scholarly journals Impact of Governmental interventions on epidemic progression and workplace activity during the COVID-19 outbreak

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumit Kumar Ram ◽  
Didier Sornette
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Spatial Diffusion ◽  
Implementation Quality ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Incidence Data ◽  
Travel Restrictions ◽  
Strategic Policy ◽  
Global Coordination

AbstractIn the first quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a state of paralysis. During this period, humanity saw by far the largest organized travel restrictions and unprecedented efforts and global coordination to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Using large scale human mobility and fine grained epidemic incidence data, we develop a framework to understand and quantify the effectiveness of the interventions implemented by various countries to control epidemic growth. Our analysis reveals the importance of timing and implementation of strategic policy in controlling the epidemic. We also unearth significant spatial diffusion of the epidemic before and during the lockdown measures in several countries, casting doubt on the effectiveness or on the implementation quality of the proposed Governmental policies.

scholarly journals Impact of Governmental interventions on epidemic progression and workplace activity during the COVID-19 outbreak

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumit Kumar Ram ◽  
Didier Sornette
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Spatial Diffusion ◽  
Implementation Quality ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Incidence Data ◽  
Travel Restrictions ◽  
Strategic Policy ◽  
Global Coordination

In the first quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a state of paralysis. During this period, humanity has seen by far the largest organized travel restrictions and unprecedented efforts and global coordination to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Using large scale human mobility and fine grained epidemic incidence data, we develop a framework to understand and quantify the effectiveness of the interventions implemented by various countries to control epidemic growth. Our analysis reveals the importance of timing and implementation of strategic policy in controlling the epidemic. Through our analysis, we also unearth significant spatial diffusion of the epidemic before and during the lock-down measures in several countries, casting doubt on the effectiveness or on the implementation quality of the proposed Governmental policies.

Scaling-Up and Zooming-Out: Understanding How and When Participatory Institutions Matter

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared Abbott ◽  
Benjamin Goldfrank
Keyword(s):  
Public Service ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
National Level ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Quality Of Democracy ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Participatory Institutions ◽  
New Generation

The three books reviewed here represent a new generation of rigorous scholarship on participatory institutions (PIs). They demonstrate that – under certain conditions – it is possible to build large-scale PIs that strengthen democratic governance and improve citizens’ lives. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain. Due in part to the absence of either high-quality national-level comparative data or fine-grained subnational data, and in part to research design choices of existing studies, the literature remains limited in its capacity to make general claims about the causes and effects of large-scale PIs. Ultimately, the key question collectively addressed, but not fully answered, by the works reviewed is whether governments can build PIs that deliver on their promise to improve the quality of democracy and enhance public service provision on a large scale in diverse contexts beyond Brazil.

scholarly journals SSAH: Semi-Supervised Adversarial Deep Hashing with Self-Paced Hard Sample Generation

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (07) ◽  
pp. 11157-11164
Author(s):  
Sheng Jin ◽  
Shangchen Zhou ◽  
Yao Liu ◽  
Chao Chen ◽  
Xiaoshuai Sun ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Unified Framework ◽  
Generative Adversarial Network ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Multi Scale ◽  
Deep Hashing ◽  
Adversarial Network ◽  
Improve State

Deep hashing methods have been proved to be effective and efficient for large-scale Web media search. The success of these data-driven methods largely depends on collecting sufficient labeled data, which is usually a crucial limitation in practical cases. The current solutions to this issue utilize Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to augment data in semi-supervised learning. However, existing GAN-based methods treat image generations and hashing learning as two isolated processes, leading to generation ineffectiveness. Besides, most works fail to exploit the semantic information in unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Self-pace Adversarial Hashing method, named SSAH to solve the above problems in a unified framework. The SSAH method consists of an adversarial network (A-Net) and a hashing network (H-Net). To improve the quality of generative images, first, the A-Net learns hard samples with multi-scale occlusions and multi-angle rotated deformations which compete against the learning of accurate hashing codes. Second, we design a novel self-paced hard generation policy to gradually increase the hashing difficulty of generated samples. To make use of the semantic information in unlabeled ones, we propose a semi-supervised consistent loss. The experimental results show that our method can significantly improve state-of-the-art models on both the widely-used hashing datasets and fine-grained datasets.

