Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are a largely avoidable and costly burden on public health systems. Accurate estimates of the costs of HAI are necessary to gauge the cost efficiency of alternative infection control measures, but are traditionally very difficult to compute. In particular, existing studies of the costs of HAI do not take into account the possible endogeneity bias between the r...

Abstract —A motion adaptive deinterlacing algorithm is presented in this paper. It consists of the ELA-Median directional interpolation, same-parity 4-field horizontal motion detection, morphological operation for noise reduction and adaptive threshold adjusting. The edges can be sharper when the ELA-Median directional interpolation is adopted. The same-parity 4-field horizontal motion detectio...

This chapter seeks to extend current knowledge relating to innovative methods in marketing. The authors consider the significance of SMS marketing amongst Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) within South Africa and aim to emphasise the various advantages of SMS marketing to SMEs within emerging economies. They look at how SMS marketing has emerged within the Western world and how it could be ju...

Previous developmental research on pedagogy has focused on children’s inferences as learners. Here we look at children’s inferences as teachers. We explore the hypothesis that young children consider the goal of the learner and rationally provide evidence that is both informative and cost-efficient. Given a toy with an ambiguous causal structure, children selectively performed costly actions to...

We develop a novel multi-armed bandit (MAB) mechanism for the problem of selecting a subset of crowd workers to achieve an assured accuracy for each binary labelling task in a cost optimal way. This problem is challenging because workers have unknown qualities and strategic costs.

We propose a nonparametric model for global cost minimization as a framework for optimal allocation of a firm’s output target across multiple locations, taking account of differences in input prices and technologies across locations. This should be useful for firms planning production sites within a country and for foreign direct investment decisions by multi-national firms. Two illustrative ex...

This paper presents the results of the implementation of prototype culture heritage presentation systems in a village, a small town and a region. These systems focus on cost efficiency, sustainability, local identity and integration in tourism, and are based on an innovative approach of interactive storytelling. This approach facilitates effective public presentation of historical and archaeolo...

This paper presents a formal framework for run-time enforcement mechanisms, or monitors, based on probabilistic input/output automata [9,10], which allows for the modeling of complex and interactive systems. We associate with each trace of a monitored system (i.e., a monitor interposed between a system and an environment) a probability and a real number that represents the cost that the actions...

Oligopolistic industries generally produce less than is socially desirable. As a result, the use of production subsidies is often suggested as a means of raising production toward the efficient level in imperfectly competitive markets. In cases where firms are equally efficient in producing the good, the common prescription is a policy of uniform subsidization, as suggested by Besley (1989).(1)...

Auscultation, the act of listening to the heart and lung sounds, can reveal substantial information about patients’ health and other cardiac-related problems; therefore, competent training can be a key for accurate and reliable diagnosis. Standardized patients (SPs), who are healthy individuals trained to portray real patients, have been extensively used for such training and other medical teac...