BAYESIAN APPROACH TO THE PROCESS OF IDENTIFICATION OF THE DETERMINANTS OF INNOVATIVENESS

Bayesian belief networks are applied in determining the most important factors of the innovativeness level of national economies. The paper is divided into two parts. The first presentsthe basic theory of Bayesian networks whereas in the second, the belief networks have been generated by an inhouse developed computer system called BeliefSEEKER which was implemented to generate the determinants influencing the innovativeness level of national economies.Qualitative analysis of the generated belief networks provided a way to define a set of the most important dimensions influencing the innovativeness level of economies and then the indicators that form these dimensions. It has been proven that Bayesian networks are very effective methods for multidimensional analysis and forming conclusions and recommendations regarding the strength of each innovative determinant influencing the overall performance of a country’s economy

Reduced Data Sets and Entropy-Based Discretization

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Results of experiments on numerical data sets discretized using two methods—global versions of Equal Frequency per Interval and Equal Interval Width-are presented. Globalization of both methods is based on entropy. For discretized data sets left and right reducts were computed. For each discretized data set and two data sets, based, respectively, on left and right reducts, we applied ten-fold cross validation using the C4.5 decision tree generation system. Our main objective was to compare the quality of all three types of data sets in terms of an error rate. Additionally, we compared complexity of generated decision trees. We show that reduction of data sets may only increase the error rate and that the decision trees generated from reduced decision sets are not simpler than the decision trees generated from non-reduced data sets

Frontal brain asymmetry, childhood maltreatment, and low-grade inflammation at midlife

Frontal EEG asymmetry is thought to reflect variations in affective style, such that greater relative right frontal activity at rest predicts enhanced emotional responding to threatening or negative stimuli, and risk of depression and anxiety disorders. A diathesis-stress model has been proposed to explain how this neuro-affective style might predispose to psychopathology, with greater right frontal activity being a vulnerability factor especially under stressful conditions. Less is known about the extent to which greater relative right frontal activity at rest might be associated with or be a diathesis for deleterious physical health outcomes. The present study examined the association between resting frontal EEG asymmetry and systemic, low-grade inflammation and tested the diathesis-stress model by examining whether childhood maltreatment exposure interacts with resting frontal asymmetry in explaining inflammation. Resting EEG, serum inflammatory biomarkers (interleukin-6, C-reactive protein, and fibrinogen) and self-reported psychological measures were available for 314 middle-aged adults (age M = 55.3 years, SD = 11.2, 55.7% female). Analyses supported the diathesis-stress model and revealed that resting frontal EEG asymmetry was significantly associated with inflammation, but only in individuals who had experienced moderate to severe levels of childhood maltreatment. These findings suggest that, in the context of severe adversity, a trait-like tendency towards greater relative right prefrontal activity may predispose to low-grade inflammation, a risk factor for conditions with inflammatory underpinnings such as coronary heart disease

Assessing positive mental health in people with chronic physical health problems: correlations with socio-demographic variables and physical health status

Background: A holistic perspective on health implies giving careful consideration to the relationship between physical and mental health. In this regard the present study sought to determine the level of Positive Mental Health (PMH) among people with chronic physical health problems, and to examine the relationship between the observed levels of PMH and both physical health status and socio-demographic variables. Methods: The study was based on the Multifactor Model of Positive Mental Health (Lluch, 1999), which comprises six factors: Personal Satisfaction (F1), Prosocial Attitude (F2), Self-control (F3), Autonomy (F4), Problem-solving and Self-actualization (F5), and Interpersonal Relationship Skills (F6). The sample comprised 259 adults with chronic physical health problems who were recruited through a primary care center in the province of Barcelona (Spain). Positive mental health was assessed by means of the Positive Mental Health Questionnaire (Lluch, 1999). Results: Levels of PMH differed, either on the global scale or on specific factors, in relation to the following variables: age: global PMH scores decreased with age (r=-0.129; p=0.038); b) gender: men scored higher on F1 (t=2.203; p=0.028) and F4 (t=3.182; p=0.002), while women scored higher on F2 (t -3.086; p=0.002) and F6 (t=-2.744; p=0.007); c) number of health conditions: the fewer the number of health problems the higher the PMH score on F5 (r=-0.146; p=0.019); d) daily medication: polymedication patients had lower PMH scores, both globally and on various factors; e) use of analgesics: occasional use of painkillers was associated with higher PMH scores on F1 (t=-2.811; p=0.006). There were no significant differences in global PMH scores according to the type of chronic health condition. The only significant difference in the analysis by factors was that patients with hypertension obtained lower PMH scores on the factor Autonomy (t=2.165; p=0.032). Conclusions: Most people with chronic physical health problems have medium or high levels of PMH. The variables that adversely affect PMH are old age, polypharmacy and frequent consumption of analgesics. The type of health problem does not influence the levels of PMH. Much more extensive studies with samples without chronic pathology are now required in order to be able to draw more robust conclusions

