scholarly journals How to Assign Scarce Resources Without Money: Designing Information Systems that are Efficient, Truthful, and (Pretty) Fair

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Bichler ◽  
Alexander Hammerl ◽  
Thayer Morrill ◽  
Stefan Waldherr
Keyword(s):  
School Choice ◽  
Field Data ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Efficient Allocation ◽  
Matching Problem ◽  
Maximum Capacity ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Monetary Transfers ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
Matching With Preferences

Matching with preferences has great potential to coordinate the efficient allocation of scarce resources in organizations when monetary transfers are not available. It is well known that it is impossible to combine all three properties of truthfulness, efficiency, and fairness (i.e., envy freeness) in matching with preferences. Established mechanisms are either efficient or envy free, and the efficiency loss in envy-free mechanisms is substantial. We focus on a widespread representative of a matching problem: course assignment where students have preferences for courses and organizers have priorities over students. An important feature in course assignment is that a course has a maximum capacity and a minimum required quota. This is also a requirement in many other matching applications, such as school choice, hospital-residents matching, or the assignment of workers to jobs. We introduce RESPCT, a mechanism that respects minimum quotas and is truthful, efficient, and has low levels of envy. The reduction in envy is significant and is due to two remarkably effective heuristics. We provide analytical and experimental results based on field data from a large-scale course assignment application. These results have led to a policy change and the proposed assignment system is now being used to match hundreds of students every semester.

scholarly journals School Choice During a Period of Radical School Reform. Evidence from Academy Conversion in England

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Bertoni ◽  
Stephen Gibbons ◽  
Olmo Silva
Keyword(s):  
School Choice ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
English Education ◽  
Limited Information ◽  
State Control ◽  
High Performing ◽  
Opt Out ◽  
Improved Performance ◽  
Expected Benefits ◽  
State Schools

Abstract We study how demand responds to the rebranding of existing state schools as autonomous ‘academies’ in the context of a radical and large-scale reform to the English education system. The academy programme encouraged schools to opt out of local state control and funding, but provided parents and students with limited information on the expected benefits. We use administrative data on school applications for three cohorts of students to estimate whether this rebranding changes schools’ relative popularity. We find that families – particularly higher-income, White British – are more likely to rank converted schools above non-converted schools on their applications. We also find that it is mainly schools that are high-performing, popular and proximate to families’ homes that attract extra demand after conversion. Overall, the patterns we document suggest that families read academy conversion as a signal of future quality gains – although this signal is in part misleading as we find limited evidence that conversion causes improved performance.

scholarly journals Large-scale Semantic Parsing without Question-Answer Pairs

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 377-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siva Reddy ◽  
Mirella Lapata ◽  
Mark Steedman
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Graph Matching ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Semantic Parsing ◽  
Matching Problem ◽  
Weak Supervision ◽  
Benchmark Datasets

In this paper we introduce a novel semantic parsing approach to query Freebase in natural language without requiring manual annotations or question-answer pairs. Our key insight is to represent natural language via semantic graphs whose topology shares many commonalities with Freebase. Given this representation, we conceptualize semantic parsing as a graph matching problem. Our model converts sentences to semantic graphs using CCG and subsequently grounds them to Freebase guided by denotations as a form of weak supervision. Evaluation experiments on a subset of the Free917 and WebQuestions benchmark datasets show our semantic parser improves over the state of the art.

On the Early Cambrian age of two late orogenic granites from. west-central Ahaggar (Algerian Sahara)

1969 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Boissonnas ◽  
S. Borsi ◽  
G. Ferrara ◽  
J. Fabre ◽  
J. Fabries ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Random Sampling ◽  
Field Data ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Early Cambrian ◽  
Basement Complex ◽  
West Central ◽  
Algerian Sahara ◽  
Igneous Activity ◽  
Made In

The Pharusian belt of west-central Ahaggar belongs to the 'basement complex' underlying the Paleozoic and later sediments of the Sahara. This paper reports and discusses the Rb–Sr ages obtained on total rocks and minerals from two granitic stocks of the belt: the Tioueiine and Iskel intrusions.Both plutons gave good whole-rock isochrons, which show that the systems were closed 560 ± 40 m.y. ago with respect to Rb and Sr. This is, most probably, the age of crystallization. Three of the four values obtained on biotites are somewhat lower and scattered in the range 502–526 m.y. The discrepancies are probably due to deuteric reactions or incipient weathering. They can be ascribed neither to the loss of 87Sr during the cooling down of the granites, nor to rejuvenation by some later thermal or tectonic event.These studies confirm previous results of random sampling in Ahaggar and prove that large-scale igneous activity took place during the Early Cambrian Epoch. Knowing from field data that the Tioueiine and Iskel are late orogenic granites, it must be concluded that the Pharusian orogeny came to an end at that time.Such a result contradicts early assumptions, made in the field, of a middle Precambrian age for the Pharusian orogeny. It gives further weight to modern ideas concerning the 700–500 m.y. events in Africa, and it leaves time for erosion to create the Saharian platform before the deposition of the first Paleozoic sandstones.

