Fair trade in insurance industry: Premium determination of Taiwan automobile insurance

This paper examines premium determination of voluntary automobile insurance policy and risk classification under a heavily regulated rating system in Taiwan. We investigate the distribution of actual premium and pure premium, based on unique data to test if premium reflect appropriate gender-age factor. The reasonableness of loading and the difference in driving exposure between policyholder and driver are investigated for three different types of policy. An adjustment of gender-age premium coefficients is called for

Systematics of multi-field effects at the end of warped brane inflation

We investigate in the context of brane inflation the possibility of additional light scalar fields generating significant power spectrum and non-Gaussianities at the end of inflation affecting the CMB scale observations. We consider the specific mechanism outlined by Lyth and describe the necessary criteria for it to be potentially important in a warped throat. We also discuss different mechanisms for uplifting the vacuum energy which can lead to different dominant contributions of the inflaton potential near the end of inflation. We then apply such criteria to one of the most detailed brane inflation models to date, and show that inflation can persist towards the tip of the throat, however for the specific stable inflationary trajectory, the light residual isometry direction becomes degenerate. We also estimate the effects for other inflationary trajectories with non-degenerate residual isometries

Implications Of Fast Radio Bursts For Superconducting Cosmic Strings

postprin

Economic Analysis of the Net Rate of Entry in Prescription Drug Markets

Economic

Electrometric Method for Determination of Chloride from Insecticides and Measurement of Free and Combined Cyanide in Plants

Biochemistr

PLAYABLE GROUNDS - playground as infrastructure for a city

PLAYABLE GROUNDS is proposed to enhance the walkability in a city by introduction of “playgrounds for public”- an integration of playgrounds and existing city fabrics without any fundamental urban structures changes. The “playgrounds” are injected in the high density city at different levels as an essential elements to promote playability and walkability, hence bringing health and benefits to citizens by strengthening social sustainability of their city. In recently years, societies are paying increasing attention to “walkability” of a city. In Korea, the government implements policies to improve the walkability in Seoul in 2014. In Hong Kong, an organization conducts a study of walkability in Hong Kong, which shows that the walkability in Hong Kong still has rooms for improvement. Unlike many of the pedestrian friendly cities in Europe, where cycling paths and pedestrian roads are carefully planned, Hong Kong and other similar metropolitan cities are far below the standard of being “walkable”. Central district in Hong Kong has been selected as the site of this thesis. Being a central business district (CBD) in Hong Kong, this site is full of challenges and potentials. An comprehensive walkability study will be conducted to address the major issues regarding pedestrian unfriendly design, corresponding design intervention will then be introduced to the CDB in order to enhance the pedestrian experience. Existing pedestrian network, footbridge, sidewalk, pocket park, elevated escalator and left-over space are the vacancy sites for injection of energy to the city. This thesis aims to explore the possibilities of how architectural interventions could actually enhance pedestrian experience by introducing “playground” as an augmented infrastructure - hence the increase of the walkability in the city without intensively changing the existing city infrastructure

Mucosal Macrophage Polarization Role in the Immune Modulation

Immunotherapy has advantages including few side effects and low probability of abuse by patients. Recently, functional materials with immunomodulatory functions, which act through reduction of free radicals, have been developed for cancer and anti-inflammatory therapy. However, the therapeutic application of natural functional materials involves a complex mechanism along with various organic factors. These substances, including polysaccharides and triterpenoids, have immunomodulatory effects. However, to our knowledge, the mechanism underlying the action of such substances in the physiological immunity of animals remains unclear. Immune cells, particularly macrophages, are crucial in the modulation of immune response. Macrophages polarise into two types, namely, M1 and M2, from the M0 form, based on the physiological microenvironment factors. M1 macrophages have functions in pathogen elimination through phagocytosis, oxidative damage, and complement system activation. M2 macrophages are involved in tissue recovery and tumour tissues containing ample M2 macrophages that release growth factors, which promote angiogenesis. In this study, we focus on the immunomodulation of the macrophage to further understand the effects of the physiological microenvironment factors on macrophage polarisation

Polarisation of Macrophage and Immunotherapy in the Wound Healing

Immune cells are involved in virtually every aspect of the wound repair process, from the initial stages where they participate in haemostasis and work to prevent infection to later stages where they drive scar formation. Immunotherapy is being developed offers some advantageous immunomodulation factors that are known in the field of alternative medicine, such as mushroom beta-glucan, anti-microbial peptides and triterpenoid; these factors represent a novel therapeutic approach for anti-inflammation to promote the wound healing

Controlling Frequency-Domain Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference via Electromagnetically Induced Transparency

Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference is a compelling quantum phenomenon that demonstrates the nonclassical nature of single photons. Herein, we investigate an electromagnetically induced transparency-based double-Lambda four-wave mixing system from the perspective of quantized light fields. The system can be used to realize efficient HOM interference in the frequency domain. By using the reduced density operator theory, we demonstrate that, although the double-Lambda medium does not exhibit phase-dependent properties for the closed-loop case of two incident single photons, frequency-domain HOM two-photon interference occurs. For experimentally achievable optical depth conditions, our theory indicates that this double-Lambda scheme can perform high-fidelity Hadamard gate operations on frequency-encoded single-photon qubits, and thereby generate HOM two-photon NOON states with a fidelity greater than 0.99. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this scheme can be used to realize arbitrary single-qubit gates and two-qubit SWAP gates by simply controlling the laser detuning and phase, exhibiting its multifunctional properties and providing a new route to scalable optical quantum computing.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Deceptive-NeRF: Enhancing NeRF Reconstruction using Pseudo-Observations from Diffusion Models

This paper introduces Deceptive-NeRF, a new method for enhancing the quality of reconstructed NeRF models using synthetically generated pseudo-observations, capable of handling sparse input and removing floater artifacts. Our proposed method involves three key steps: 1) reconstruct a coarse NeRF model from sparse inputs; 2) generate pseudo-observations based on the coarse model; 3) refine the NeRF model using pseudo-observations to produce a high-quality reconstruction. To generate photo-realistic pseudo-observations that faithfully preserve the identity of the reconstructed scene while remaining consistent with the sparse inputs, we develop a rectification latent diffusion model that generates images conditional on a coarse RGB image and depth map, which are derived from the coarse NeRF and latent text embedding from input images. Extensive experiments show that our method is effective and can generate perceptually high-quality NeRF even with very sparse inputs