Bureaucracies often post staff to better or worse locations, ostensibly to provide incentives. Yet we know little about whether this works, with heterogeneity in preferences over postings impacting effectiveness. We propose a performance-ranked serial dictatorship mechanism, whereby bureaucrats sequentially choose desired locations in order of performance. We evaluate this using a two-year fiel...

The use of biomarkers to refine patient populations, such that clinical trials will be most likely to provide a definitive answer requiring the fewest patients, is particularly appealing for application to research involving patients with a heterogeneous syndrome like ALI/ARDS. This could be beneficial by helping to characterize either a group of patients with a high mortality where mortality i...

In region-based image segmentation, two models dominate the field: the Mumford-Shah functional and statistical approaches based on Bayesian inference. Whereas the latter allow for numerous ways to describe the statistics of intensities in regions, the first includes spatially smooth approximations. In this paper, we show that the piecewise smooth Mumford-Shah functional is a first order approxi...

Reality therapy is a particular approach in adolescent development and independence that repeatedly emphasized on the disagreeable relationships and self-control to encourage personal growth. Unfortunately, we could not find any study in the context of effectiveness of training reality therapy concepts on parent-child conflicts and self-efficacy. Therefore, this study were done with the purpose...