scholarly journals Elinor Ostrom: proving the effectiveness of collective action in management (the Noble Prize in Economics in 2009 “for research in the field of economic organization”)

2017 ◽  
pp. 127-139
Author(s):  
Oksana Shymanska
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Empirically Supported ◽  
Use Of Resources ◽  
Human Organization ◽  
The Government

The article substantiates Elinor Ostrom’s contribution to the theory of collective management of property. The author outlines solutions to problems of the most optimal use of scarce natural resources and their economically relevant preservation in a long-term perspective. The research paper affirms the idea that it is not only the government who can solve the problem of efficient use of resources for public purposes. It is proved that collective decisions can be made in the management of resources, under which the latter are maintained in good conditions while being used for general public. The most accepted models (‘the tragedy of the commons’, ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’, ‘the logic of collective action’) are examined. The above- mentioned models are frequently used as tools to study cases of economic policy-making in allocating scarce resources for public purposes, and as a concept for analyzing problems of individuals who seek to achieve collective benefits. It is emphasized that there is a need for a balanced application of the above models as metaphors, which substitute solid foundations of the economic policy, since the limitations suggested for easing the analysis are accepted without reservation as permanent empirical requirements that remain as such until adjustments are made by the government. Special emphasis is placed on the importance of developing the theory of human organization based on realistic assessments of human possibilities and limitations that arise when a number of various situations related to using public goods are to be resolved. It is stressed that the empirically supported theories of human organization as an important component of study on economic policy are able to complement the solutions with estimates of the most likely effect of using many ways of organizing human activities. It is concluded that E. Ostrom’s experimental research in the field of natural resources management can be used to solve large-scale range of issues related to the production of public goods.

scholarly journals Space-time clustering-based method to optimize shareability in real-time ride-sharing

PLoS ONE ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. e0262499
Author(s):  
Negin Alisoltani ◽  
Mostafa Ameli ◽  
Mahdi Zargayouna ◽  
Ludovic Leclercq
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Computation Time ◽  
Clustering Method ◽  
Matching Problem ◽  
Solution Quality ◽  
Mobility Service ◽  
Ride Sharing ◽  
Large Scale Problems ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Real-time ride-sharing has become popular in recent years. However, the underlying optimization problem for this service is highly complex. One of the most critical challenges when solving the problem is solution quality and computation time, especially in large-scale problems where the number of received requests is huge. In this paper, we rely on an exact solving method to ensure the quality of the solution, while using AI-based techniques to limit the number of requests that we feed to the solver. More precisely, we propose a clustering method based on a new shareability function to put the most shareable trips inside separate clusters. Previous studies only consider Spatio-temporal dependencies to do clustering on the mobility service requests, which is not efficient in finding the shareable trips. Here, we define the shareability function to consider all the different sharing states for each pair of trips. Each cluster is then managed with a proposed heuristic framework in order to solve the matching problem inside each cluster. As the method favors sharing, we present the number of sharing constraints to allow the service to choose the number of shared trips. To validate our proposal, we employ the proposed method on the network of Lyon city in France, with half-million requests in the morning peak from 6 to 10 AM. The results demonstrate that the algorithm can provide high-quality solutions in a short time for large-scale problems. The proposed clustering method can also be used for different mobility service problems such as car-sharing, bike-sharing, etc.

Determinants of willingness to eat insects in the USA and India

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.B. Ruby ◽  
P. Rozin ◽  
C. Chan
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Sensation Seeking ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Substantial Proportion ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Risk Of Disease ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
Insects As Food ◽  
Major Impediment ◽  
Favourite Food

One of the major, if not the major impediment to large scale increases of human insect consumption, is the strong rejection of insects as food by most of the world’s population. In an effort to understand this aversion, we surveyed online samples of adults living in the USA and India to participate in a study on ‘attitudes toward food’. A substantial proportion of both Americans (72%) and Indians (74%) were at least willing to consider eating some form of insect food. Men were more willing to try eating insects than were women, especially in the USA. Disgust seems to be the most common reaction of both groups at the prospect of eating insects. The most common perceived benefits of eating insects were related to nutrition and environmental sustainability, and the most common risks related to risk of disease and illness. Both groups find ants the most palatable of a set of seven possible insects, and cockroaches the most unpalatable. In both samples, participants were most amenable to eating low levels of insect flour in a favourite food, and most averse to consuming whole insects. The best predictors of insect acceptance were disgust at the thought of eating insects, beliefs about the benefits of eating insects, sensation seeking, and the enjoyment of telling others about consumption of unusual foods.