scholarly journals Fine-grained data reveal segregated mobility networks and opportunities for local containment of COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao Fan ◽  
Ronald Lee ◽  
Yang Yang ◽  
Ali Mostafavi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Virus Transmission ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mobility Control ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Effective Mobility ◽  
Travel Restrictions ◽  
Mobility Reduction

AbstractDeriving effective mobility control measures is critical for the control of COVID-19 spreading. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries and regions implemented travel restrictions and quarantines to reduce human mobility and thus reduce virus transmission. But since human mobility decreased heterogeneously, we lack empirical evidence of the extent to which the reductions in mobility alter the way people from different regions of cities are connected, and what containment policies could complement mobility reductions to conquer the pandemic. Here, we examined individual movements in 21 of the most affected counties in the United States, showing that mobility reduction leads to a segregated place network and alters its relationship with pandemic spread. Our findings suggest localized area-specific policies, such as geo-fencing, as viable alternatives to city-wide lockdown for conquering the pandemic after mobility was reduced.

Dynamic partner selection in Cloud Federation for ensuring the quality of service for cloud consumers

2017 ◽  
Vol 08 (03) ◽  
pp. 1750036 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manoj V. Thomas ◽  
K. Chandrasekaran
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Computing ◽  
Quality Of Service ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Partner Selection ◽  
Cloud Service ◽  
Analytic Hierarchy ◽  
Cloud Federation ◽  
Global Coordination

Cloud Computing has become the popular paradigm for accessing the various scalable and on-demand computing services over the internet. Nowadays, individual Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) offering specialized services to the customers collaborate to form the Cloud Federation, in order to reap the real benefits of Cloud Computing. By collaboration, the member CSPs of the federation achieve better resource utilization and Quality of Service (QoS), thereby increasing their business prospects. When a CSP runs out of resources in the Cloud Federation, in order to offload the customer requests for resources to other CSP(s), identifying a suitable partner is a challenging task due to the lack of global coordination among them. In this paper, we propose the design and implementation of an efficient partner selection mechanism in the Cloud Federation, using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods, and also considering the trust values of various CSPs in the federation. The AHP method is used to calculate the weights of the QoS parameters used in the TOPSIS method which is used to rank the various CSPs in the Cloud Federation according to the user requirements. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this approach in order to efficiently select the trustworthy partners in large scale federations to ensure the required QoS to the cloud consumers.

Coaching Teachers to Enhance the Implementation Quality of Evidence-Based Programs

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly D. Becker ◽  
Dana Darney ◽  
Celene Domitrovich ◽  
Catherine Bradshaw ◽  
Nicholas S. Ialongo
Keyword(s):  
Evidence Based ◽  
Implementation Quality ◽  
Quality Of Evidence ◽  
Evidence Based Programs

Assessment of quality of life in patients with the effects of transient ischemic stroke

2016 ◽  
pp. 37-39
Author(s):  
A. Babirad
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Ischemic Stroke ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Cerebrovascular Diseases ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Cerebrovascular Events ◽  
Sf 36 ◽  
Angioplasty And Stenting

Cerebrovascular diseases are a problem of the world today, and according to the forecast, the problem of the near future arises. The main risk factors for the development of ischemic disorders of the cerebral circulation include oblique and aging, arterial hypertension, smoking, diabetes mellitus and heart disease. An effective strategy for the prevention of cerebrovascular events is based on the implementation of large-scale risk control measures, including the use of antiagregant and anticoagulant therapy, invasive interventions such as atheromectomy, angioplasty and stenting. In this connection, the efforts of neurologists, cardiologists, angiosurgery, endocrinologists and other specialists are the basis for achieving an acceptable clinical outcome. A review of the SF-36 method for assessing the quality of life in patients with the effects of transient ischemic stroke is presented. The assessment of quality of life is recognized in world medical practice and research, an indicator that is also used to assess the quality of the health system and in general sociological research.