Practices violating the collective interests of consumers based on the Law of 16 February 2007 on the protection of competition and consumers

Ochrona konkurencji i konsumentów w Polsce stanowi gałąź prawa polskiego,która od lat dziewięćdziesiątych dwudziestego wieku podlega ciągłym przeobrażeniom. Przystąpienie Polski do Unii Europejskiej wymagało od ustawodawcy polskiego wprowadzenia zmian ustrojowych zgodnych z regulacjami Unii Europejskiej. Implementacja poszczególnych dyrektyw umocniła system ochrony zbiorowych interesów konsumentów. Zmianie uległa również pozycja prezesa UOKiK, poprzez nadanie większej autonomii w stosunku do obozu rządzącego. Na przestrzeni ostatnich lat można zauważyć rozwój prawa konsumenckiego w kierunku ochrony indywidualnych interesów konsumentów. Świadczy o tym chociażby złożoność systemu ochrony konkurencji i konsumentów, w skład którego wchodzą poza Urzędem Ochrony Konkurencji i Konsumenta organy sądowe oraz liczne stowarzyszenia. Organizacje pozarządowe kładą szczególny nacisk na ochronę indywidualnych interesów konsumentów poprzez udzielanie darmowych porad prawnych, prowadzenie kampanii edukacyjnych oraz reprezentowanie konsumentów przed organami wyższego stopnia w procesie dochodzenia indywidualnych roszczeń.Protection of competition and consumers in Poland is a branch of Polish law, which has undergone continuous transformation since the 1990s. Poland's accession to the European Union required the Polish legislature to introduce systemic changes in accordance with EU regulations. Implementation of individual directives has strengthened the system of protection of collective consumer interests. The position of the President of UOKiK has also changed, by giving more autonomy to the ruling camp. Over the last few years, consumer law has evolved to protect the individual interests of consumers. This is evidenced, for example, by the complexity of the competition and consumer protection system, which includes judicial authorities and numerous associations outside the Office for Competition and Consumer Protection. NGOs place special emphasis on protecting individual consumer interests by providing free legal advice, conducting educational campaigns, and representing consumers to higher authorities in the process of individual claims

General principles and principles of the reconnaissance stage in administrative proceedings

