6,792 research outputs found
Bribe-Taking by Bureaucrats: Personal and Circumstantial Determinants
We argue that personal (e.g., age, gender and education) and circumstantial (e.g., bureaucratic rank and sector of employment) factors affect the cost and the benefit of bribe-taking by the bureaucrats. The bureaucrat’s bribe-taking decision is modeled. A unique data set is used to test the predictions of the model. The empirical findings include that education reduces, but power (measured by rank and sector of work) increases, the magnitude of bribe-taking. Age affects bribe-taking in a more subtle way. Gender does not affect it in a statistically significant way. Our study of corruption at the individual level complements the literature studying corruption at country and industry levels.corruption, bureaucrats, determinants, bribe-taking
On one-sided filters for spectral Fourier approximations of discontinuous functions
The existence of one-sided filters, for spectral Fourier approximations of discontinuous functions, which can recover spectral accuracy up to discontinuity from one side, was proved. A least square procedure was also used to construct such a filter and test it on several discontinuous functions numerically
Non-oscillatory spectral Fourier methods for shock wave calculations
A non-oscillatory spectral Fourier method is presented for the solution of hyperbolic partial differential equations. The method is based on adding a nonsmooth function to the trigonometric polynomials which are the usual basis functions for the Fourier method. The high accuracy away from the shock is enhanced by using filters. Numerical results confirm that no oscillations develop in the solution. Also, the accuracy of the spectral solution of the inviscid Burgers equation is shown to be higher than a fixed order
Comparison of the co-gasification of sewage sludge and food wastes and cost-benefit analysis of gasification- and incineration-based waste treatment schemes
The compositions of food wastes and their co-gasification producer gas were compared with the existing data of sewage sludge. Results showed that food wastes are more favorable than sewage sludge for co-gasification based on residue generation and energy output. Two decentralized gasification-based schemes were proposed to dispose of the sewage sludge and food wastes in Singapore. Monte Carlo simulation-based cost-benefit analysis was conducted to compare the proposed schemes with the existing incineration-based scheme. It was found that the gasification-based schemes are financially superior to the incineration-based scheme based on the data of net present value (NPV), benefit-cost ratio (BCR), and internal rate of return (IRR). Sensitivity analysis was conducted to suggest effective measures to improve the economics of the schemes
PUEPro : A Computational Pipeline for Prediction of Urine Excretory Proteins
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 81320108025, 61402194, 61572227), Development Project of Jilin Province of China (20140101180JC) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2014T70291).Postprin
A Taxonomy of Hyperlink Hiding Techniques
Hidden links are designed solely for search engines rather than visitors. To
get high search engine rankings, link hiding techniques are usually used for
the profitability of black industries, such as illicit game servers, false
medical services, illegal gambling, and less attractive high-profit industry,
etc. This paper investigates hyperlink hiding techniques on the Web, and gives
a detailed taxonomy. We believe the taxonomy can help develop appropriate
countermeasures. Study on 5,583,451 Chinese sites' home pages indicate that
link hidden techniques are very prevalent on the Web. We also tried to explore
the attitude of Google towards link hiding spam by analyzing the PageRank
values of relative links. The results show that more should be done to punish
the hidden link spam.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure
Soft Methodology for Cost-and-error Sensitive Classification
Many real-world data mining applications need varying cost for different
types of classification errors and thus call for cost-sensitive classification
algorithms. Existing algorithms for cost-sensitive classification are
successful in terms of minimizing the cost, but can result in a high error rate
as the trade-off. The high error rate holds back the practical use of those
algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel cost-sensitive classification
methodology that takes both the cost and the error rate into account. The
methodology, called soft cost-sensitive classification, is established from a
multicriteria optimization problem of the cost and the error rate, and can be
viewed as regularizing cost-sensitive classification with the error rate. The
simple methodology allows immediate improvements of existing cost-sensitive
classification algorithms. Experiments on the benchmark and the real-world data
sets show that our proposed methodology indeed achieves lower test error rates
and similar (sometimes lower) test costs than existing cost-sensitive
classification algorithms. We also demonstrate that the methodology can be
extended for considering the weighted error rate instead of the original error
rate. This extension is useful for tackling unbalanced classification problems.Comment: A shorter version appeared in KDD '1
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