What was the conference? From July 20–24, 2005, the 4th International Symposium on Imprecise Probabilities and Their Applications (ISIPTA’05) was held on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. This biennial conference is organized by the Society for Imprecise Probability Theory and Applications (SIPTA) [13]. The main organizers of ISIPTA’05 were Fabio G. Cozm...

Many decades of research have produced a significant amount of data showing increased oxidative stress in asthma and indicating a potential role for oxidants in the pathogenesis of the disease, particularly during exacerbations. Putatively relevant pro-oxidative mechanisms have also been identified. Currently available asthma drugs are generally effective for the treatment of the disease, but t...

In this study, we investigate the review system of Amazon.com, which is regarded as one of the most successful e-commerce websites in the world. We believe that the review results provided by Amazon’s review system may not be representative of the advertised products because the system does not consider two essential factors, namely the credibility and the time-decay of public reviews. Using a ...

We have developed a news portal site called Fair News Reader (FNR) that recommends news articles with different sentiments for a user in each of the topics in which the user is interested. FNR can detect various sentiments of news articles, and determine the sentimetal preferences of a user based on the sentiments of previously read articles by the user. While there are many news portal sites o...

Flexibility can be used to mitigate distribution network overloading. Distribution system operators (DSOs) obtain this flexibility from market parties connected the network. After has been delivered DSO, it needs settled. This is typically done by comparing load measurements with a baseline. baseline describes an asset’s power profile in case no would have delivered. Until recently, baselining ...

We present a novel methodology for identifying public knowledge and eliminating the biases it creates when aggregating information in small group settings. A two-stage mechanism consisting of an information market and a coordination game is used to reveal and adjust for individuals’ public information. A nonlinear aggregation of their decisions then allows for the calculation of the probability...

A High Yield Investment Program (HYIP) is an online Ponzi scheme, a financial fraud that pays outrageous levels of interest using money from new investors. We call this fraud ‘postmodern’ in that sophisticated investors understand the fraud, but hope to profit by joining early. These investors support ‘aggregators’ – reputation websites that track the status of HYIPs. We examine 9 months of agg...

This article reviews the New Public Management (NPM) literature in Central and Eastern Europe with the aim of assessing whether reforms have ‘worked’. Increasingly academics have tended to argue against the suitability of NPM instruments in this region. To understand the impact of this much-debated policy, we first propose a classification of the impacts of NPM geared to the realities of Centra...

People rely on online reviews to guide their purchasing behavior. According to industry research reports, a big proportion of consumers claim that their purchasing decision is largely influenced by online reviews (Deloitte 2007). In addition, consumers share these reviews with their family, friends or colleagues to make sense of their shopping experiences and deepen social connections (Peters a...