Economic description of tolerance in a society with asymmetric social cost functions

The evolutionary game dynamics of social tolerance among heterogeneous economic agents have been discussed in an economic interaction model with asymmetric social cost functions, where the individual cost depends only on the share of intolerant people in the opposite group. We show that, very different from the symmetric function case studied previously, economic interactions between individuals in a society with asymmetric social cost functions can be exactly solved in phase plane, and rich behaviours can be revealed by using algebraic approach. Our contribution consists in offering the explicit formula of evolutionary trajectories in the phase plane for the first time. The property of equilibrium is shown to be closely related to the group populations. Based on the explicit formula in the phase plane, the equilibriums of the evolutionary dynamics can be easily identified, and the evolutionary trajectory can be exactly analysed. We also show that the explicit solutions obtained would be especially suited to effective control of the evolutionary dynamics of social tolerance. The necessary and sufficient conditions of the full tolerance equilibrium under asymmetric social cost function are also discussed, which provides guidance and reference to set policies and development strategy of social tolerance

CardioCam: Leveraging Camera on Mobile Devices to Verify Users While Their Heart is Pumping

With the increasing prevalence of mobile and IoT devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, smart-home appliances), massive private and sensitive information are stored on these devices. To prevent unauthorized access on these devices, existing user verification solutions either rely on the complexity of user-defined secrets (e.g., password) or resort to specialized biometric sensors (e.g., fingerprint reader), but the users may still suffer from various attacks, such as password theft, shoulder surfing, smudge, and forged biometrics attacks. In this paper, we propose, CardioCam, a low-cost, general, hard-to-forge user verification system leveraging the unique cardiac biometrics extracted from the readily available built-in cameras in mobile and IoT devices. We demonstrate that the unique cardiac features can be extracted from the cardiac motion patterns in fingertips, by pressing on the built-in camera. To mitigate the impacts of various ambient lighting conditions and human movements under practical scenarios, CardioCam develops a gradient-based technique to optimize the camera configuration, and dynamically selects the most sensitive pixels in a camera frame to extract reliable cardiac motion patterns. Furthermore, the morphological characteristic analysis is deployed to derive user-specific cardiac features, and a feature transformation scheme grounded on Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is developed to enhance the robustness of cardiac biometrics for effective user verification. With the prototyped system, extensive experiments involving 25 subjects are conducted to demonstrate that CardioCam can achieve effective and reliable user verification with over 99% average true positive rate (TPR) while maintaining the false positive rate (FPR) as low as 4%

Joint optimal measurement for locating two incoherent optical point sources near the Rayleigh distance

The simultaneous optimization of the centroid estimation and the separation estimation of two incoherent optical point sources is restricted by a tradeoff relation through an incompatibility coefficient. At the Rayleigh distance the incompatibility coefficient vanishes and thus the tradeoff relation no longer restricts the simultaneous optimization of measurement for a joint estimation. We construct such a joint optimal measurement by an elaborated analysis on the operator algebra of the symmetric logarithmic derivative. Our work not only confirms the existence of a joint optimal measurement for this specific imaging model, but also gives a promising method to characterize the condition on measurement compatibility for general multiparameter estimation problems.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Conformal off-policy prediction

Off-policy evaluation is critical in a number of applications where new policies need to be evaluated offline before online deployment. Most existing methods focus on the expected return, define the target parameter through averaging and provide a point estimator only. In this paper, we develop a novel procedure to produce reliable interval estimators for a target policy’s return starting from any initial state. Our proposal accounts for the variability of the return around its expectation, focuses on the individual effect and offers valid uncertainty quantification. Our main idea lies in designing a pseudo policy that generates subsamples as if they were sampled from the target policy so that existing conformal prediction algorithms are applicable to prediction interval construction. Our methods are justified by theories, synthetic data and real data from short-video platforms