Model and Method for Contributor’s Quality Assessment in Community Image Tagging Systems

2018 ◽  
pp. 45-51
Author(s):  
A. V. Ponomarev
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Preference Relation ◽  
Pairwise Comparison ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Comparison Method ◽  
Characteristic Matrix ◽  
Image Tagging ◽  
Proposed Model

Introduction: Large-scale human-computer systems involving people of various skills and motivation into the information processing process are currently used in a wide spectrum of applications. An acute problem in such systems is assessing the expected quality of each contributor; for example, in order to penalize incompetent or inaccurate ones and to promote diligent ones.Purpose: To develop a method of assessing the expected contributor’s quality in community tagging systems. This method should only use generally unreliable and incomplete information provided by contributors (with ground truth tags unknown).Results:A mathematical model is proposed for community image tagging (including the model of a contributor), along with a method of assessing the expected contributor’s quality. The method is based on comparing tag sets provided by different contributors for the same images, being a modification of pairwise comparison method with preference relation replaced by a special domination characteristic. Expected contributors’ quality is evaluated as a positive eigenvector of a pairwise domination characteristic matrix. Community tagging simulation has confirmed that the proposed method allows you to adequately estimate the expected quality of community tagging system contributors (provided that the contributors' behavior fits the proposed model).Practical relevance: The obtained results can be used in the development of systems based on coordinated efforts of community (primarily, community tagging systems). 

Translation and Validation of the Thai Version of the Wisconsin Quality of Life Questionnaire (TH WISQoL) for Kidney Stone Patients

2020 ◽  
Vol 103 (11) ◽  
pp. 1194-1199
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Internal Consistency ◽  
Kidney Stone ◽  
Convergent Validity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Short Form ◽  
Outcome Measurement ◽  
Life Questionnaire ◽  
Sf 36

Objective: To develop and validate a Thai version of the Wisconsin Quality of Life (TH WISQoL) Questionnaire. Materials and Methods: The authors developed the TH WISQoL Questionnaire based on a standard multi-step process. Subsequently, the authors recruited patients with kidney stone and requested them to complete the TH WISQoL and a validated Thai version of the 36-Item Short Form Survey (TH SF-36). The authors calculated the internal consistency and interdomain correlation of TH WISQoL and compared the convergent validity between the two instruments. Results: Thirty kidney stone patients completed the TH WISQoL and the TH SF-36. The TH WISQoL showed acceptable internal consistency for all domains (Cronbach’s alpha 0.768 to 0.909). Interdomain correlation was high for most domains (r=0.698 to 0.779), except for the correlation between Vitality and Disease domains, which showed a moderate correlation (r=0.575). For convergent validity, TH WISQoL demonstrated a good overall correlation to TH SF-36, (r=0.796, p<0.05). Conclusion: The TH WISQoL is valid and reliable for evaluating the quality of life of Thai patients with kidney stone. A further large-scale multi-center study is warranted to confirm its applicability in Thailand. Keywords: Quality of life, Kidney stone, Validation, Outcome measurement

Evaluating Qualitative Research

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeasik Cho
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Journal Editors ◽  
The Past ◽  
Grant Proposals

This book provides the qualitative research community with some insight on how to evaluate the quality of qualitative research. This topic has gained little attention during the past few decades. We, qualitative researchers, read journal articles, serve on masters’ and doctoral committees, and also make decisions on whether conference proposals, manuscripts, or large-scale grant proposals should be accepted or rejected. It is assumed that various perspectives or criteria, depending on various paradigms, theories, or fields of discipline, have been used in assessing the quality of qualitative research. Nonetheless, until now, no textbook has been specifically devoted to exploring theories, practices, and reflections associated with the evaluation of qualitative research. This book constructs a typology of evaluating qualitative research, examines actual information from websites and qualitative journal editors, and reflects on some challenges that are currently encountered by the qualitative research community. Many different kinds of journals’ review guidelines and available assessment tools are collected and analyzed. Consequently, core criteria that stand out among these evaluation tools are presented. Readers are invited to join the author to confidently proclaim: “Fortunately, there are commonly agreed, bold standards for evaluating the goodness of qualitative research in the academic research community. These standards are a part of what is generally called ‘scientific research.’ ”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document