Structural evolution of Archean rocks in the western Wawa subprovince, Minnesota: refolding of precleavage nappes during D2 transpression

1992 ◽  
Vol 29 (10) ◽  
pp. 2146-2155 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. A. Jirsa ◽  
D. L. Southwick ◽  
T. J. Boerboom
Keyword(s):  
Field Data ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Volcanic Rocks ◽  
Structural Evolution ◽  
Precise Form

Recent mapping in the western Wawa subprovince (the Vermilion district and its westward extensions in Minnesota) has identified a major, northeast-trending stratotectonic break, informally called the Leech Lake structural disconformity (LLSD), that separates two contrasting terranes. North of the LLSD are elongate, east-northeast-trending, fault-bounded panels of volcanic rocks, which are mostly north topping and homoclinal. South of the LLSD, large-scale, northwest-trending folds involve basaltic sequences that are stratigraphically overlain by thick sections of dacitic volcaniclastic and turbiditic rocks. However, the most prominent outcrop-scale deformational features are northeast-trending vertical folds and associated axial-planar cleavage related to transpression in D2. D1 minor folds and cleavage are rare.New field data indicate that the large folds in a predominantly sedimentary part of the southern terrane are early formed (D0–D1), and nappe-like. The precise form of the early folds is largely obscured by (i) superimposed folds and metamorphism contemporaneous with D2, (ii) faulting that began in D2 and outlasted folding, and (iii) emplacement of the Giants Range batholith and associated plutons. Nevertheless, the presence in the southern terrane of large areas of shallow-plunging, downward-facing rock sequences and the map pattern of rock units imply that a large south-verging, northwest-plunging thrust nappe (or nappes) antedated D2. Where the nappe lacked thick, rigid volcanic layers, accommodation to D2 transpression took the form of abundant Z folds. Much of the observed Z asymmetry of F2 folds may have resulted from compression and shear oblique to the trend of rock units. In contrast, early thrusts are inferred to have positioned volcanic units north of the LLSD such that their strike was nearly perpendicular to D2 compression, and therefore F2 folds did not develop extensively.

scholarly journals Binning unassembled short reads based on k-mer abundance covariance using sparse coding

GigaScience ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olexiy Kyrgyzov ◽  
Vincent Prost ◽  
Stéphane Gazut ◽  
Bruno Farcy ◽  
Thomas Brüls
Keyword(s):  
Relative Abundance ◽  
Sparse Coding ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Computational Cost ◽  
Joint Analysis ◽  
Short Reads ◽  
Elastic Net Regularization ◽  
Sparse Dictionary Learning ◽  
Metagenome Assembly ◽  
Low Levels

Abstract Background Sequence-binning techniques enable the recovery of an increasing number of genomes from complex microbial metagenomes and typically require prior metagenome assembly, incurring the computational cost and drawbacks of the latter, e.g., biases against low-abundance genomes and inability to conveniently assemble multi-terabyte datasets. Results We present here a scalable pre-assembly binning scheme (i.e., operating on unassembled short reads) enabling latent genome recovery by leveraging sparse dictionary learning and elastic-net regularization, and its use to recover hundreds of metagenome-assembled genomes, including very low-abundance genomes, from a joint analysis of microbiomes from the LifeLines DEEP population cohort (n = 1,135, >1010 reads). Conclusion We showed that sparse coding techniques can be leveraged to carry out read-level binning at large scale and that, despite lower genome reconstruction yields compared to assembly-based approaches, bin-first strategies can complement the more widely used assembly-first protocols by targeting distinct genome segregation profiles. Read enrichment levels across 6 orders of magnitude in relative abundance were observed, indicating that the method has the power to recover genomes consistently segregating at low levels.

Effects of electrical anisotropy on long-offset transient electromagnetic data

2020 ◽  
Vol 222 (2) ◽  
pp. 1074-1089 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yajun Liu ◽  
Pritam Yogeshwar ◽  
Xiangyun Hu ◽  
Ronghua Peng ◽  
Bülent Tezkan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Electric Field ◽  
Field Data ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Mining Area ◽  
Black Shales ◽  
Electrical Anisotropy ◽  
Anisotropic Models ◽  
Data Inversion ◽  
Transient Electromagnetic ◽  
Long Offset

SUMMARY Electrical anisotropy of formations has been long recognized by field and laboratory evidence. However, most interpretations of long-offset transient electromagnetic (LOTEM) data are based on the assumption of an electrical isotropic earth. Neglecting electrical anisotropy of formations may cause severe misleading interpretations in regions with strong electrical anisotropy. During a large scale LOTEM survey in a former mining area in Eastern Germany, data was acquired over black shale formations. These black shales are expected to produce a pronounced bulk anisotropy. Here, we investigate the effects of electrical anisotropy on LOTEM responses through numerical simulation using a finite-volume time-domain (FVTD) algorithm. On the basis of isotropic models obtained from LOTEM field data, various anisotropic models are developed and analysed. Numerical results demonstrate that the presence of electrical anisotropy has a significant influence on LOTEM responses. Based on the numerical modelling results, an isolated deep conductive anomaly presented in the 2-D isotropic LOTEM electric field data inversion result is identified as a possible artifact introduced by using an isotropic inversion scheme. Trial-and-error forward modelling of the LOTEM electric field data using an anisotropic conductivity model can explain the data and results in a reasonable quantitative data fit. The derived anisotropic 2-D model is consistent with the prior geological information.

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