The Craft of Incentive Prize Design: Lessons from the Public Sector

In the last five years, incentive prizes have transformed from an exotic open innovation tool to a proven innovation strategy for the public, private and philanthropic sectors. This report offers practical lessons for public sector leaders and their counterparts in the philanthropic and private sectors to help understand what types of outcomes incentive prizes help to achieve, what design elements prize designers use to create these challenges and how to make smart design choices to achieve a particular outcome. It synthesizes insights from expert interviews and analysis of more than 400 prize

The Effect of Expected Benefit and Perceived Cost on Employees’ Knowledge Sharing Behavior: a Study of It Employees in India

In the increasingly turbulent business environment knowledge is considered to be the most important source of sustainable competitive advantage and to sustain it, an organization must create, share, and utilize the knowledge it possesses.  The critical knowledge is only available to the organization as long as employees are willing to cooperate. It can easily be lost if the employees decide to explore other opportunities outside the organization or employees fear to share knowledge with co-workers.  To achieve continuous growth, organizations need to understand the factors which motivate and de-motivate the employees to share knowledge. The present study examines the impact of employees’ perception of perceived benefits and cost of knowledge sharing on their knowledge sharing behavior. Data were collected from 228 employees of two major Information Technology organizations in India. The results of regression analysis showed that benefits mainly perceived increase in expected association with others and expected contribution to organization positively influences employees’ knowledge sharing behaviour. Perceived cost was found to influence negatively on knowledge sharing behaviour. The findings of the study are expected to provide significant inputs to organizations to design the practices which make knowledge sharing an integral part of the day-to-day conversation.  &nbsp

Garch Models: Forecasting Volatility and Pricing Options

Volatility is unobservable and a very essential input to the option pricing models and for risk management purposes. Historical volatility is not a good indicator of future volatility and in the literature GARCH model of Bollerslev (1986) is often proved to be very accurate in forecasting future volatility which also led to the extension of other GARCH models overcoming its limitations. In this paper, accuracy of three popular GARCH models, GARCH(1,1), GJR-GARCH(1,1) & EGARCH(1,1) is compared with the actual realized volatility in case of $/£ exchange rate. The pricing performance of alternative GARCH models in pricing currency options is paid very little attention in literature. Therefore, in this paper the pricing performance of GARCH option pricing model with three alternative GARCH models and widely used Garman-Kohlhagen model is also compared with the market settled GBP European currency option prices. In case of forecasting volatility, even though the GJR-GARCH(1,1) and EGARCH(1,1) model incorporates the asymmetric effect, the GARCH(1,1) model is proved to be superior than other two models even after having few limitations. Regarding the option pricing, GARCH option pricing model with GARCH(1,1) volatility is overall better than the other models

RescueAlert-an accident detection and rescue mechanism

With the increase of vehicles and cars of different kind and the large movement that occurs every day on the roads it was natural to observe an increase in traffic accidents, but the real dilemma lies in how to make the rescue process efficient. The problem that we want to solve is the response of ambulances towards accidents and the lengthy registration process of patients in hospitals. In the above two scenarios, the manual process of calling the ambulance leads to delay in rescue of patients from an accident and the delay in registration of patient leads to delay in medication or treatment of the patient. We want to make the process more efficient by automating accident detection for increasing the efficiency of the ambulance rescue process and by sending the details of the patient before the patient reaches the hospitals for faster treatment of patients. Along with this, alert messages will be sent to the family or friends of the patients to notify them as soon as an accident is detected

Health worker and patient views on implementation of smoking cessation in routine tuberculosis care