Foreign entry liberalization and export quality: evidence from China

This paper examines the impact of foreign entry deregulation in China on the export price and quality of manufacturing firms through input-output linkage. We create a unique dataset describing the extent of regulatory control over foreign entry across approximately 900 industries covering all primary, manufacturing and services sectors. Results suggest foreign entry deregulation encourages firms to improve product quality and increase export prices. Deregulation in the manufacturing sectors has more impact on downstream export price and quality, compared with services sectors. Moreover, firms having larger imported inputs benefit more from foreign entry deregulation. These effects are robust to alternative specifications

Secret key distribution leveraging color shift over visible light channel

Given the widely adoption of screen and camera in many electronic devices, the visible light communication (VLC) over screen-to-camera channel emerges as a novel short range communication technique in recent years. Active research explores various ways to convey messages over screen-camera channel, such as barcode and unobtrusive optical pattern. However, with the prevalence of LED screens of wide viewing angles and mobile devices equipped with high standard cameras, the threat of information leakage over screen-to-camera channel becomes in-negligible. Few studies have discussed how to ensure the security of data transmission over screen-to-camera channel. In this paper, we propose a secret key distribution system leveraging the unique color shift property over visible light channel. To facilitate such design, we develop a practical secret key matching based method to map the secret key into gridded optical patterns on screen, which can only be correctly recognized by the legitimate user through an accessible region and allow regular data stream transmission through valid grids. The proposed system is prototyped with off-the-shelf devices and validated under various experimental scenarios. The results show that our system can achieve high bit-decoding accuracy for the legitimate users while maintaining comparable data throughput as regular unobtrusive VLC systems with very low recovery accuracy of the encrypted data for the attackers

Dramatic Increases of Soil Microbial Functional Gene Diversity at the Treeline Ecotone of Changbai Mountain.

The elevational and latitudinal diversity patterns of microbial taxa have attracted great attention in the past decade. Recently, the distribution of functional attributes has been in the spotlight. Here, we report a study profiling soil microbial communities along an elevation gradient (500-2200 m) on Changbai Mountain. Using a comprehensive functional gene microarray (GeoChip 5.0), we found that microbial functional gene richness exhibited a dramatic increase at the treeline ecotone, but the bacterial taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing did not exhibit such a similar trend. However, the β-diversity (compositional dissimilarity among sites) pattern for both bacterial taxa and functional genes was similar, showing significant elevational distance-decay patterns which presented increased dissimilarity with elevation. The bacterial taxonomic diversity/structure was strongly influenced by soil pH, while the functional gene diversity/structure was significantly correlated with soil dissolved organic carbon (DOC). This finding highlights that soil DOC may be a good predictor in determining the elevational distribution of microbial functional genes. The finding of significant shifts in functional gene diversity at the treeline ecotone could also provide valuable information for predicting the responses of microbial functions to climate change

The effect of infrastructure development on urban-rural price differences in China

Market liberalization reforms in China have given rise to greater domestic market integration. However, large urban-rural price differences indicate that the segregation of the urban and rural markets still exists in China. We study evolution of price differences between urban and rural areas across 25 Chinese provinces over the period of 1985 and 2018. First, we show that while there is an evidence of convergence separately for urban markets and for rural markets in China, the gap between urban and rural price levels within each province still remains large and persists over time. Second, we find that the urban-rural price gap has shrunk after 2000, when China adopted the Price Law resulted in liberalization of prices. This is suggestive of deeper urban-rural integration associated with policy changes. In addition, we record notable differences in urban-rural price gaps between provinces, however, using the log-t test we find an evidence of regional convergence of these price gaps. Finally, we investigate the effect of transport infrastructure development on the urban-rural price differences. The regression results show that highway- and railway-related variables have strong negative effect on the urban-rural price divide, indicating that infrastructure development is conducive to market integration between urban and rural areas in China. Therefore, further improvement of infrastructure can promote the process of urban-rural economic integration within Chinese provinces, and this could became a main focus of the China's rural revitalization strategy introduced in 2018