Administracyjne prawo formalne (procesowe), definiuje się w doktrynie prawa polskiego jako określony tryb działań organów administracji publicznej w sprawach dotyczących praw i obowiązków niepodporządkowanych im służbowo konkretnych podmiotów , bądź też jako uporządkowany ciąg czynności procesowych, dokonywanych przez organ administracji publicznej i inne podmioty tego postępowania, zmierzających do załatwienia sprawy indywidualnej w drodze decyzji administracyjnej. Postępowanie administracyjne zmierzające do wydania decyzji i prowadzone na podstawie przepisów zawartych w kodeksie postępowania administracyjnego jest nazywane ogólnym postępowaniem administracyjnym jurysdykcyjnym. W postępowaniu administracyjnym obowiązuje szereg zasad prawa. Zasady te to wyjęte przed nawias przepisy procedury administracyjnej, zawierające normy wspólne dla całego postępowania administracyjnego. Zasady te obowiązują we wszystkich stadiach postępowania oraz stanowią wiążące wytyczne dla stosowania przepisów Kodeksu postępowania administracyjnego. Zasady prawa nie wprowadzają żadnych nowych, samoistnych instytucji procesowych, są normami realizowanymi przez istniejące instytucje. Ponadto, przepisy szczegółowe KPA muszą być interpretowane zgodnie zasadami KPA Zasady prawa służą wypełnianiu luk w obrębie KPA Co więcej, zasady prawa są normami prawnymi, więc ich naruszenie będzie równoznaczne z naruszeniem prawa. Do funkcji zasad postępowania administracyjnego zaliczyć można m.in. ujednolicanie praktyki stosowania prawa administracyjnego, sterowanie działaniami podejmowanymi w ramach uznania administracyjnego, zapewnienie niezbędnej elastyczności dla działań administracji publicznej, wypełnianie luk w prawie administracyjnym, oraz wyznaczanie kierunku prac legislacyjnych. Zasady postępowania administracyjnego dzielą się na naczelne i ogólne. Do zasad naczelnych czyli pozakodeksowych zasad ogólnych postępowania administracyjnego zalicza się zasadę demokratycznego państwa prawnego: prawo do procesu, prawo do sądu, ochronę praw nabytych, zasadę praworządności, zasadę proporcjonalności, zasadę równości wobec prawa, prawo do jawnego, sprawiedliwego i szybkiego postępowania, prawo do wnoszenia petycji, skarg i wniosków, oraz zasadę dwuinstancyjności. Zasady ogólne postępowania administracyjnego można podzielić na zasady idei stosowania prawa spośród których wyróżniamy pierwotne, czyli: praworządność działania organu administracji publicznej i dbałość o praworządne działanie stron i uczestników postępowania, prawdę obiektywną, uwzględnianie w postępowaniu i załatwianiu spraw interesu społecznego i słusznego interesu jednostki i czynny udział stron w postępowaniu oraz pochodne. Do pochodnych zaliczyć można zasadę zaufania uczestników postępowania do organów państwa, zasadę dwuinstancyjności postępowania , trwałości decyzji administracyjnej. W doktrynie wyróżnia się także zasady kultury administrowania oraz zasady techniczno-procesowe. Są to m.in. zasady kultury administrowania, przekonywania, udzielania informacji faktycznej i prawnej stronom oraz niezbędnej informacji prawnej stronom i uczestnikom postępowania, ugodowego załatwiania spraw o spornych interesach stron, szybkości i prostoty postępowania czy też pisemności.Przedmiotem niniejszej pracy jest scharakteryzowanie historii i genezy powstania procedury administracyjnej, a także omówienie zasad ogólnych KPA oraz scharakteryzowanie skutków prawnych naruszenia zasad obowiązujących w stadium rozpoznawczym w postępowaniu administracyjnym.Administrative formal (procedural) law is defined in the Polish legal system as a specific mode of action of public administration bodies in cases concerning rights and obligations of specific entities not subordinated to them or as an ordered sequence of procedural acts performed by a public administration body and other entities of this procedure , aimed at settling an individual case by way of an administrative decision. Administrative proceedings aimed at issuing decisions and conducted on the basis of provisions contained in the Code of Administrative Procedure are called general administrative jurisdictional proceedings.In administrative proceedings there are several rules of law in force. These rules are the provisions of the administrative procedure extracted from the bracket, containing standards common to the entire administrative procedure. These rules are in force at all stages of the proceedings and constitute binding guidelines for the application of the provisions of the Code of Administrative Procedure. The rules of law do not introduce any new, autonomous procedural institutions, they are standards implemented by existing institutions. In addition, the specific provisions of the CCP must be interpreted in accordance with the rules of the CAP. The legal principles are used to fill gaps within the CAP. What is more, the legal principles are legal norms, so their violation will be tantamount to violation of the law.The functions of the rules of administrative proceedings include, among others, unification of the practice of applying administrative law, controlling the activities undertaken within the framework of administrative recognition, ensuring the necessary flexibility for public administration activities, filling gaps in administrative law, and setting the direction of legislative work. The rules of administrative proceedings are divided into primateand general. The general principles of non-code general principles of administrative proceedings include the principle of a democratic legal state: the right to trial, the right to court, protection of acquired rights, the rule of law, the principle of proportionality, the principle of equality before the law, the right to public, just and speedy proceedings, right to bring petitions, complaints and petitions, and the principle of two instances.The general principles of administrative proceedings can be divided into principles of the application of law, from which we distinguish primary, ie: the rule of law of the public administration body and attention to the lawful action of parties and participants of the proceedings, objective truth, taking into account and dealing with matters of social interest and legitimate interest of the individual and active parties' participation in the proceedings and derivatives. Derivatives include the principle of trust of participants in the proceedings to state organs, the principle of two-instance proceedings, and the sustainability of an administrative decision. The doctrine also distinguishes the principles of administration culture and technical and procedural principles. These include principles of the culture of administration, persuasion, providing factual and legal information to the parties and necessary legal information to parties and participants in the proceedings, conciliatory handling of disputable interests of the parties, speed and simplicity of proceedings or writing.The subject of this work is to characterize the history and origin of the administrative procedure, as well as to discuss the general principles of the CAP and characterize the legal consequences of the violation of the rules applicable at the identification stage in administrative proceedings