Böckmann M, Warsi S, Noor M, et al. Health worker and patient views on implementation of smoking cessation in routine tuberculosis care. NPJ primary care respiratory medicine. 2019;29(1): 34.Smoking worsens tuberculosis (TB) outcomes. Persons with TB who smoke can benefit from smoking cessation. We report findings of a multi-country qualitative process evaluation assessing barriers and facilitators to implementation of smoking cessation behaviour support in TB clinics in Bangladesh and Pakistan. We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews at five case study clinics with 35 patients and 8 health workers over a period of 11 months (2017-2018) at different time points during the intervention implementation phase. Interviews were conducted by trained researchers in the native languages, audio-recorded, transcribed into English and analysed using a combined deductive-inductive approach guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research and Theoretical Domains Framework. All patients report willingness to quit smoking and recent quit attempts. Individuals' main motivations to quit are their health and the need to financially provide for a family. Behavioural regulation such as avoiding exposure to cigarettes and social influences from friends, family and colleagues are main themes of the interviews. Most male patients do not feel shy admitting to smoking, for the sole female patient interviewee stigma was an issue. Health workers report structural characteristics such as high workload and limited time per patient as primary barriers to offering behavioural support. Self-efficacy to discuss tobacco use with women varies by health worker. Systemic barriers to implementation such as staff workload and socio-cultural barriers to cessation like gender relations, stigma or social influences should be dealt with creatively to optimize the behaviour support for sustainability and scale-up

Global, regional, and national life expectancy, all-cause mortality, and cause-specific mortality for 249 causes of death, 1980-2015 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015

Background Improving survival and extending the longevity of life for all populations requires timely, robust evidence on local mortality levels and trends. The Global Burden of Disease 2015 Study (GBD 2015) provides a comprehensive assessment of all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 249 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2015. These results informed an in-depth investigation of observed and expected mortality patterns based on sociodemographic measures. Methods We estimated all-cause mortality by age, sex, geography, and year using an improved analytical approach originally developed for GBD 2013 and GBD 2010. Improvements included refinements to the estimation of child and adult mortality and corresponding uncertainty, parameter selection for under-5 mortality synthesis by spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression, and sibling history data processing. We also expanded the database of vital registration, survey, and census data to 14 294 geography-year datapoints. For GBD 2015, eight causes, including Ebola virus disease, were added to the previous GBD cause list for mortality. We used six modelling approaches to assess cause-specific mortality, with the Cause of Death Ensemble Model (CODEm) generating estimates for most causes. We used a series of novel analyses to systematically quantify the drivers of trends in mortality across geographies. First, we assessed observed and expected levels and trends of cause-specific mortality as they relate to the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a summary indicator derived from measures of income per capita, educational attainment, and fertility. Second, we examined factors affecting total mortality patterns through a series of counterfactual scenarios, testing the magnitude by which population growth, population age structures, and epidemiological changes contributed to shifts in mortality. Finally, we attributed changes in life expectancy to changes in cause of death. We documented each step of the GBD 2015 estimation processes, as well as data sources, in accordance with Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting (GATHER). Findings Globally, life expectancy from birth increased from 61.7 years (95% uncertainty interval 61.4-61.9) in 1980 to 71.8 years (71.5-72.2) in 2015. Several countries in sub-Saharan Africa had very large gains in life expectancy from 2005 to 2015, rebounding from an era of exceedingly high loss of life due to HIV/AIDS. At the same time, many geographies saw life expectancy stagnate or decline, particularly for men and in countries with rising mortality from war or interpersonal violence. From 2005 to 2015, male life expectancy in Syria dropped by 11.3 years (3.7-17.4), to 62.6 years (56.5-70.2). Total deaths increased by 4.1% (2.6-5.6) from 2005 to 2015, rising to 55.8 million (54.9 million to 56.6 million) in 2015, but age-standardised death rates fell by 17.0% (15.8-18.1) during this time, underscoring changes in population growth and shifts in global age structures. The result was similar for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), with total deaths from these causes increasing by 14.1% (12.6-16.0) to 39.8 million (39.2 million to 40.5 million) in 2015, whereas age-standardised rates decreased by 13.1% (11.9-14.3). Globally, this mortality pattern emerged for several NCDs, including several types of cancer, ischaemic heart disease, cirrhosis, and Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. By contrast, both total deaths and age-standardised death rates due to communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional conditions significantly declined from 2005 to 2015, gains largely attributable to decreases in mortality rates due to HIV/AIDS (42.1%, 39.1-44.6), malaria (43.1%, 34.7-51.8), neonatal preterm birth complications (29.8%, 24.8-34.9), and maternal disorders (29.1%, 19.3-37.1). Progress was slower for several causes, such as lower respiratory infections and nutritional deficiencies, whereas deaths increased for others, including dengue and drug use disorders. Age-standardised death rates due to injuries significantly declined from 2005 to 2015, yet interpersonal violence and war claimed increasingly more lives in some regions, particularly in the Middle East. In 2015, rotaviral enteritis (rotavirus) was the leading cause of under-5 deaths due to diarrhoea (146 000 deaths, 118 000-183 000) and pneumococcal pneumonia was the leading cause of under-5 deaths due to lower respiratory infections (393 000 deaths, 228 000-532 000), although pathogen-specific mortality varied by region. Globally, the effects of population growth, ageing, and changes in age-standardised death rates substantially differed by cause. Our analyses on the expected associations between cause-specific mortality and SDI show the regular shifts in cause of death composition and population age structure with rising SDI. Country patterns of premature mortality (measured as years of life lost [YLLs]) and how they differ from the level expected on the basis of SDI alone revealed distinct but highly heterogeneous patterns by region and country or territory. Ischaemic heart disease, stroke, and diabetes were among the leading causes of YLLs in most regions, but in many cases, intraregional results sharply diverged for ratios of observed and expected YLLs based on SDI. Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases caused the most YLLs throughout sub-Saharan Africa, with observed YLLs far exceeding expected YLLs for countries in which malaria or HIV/AIDS remained the leading causes of early death. Interpretation At the global scale, age-specific mortality has steadily improved over the past 35 years; this pattern of general progress continued in the past decade. Progress has been faster in most countries than expected on the basis of development measured by the SDI. Against this background of progress, some countries have seen falls in life expectancy, and age-standardised death rates for some causes are increasing. Despite progress in reducing age-standardised death rates, population growth and ageing mean that the number of deaths from most non-communicable causes are increasing in most countries, putting increased demands on health systems. Copyright (C) The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.Peer reviewe

