A Housing First evaluation project for homeless Veterans in Canada: Quantitative findings

LAY SUMMARY This study sought to evaluate a Housing First program for Veterans experiencing homelessness. Housing First is an approach made up of many different aspects of care including peer support and greater access to care resources within the home. These aspects of care are offered in order to address underlying issues and maintain housing stability. The program was implemented across four cities in Canada including London, Toronto, Calgary, and Victoria. To assess the program, interviews with Veterans were conducted at time of enrollment, 3, 9, and 15 months. The Veterans in this study demonstrated a significant reduction in homelessness. As well, a significant reduction in emergency room visits was reported. Other health care interactions and quality-of-life scores remained stable. These findings could, therefore, lead to potential future cost savings in the health care sector. This study demonstrates why this approach to housing for Veterans can be a highly effective and useful way to ensure housing stability.

Augmenting Whole Recombinant Antibody Production in HEK293E Cells: Optimizing Transfection and Culture Parameters

Optimizing recombinant antibody production is important for cost-effective therapeutics and diagnostics. With downstream impact on commercialization, higher productivity is highly sought after beyond laboratory scales, where efficient production can also accelerate antibody characterizations and investigations. Using HEK293E cells as the base model for mammalian antibody production, various transfection and culture parameters were systematically analyzed using antibody light chain production before applying them onto whole antibody production. Transfection parameters investigated include seeding cell density, the concentration of the transfection reagent and DNA, complexation time, temperature, and volume, as well as culture parameters such as media replacement, serum deprivation, media volume, post-transfection harvest, incubation temperature, and common nutrient supplements. Incorporating the most optimized parameters, Pertuzumab κ-chain only and whole recombinant Pertuzumab antibody production were found to increase by 452 % and 252 % respectively, that can be used to guide future cost-effective transient antibody production with the potential for further scaling up.

Web-based Fractional Ownership in Real Estate

The Indian real estate sector is one of the fastest-growing sectors. Real estate crowdfunding is a way of raising money for real estate investment by reaching out to a pool of investors to contribute a small amount of money towards a project. Real estate crowdfunding can be achieved by fractional ownership. Fractional ownership splits the cost of expensive property among several people. As popular the concepts seem, it has not been implemented in some parts concerning the higher risk factor. Such a process is complex if the person is a beginner and has little idea about the same. The objective of this paper is to display the real estate properties and connect investors-owners using a web-based application system. This system also advises market patterns, value ranges, and enhancing the advancements of the future cost will be predicted through machine learning model.

Performance of Dynamic Optical Path Networks with Large-scale WBSS-based Optical Cross-connects

In this paper, we have proposed a generalized large-scale optical cross-connect (OXC) architecture utilizing waveband selective switches (WBSS) for realizing future cost-effective, bandwidth-abundant and flexible optical networks. The developed architecture implements multiple WBSSs for each incoming fiber and small size wavelength selective switches (WSSs) for dropping optical paths while simply deploying 1´2 WSSs or 1´2 optical couplers for realizing the adding function. Thanks to the use of WBSSs, which are more cost-effective and simpler devices, the developed architecture enables a significant hardware scale reduction. The WBSS-based OXC, however, suffers from a limited routing capability, which relies on the inner node parameter (i.e., the WBSS number per input fiber) and the waveband granularity of WBSSs. We, therefore, evaluate the hardware scale requirement of our developed architecture in comparison with that of conventional WSS-based OXC. It is verified that a substantial hardware scale reduction can be achieved by using the proposed architecture, especially for high port count OXCs or when applying coarser granular WBSSs. Moreover, we also assess the performance of dynamic optical networks based on the proposed OXC. Numerical simulations show that the network offers a substantial necessary hardware scale reduction at the cost of a small performance offset comparing to that of the network using conventional WSS-based OXC.

A strategy to improve expert technology forecasts

Forecasts of the future cost and performance of technologies are often used to support decision-making. However, retrospective reviews find that many forecasts made by experts are not very accurate and are often seriously overconfident, with realized values too frequently falling outside of forecasted ranges. Here, we outline a hybrid approach to expert elicitation that we believe might improve forecasts of future technologies. The proposed approach iteratively combines the judgments of technical domain experts with those of experts who are knowledgeable about broader issues of technology adoption and public policy. We motivate the approach with results from a pilot study designed to help forecasters think systematically about factors beyond the technology itself that may shape its future, such as policy, economic, and social factors. Forecasters who received briefings on these topics provided wider forecast intervals than those receiving no assistance.

An empirical evaluation of cost-based federated SPARQL query processing engines

Finding a good query plan is key to the optimization of query runtime. This holds in particular for cost-based federation engines, which make use of cardinality estimations to achieve this goal. A number of studies compare SPARQL federation engines across different performance metrics, including query runtime, result set completeness and correctness, number of sources selected and number of requests sent. Albeit informative, these metrics are generic and unable to quantify and evaluate the accuracy of the cardinality estimators of cost-based federation engines. To thoroughly evaluate cost-based federation engines, the effect of estimated cardinality errors on the overall query runtime performance must be measured. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting novel evaluation metrics targeted at a fine-grained benchmarking of cost-based federated SPARQL query engines. We evaluate five cost-based federated SPARQL query engines using existing as well as novel evaluation metrics by using LargeRDFBench queries. Our results provide a detailed analysis of the experimental outcomes that reveal novel insights, useful for the development of future cost-based federated SPARQL query processing engines.