A Comparison of Four Approaches to Discretization Based on Entropy

We compare four discretization methods, all based on entropy: the original C4.5 approach to discretization, two globalized methods, known as equal interval width and equal frequency per interval, and a relatively new method for discretization called multiple scanning using the C4.5 decision tree generation system. The main objective of our research is to compare the quality of these four methods using two criteria: an error rate evaluated by ten-fold cross-validation and the size of the decision tree generated by C4.5. Our results show that multiple scanning is the best discretization method in terms of the error rate and that decision trees generated from datasets discretized by multiple scanning are simpler than decision trees generated directly by C4.5 or generated from datasets discretized by both globalized discretization methods

Human – Computer Systems Interaction Backgrounds and Applications 2

The main contemporary human-system interaction (H-SI) problems consist in design and/or improvement of the tools for effective exchange of information between individual humans or human groups and technical systems created for humans aiding in reaching their vital goals. This book is a second issue in a series devoted to the novel in H-SI results and contributions reached for the last years by many research groups in European and extra-European countries. The preliminary (usually shortened) versions of the chapters  were presented as conference papers at the 3rd International Conference on H-SI held in Rzeszow, Poland, in 2010. A  large number of valuable papers  selected for publication caused a necessity to publish the book in two volumes. The given, 1st Volume  consists of sections devoted to: I. Decision Supporting Systems, II. Distributed Knowledge Bases and WEB Systems and III. Impaired Persons  Aiding Systems. The decision supporting systems concern various application areas, like enterprises management, healthcare, agricultural products storage, visual design, planning of sport trainings, etc. Other papers in this area are devoted to general decision supporting methods and tools. In the group of papers concerning  knowledge bases and WEB-based  systems are some focused on new computer networks technologies, models of malicious network traffic and selected  problems of distributed networks resources organization and tagging. The concepts of a distributed virtual  museum and of managing the process of intellectual capital creation in this part of the book are also presented. The last part of this volume contains a dozen of papers concerning various concepts and realizations of disabled persons aiding systems. Among them, the systems aimed at aiding visual or motion disability affected persons can be mentioned. The problems of  residential infrastructure for ubiquitous health supervision and graphics- and gesture-based interactive children therapy supporting systems design in this volume are also presented

Merging of Numerical Intervals in Entropy-Based Discretization

As previous research indicates, a multiple-scanning methodology for discretization of numerical datasets, based on entropy, is very competitive. Discretization is a process of converting numerical values of the data records into discrete values associated with numerical intervals defined over the domains of the data records. In multiple-scanning discretization, the last step is the merging of neighboring intervals in discretized datasets as a kind of postprocessing. Our objective is to check how the error rate, measured by tenfold cross validation within the C4.5 system, is affected by such merging. We conducted experiments on 17 numerical datasets, using the same setup of multiple scanning, with three different options for merging: no merging at all, merging based on the smallest entropy, and merging based on the biggest entropy. As a result of the Friedman rank sum test (5% significance level) we concluded that the differences between all three approaches are statistically insignificant. There is no universally best approach. Then, we repeated all experiments 30 times, recording averages and standard deviations. The test of the difference between averages shows that, for a comparison of no merging with merging based on the smallest entropy, there are statistically highly significant differences (with a 1% significance level). In some cases, the smaller error rate is associated with no merging, in some cases the smaller error rate is associated with merging based on the smallest entropy. A comparison of no merging with merging based on the biggest entropy showed similar results. So, our final conclusion was that there are highly significant differences between no merging and merging, depending on the dataset. The best approach should be chosen by trying all three approaches

Data mining approach in determining the relationships between the economy and the general government sector

This article is dedicated to a study of the relations between the economy and the size of the general government sector. The main aim of the article is an identification of the most important variables that are used to determine relations between the economy and size of the sector, as well as to identify frequency of their occurrences in relations to pairs of variables which describe an economy and the size of the sector. In order to explore these relations, the authors used Bayes networks. The economies of EU member states and their public finance systems were the object of analyses in this article. The period that was selected for the research covered the years 2000-2013 (inclusive). In order to describe economies, the authors selected 18 variables, whereas to describe the general government sector - 15 variables. These variables were sourced from databases of Eurostat, OECD and the World Bank. Among an economy’s measures and general government sector measures, there were also some benchmarks found (standard and classic) as well as measures proposed by the authors, which had not been used in the scientific descriptions that were dedicated to research on size of the general government sector. Ipso facto, this article fits in the discussion on not only the size of the general government sector, but also attempts to answer the question of whether the economy determines the size of the sector. To date, the research questions on the impact of the size of the general government sector on the economy of a particular country have been common. This article inverts the investigated dependence and its content concentrates on the attempt to determine if the size of the sector in a particular country is a function of its economy expressed by ratios adopted in conducted the research