Garch Models: Forecasting Volatility and Pricing Options

Volatility is unobservable and a very essential input to the option pricing models and for risk management purposes. Historical volatility is not a good indicator of future volatility and in the literature GARCH model of Bollerslev (1986) is often proved to be very accurate in forecasting future volatility which also led to the extension of other GARCH models overcoming its limitations. In this paper, accuracy of three popular GARCH models, GARCH(1,1), GJR-GARCH(1,1) & EGARCH(1,1) is compared with the actual realized volatility in case of $/£ exchange rate. The pricing performance of alternative GARCH models in pricing currency options is paid very little attention in literature. Therefore, in this paper the pricing performance of GARCH option pricing model with three alternative GARCH models and widely used Garman-Kohlhagen model is also compared with the market settled GBP European currency option prices. In case of forecasting volatility, even though the GJR-GARCH(1,1) and EGARCH(1,1) model incorporates the asymmetric effect, the GARCH(1,1) model is proved to be superior than other two models even after having few limitations. Regarding the option pricing, GARCH option pricing model with GARCH(1,1) volatility is overall better than the other models

National Seminar on Smart City Seminar of 3d Printing

In this we are discussing on the topic of 3d printing. Like we use 3d printing in the field of medical and also in the field of construction of buildings

Some evaluations of Jones polynomials for certain families of weaving knots

In this paper, we derive formulae for the determinant of weaving knots $W(3,n)$ and $W(p,2)$. We calculate the dimension of the first homology group with coefficients in $\mathbb{Z}_3$ of the double cyclic cover of the $3$-sphere $S^3$ branched over $W(3,n)$ and $W(p,2)$ respectively. As a consequence, we obtain a lower bound of the unknotting number of $W(3,n)$ for certain values of $n$