest a set of criteria to identify priority areas for biodiversity conservation. The empirical data have been compiled from 185 respondents, categorizing into three main groups: Governmental Administration, Research Institutions, and Protected Areas in Vietnam, by using a well-designed questionnaire. Then, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) theory was used to identify the weight of all criteria. These results show that three main factors could identify the priority level for biodiversity conservation: Pressure, State, and Response, with weights of 41%, 26%, and 33%, respectively. Based on the three factors, seven criteria and 17 sub-criteria were developed to determine priority areas for biodiversity conservation. In addition, this study also indicates that the groups of Governmental Administration and Protected Areas put a focus on the “Pressure” factor while the group of Research Institutions emphasized the importance of the “Response” factor in the evaluation process. Then these suggested criteria were applied by integrating with Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) to define priority areas for biodiversity conservation in a particular conservation area (Pu Luong-Cuc Phuong area) in Vietnam. The results also reveal the proportion of very high and high priority areas, accounting for 84.9%, 96%, and 65.9% for Cuc Phuong National Park, Pu Luong Nature Reserve, and Ngoc Son Ngo Luong Nature Reserve, respectively. Based on these results, recommendations were provided to apply the developed criteria for identifying priority areas for biodiversity conservation in Vietnam.:Acknowledgement I Abstract III Table of contents IV List of figures VI List of tables X Acronyms and Abbreviations XII Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Problem statement and motivation 1 1.2. Research objectives and questions 2 1.3. Study contribution 3 1.4. Thesis structure 6 Chapter 2. Literature review 8 2.1. Background information on Vietnam 8 2.2. Environmental Pressure-State-Response model 11 2.3. Defining criteria for biodiversity conservation 13 2.4. Application of GIS and RS for biodiversity conservation 16 Chapter 3. Research methodology 19 3.1. Study areas 19 3.2. Data collection 23 3.3. Analytic Hierarchy Process 25 3.4. Remote Sensing 27 3.5. Geography Information System 35 3.6. Climate change scenarios 40 Chapter 4. Establishment of criteria 42 4.1. Summary of responses 44 4.2. Statistic of pairwise comparison 46 4.3. Weights of criteria based on all respondents 48 4.4. Weights of criteria based on groups 60 Chapter 5. Application of Criteria 64 5.1. Mapping criteria 64 5.2. Synthesis of multiple criteria 144 Chapter 6. Conclusions and recommendations 158 6.1. Establishment of criteria 158 6.2. Application of criteria 161 6.3. Recommendations 165 References 167 Appendix I. Questionnaire 197 Appendix II. Establishment of criteria 207 Appendix III. Application of criteria 23

The Current Status of Historical Preservation Law in Regularory Takings Jurisprudence: Has the Lucas Missile Dismantled Preservation Programs?

This paper describes our NIHRIO system for SemEval-2018 Task 3 "Irony detection in English tweets". We propose to use a simple neural network architecture of Multilayer Perceptron with various types of input features including: lexical, syntactic, semantic and polarity features.  Our system achieves very high performance in both subtasks of binary and multi-class irony detection in tweets. In particular, we rank at fifth in terms of the accuracy metric and the F1 metric. Our code is available at: https://github.com/NIHRIO/IronyDetectionInTwitte

Branch-and-Prune Search Strategies for Numerical Constraint Solving

When solving numerical constraints such as nonlinear equations and inequalities, solvers often exploit pruning techniques, which remove redundant value combinations from the domains of variables, at pruning steps. To find the complete solution set, most of these solvers alternate the pruning steps with branching steps, which split each problem into subproblems. This forms the so-called branch-and-prune framework, well known among the approaches for solving numerical constraints. The basic branch-and-prune search strategy that uses domain bisections in place of the branching steps is called the bisection search. In general, the bisection search works well in case (i) the solutions are isolated, but it can be improved further in case (ii) there are continuums of solutions (this often occurs when inequalities are involved). In this paper, we propose a new branch-and-prune search strategy along with several variants, which not only allow yielding better branching decisions in the latter case, but also work as well as the bisection search does in the former case. These new search algorithms enable us to employ various pruning techniques in the construction of inner and outer approximations of the solution set. Our experiments show that these algorithms speed up the solving process often by one order of magnitude or more when solving problems with continuums of solutions, while keeping the same performance as the bisection search when the solutions are isolated.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figure

Almost sure behavior of the zeros of iterated derivatives of random polynomials

Let $Z_1,\, Z_2,\dots$ be independent and identically distributed complex random variables with common distribution $\mu$ and set $$P_n(z) := (z - Z_1)\cdots (z - Z_n)\,.$$ Recently, Angst, Malicet and Poly proved that the critical points of $P_n$ converge in an almost-sure sense to the measure $\mu$ as $n$ tends to infinity, thereby confirming a conjecture of Cheung-Ng-Yam and Kabluchko. In this short note, we prove for any fixed $k\in \mathbb{N}$, the empirical measure of zeros of the $k$th derivative of $P_n$ converges to $\mu$ in the almost sure sense, as conjectured by Angst-Malicet-Poly.Comment: 8 page