An investigation into social media syndromic monitoring

Tweets offer us early information on initial stages of diseases, since people often tweet the early symptoms of feeling unwell prior to presenting to an emergency department if their symptoms become more severe. Even when people do present at an emergency department, it generally takes over 24 hours for their information to be collected, diagnosed and transferred for analysis at a centralized location. The advantage of utilizing tweets is that they offer information on syndromes in real-time. This paper investigates the value of carrying out multivariate syndromic surveillance using daily counts of keywords. The dynamic bi-plot is used to detect unexpected changes in the daily counts. These methods can be easily generalized to hourly tweet syndromic counts. By following Twitter users that suffer certain symptoms over time we can better understand the burden of these health issues and better understand emerging health issues. Monitoring people who present with symptoms but are just not sick enough to go to emergency departments provides us with additional information not gathered by emergency departments.     

Building evaluative culture in community services: Caring for evidence

An organization with a strong evaluative culture engages in self-reflection, evidence-based learning and experimentation. It sees evidence as essential for managing well, but building such a culture is challenging. Community service organizations seek to provide effective services for their clients. To build an evaluative culture, they need to acquire basic monitoring and evaluation capabilities, be provided with opportunities for using these capabilities and be adequately motivated to care about evidence as a means to improve services to their clients. Leadership along with a phased in approach are key in bringing about these behaviour changes.     

Semi-Sequential One-Shot Monitoring of Small Disorders With Controlled Type I Error Rate

We propose a simple two-stage monitoring rule for detecting small disorders in a two-sample location problem. The proposed rule is based on ranks and hence is nonparametric in nature. In the first stage, we use a sequential monitoring scheme to decide the necessity of employing a location test at some point of time. If there is urgency, we simply use a two-sample Wilcoxon rank sum test in the second stage. This leads to a semi sequential one-shot monitoring procedure. We study some asymptotic performance of the proposed rule. We also present some numerical findings obtained through Monte Carlo studies. The proposed rule meets the challenge of controlling type I error rate in sequential monitoring of an incoming series of observations.     

A Unified Approach to Structural Change Tests Based on ML Scores,F Statistics,and OLS Residuals

This paper presents an easy-to-compute semi-parametric (SP) method to estimate a simple disequilibrium model proposed by Fair and Jaffee (1972). The proposed approach is based on a non-parametric interpretation of the EM (Expectation and Maximization) principle (Dempster et al; 1977) and the least squares method. The simple disequilibrium model includes the demand equation, the supply equation, and the condition that only the minimum of quantity demanded and quantity supplied is observed. The method used here allows one to consistently estimate the disequilibrium model without fully specifying the distribution of error terms in both demand and supply equations. Our Monte Carlo study suggests that the proposedestimator is better than the normal maximum likelihood estimator under asymmetric error distributions. and comparable to the nlaximunl likelihood estimator under synirnetric error distributions in finite samples. Aggregate U.S. labor market data from Quandt and Rosen (1988) is used to illustrate the procedure.     

完善上海价格异常波动立急管理机制的思路和建议

近几年，价格波动幅度加大，价格波动的突发性越来越明显，全球性的金融危机、农产品的轮番炒作、日本大地震引起的抢盐事件等都引起了相关商品的大幅波动，对市场秩序和社会稳定都造成较大的冲击。在这个背景下，上海进一步完善市场价格异常波动应急管理机制正当时。为此，在上海现有价格管理的基础上，充分借鉴国内外经验，根据国家要求和上海国际化大都市的需要，对上海构建一个包括价格监测、预警、应急响应、应急保障在内的全方位、综合性、协调联动、信息化的价格应急管理机制进行了初步探索。     

美国基金业独立董事制度探析

自20世纪90年代创始以来,在短短的十余年里,中国证券投资基金经历了初创到繁荣、规范与发展并重的历程,与此同时,有关基金的法律规定也不断丰富,日趋完善。为保护投资人利益,基金业独立董事制度被引入设立。通过运用比较分析的方法重点介绍基金业独立董事制度的缘起和发展,讨论其发源地美国共同基金的治理结构和现行规范,了解美国业界对于共同基金独立董事制度的评价,从而分析出独立董事作为基金监督机制的一种,有其积极意义所在,但是其本身并不是一剂"万能药",除此之外,还需借助于其他制度对于独立董事的作用进行补充和配合,如充分的信息披露,以及民事诉权制度等。     

Auditory evoked potentials as a function of sleep deprivation

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were studied in subjects deprived of sleep over a 48-h test period to assess the effects of different durations of continuous wakefulness on ERP components and to determine whether changes in the ERP components were related to changes in performance. Forty subjects were randomly assigned to either an experimental (sleep deprived) group (n = 30) or a control (not sleep deprived) group (n = 10). For the experimental subjects, ERP and performance measures were obtained in four-h test blocks throughout the 48-h period. Performance was assessed using the Walter Reed performance assessment battery. The control subjects were tested at the same times except during designated sleep periods. Both performance and evoked potential measures showed systematic changes over the experimental test period in association with sleep deprivation, time of day, and repeated testing. The latency of the N2 component of the evoked potential covaried with throughput measures on the performance assessment battery across the 12 four-h test blocks of the experiment. These data suggest that ERPs reflect central processes that change across the sleep deprivation period and that ERP measures might be useful in assessment and prediction of performance degradation under adverse conditions such as sleep loss.     

井下泵房自动监控改造

通过使用双单片机和嵌入式以太网芯片RTL8019AS,完成井下水泵房的自动监控的同时实现了远程控制和数据共享,为老矿井改造提供了一定的参考价值。     

Do the contingencies of external monitoring, ownership incentives, or free cash flow explain opposing firm performance expectations?

Neoclassical and strategy frameworks stipulate that managers promote corporate performance and shareholder interests in their resource allocation decisions. Agency related works anticipate that executives seek their own personal interests at a cost to performance and shareholder wealth in their resource allocation choices. In this study, an attempt is made to resolve these conflicting anticipations. We propose that changes in levels of resource allocations (advertising expenditure, R&D spending, capital intensity) may be more positively associated with changes in levels of subsequent corporate performance for firms with greater external monitoring or with higher CEO ownership incentives. We also propose that changes in levels of resource allocations may directly (inversely) affect changes in levels of subsequent performance of the actively (passively) monitored enterprises, lacking (possessing) free cash flow. Additionally, we propose that changes in levels of resource allocations may directly (inversely) affect changes in levels of subsequent performance of firms with high (low) CEO ownership incentives in the absence (presence) of free cash flow. Regression models are utilized to test our proposals on a longitudinal sample obtained from the Compustat database. The empirical findings are generally supportive of our proposals.