Convergence of object focused simultaneous estimation of optical flow and state dynamics

The purpose of this study is to prove the convergence of the simultaneous estimation of the optical flow and object state (SEOS) method. The SEOS method utilizes dynamic object parameter information when calculating optical flow in tracking a moving object within a video stream. Optical flow estimation for the SEOS method requires the minimization of an error function containing the object's physical parameter data. When this function is discretized, the Euler-Lagrange equations form a system of linear equations. The system is arranged such that its property matrix is positive definite symmetric, proving the convergence of the Gauss-Seidel iterative methods. The system of linear equations produced by SEOS can alternatively be resolved by Jacobi iterative schemes. The positive definite symmetric property is not sufficient for Jacobi convergence. The convergence of SEOS for a block diagonal Jacobi is proved by analysing the Euclidean norm of the Jacobi matrix. In this paper, we also investigate the use of SEOS for tracking individual objects within a video sequence. The illustrations provided show the effectiveness of SEOS for localizing objects within a video sequence and generating optical flow results.

Social norms in the development of adolescent substance use: a longitudinal analysis of the International Youth Development Study.

Identifying specific aspects of peer social norms that influence adolescent substance use may assist international prevention efforts. This study examines two aggregated measures of social norms in the school setting and their predictive association with substance (alcohol, tobacco and marijuana) use 2 years later in a large cross-national population-based cohort of adolescents. The primary hypothesis is that in Grade 7 both "injunctive" school norms (where students associate substance use with "coolness") and "descriptive" norms (where student substance use is common) will predict Grade 9 substance use. Data come from the International Youth Development Study, including 2,248 students (51.2% female) in the US and Australia attending 121 schools in Grade 7. Independent variables included injunctive norms (aggregating measures of school-wide coolness ratings of each substance use) and descriptive norms (aggregating the prevalence of school substance use) in Grade 7. Dependent variables included binge drinking and current use of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana in Grade 9. Associations between each type of school-wide social norm and substance use behaviors in Grade 9 were tested using multilevel logistic regression, adjusting for covariates. In unadjusted models, both injunctive and descriptive norms each significantly predicted subsequent substance use. In fully adjusted models, injunctive norms were no longer significantly associated with Grade 9 use, but descriptive norms remained significantly associated with tobacco and marijuana use in the expected direction. The findings identify descriptive social norms in the school context as a particularly important area to address in adolescent substance use prevention efforts.

Sizing up the effect of portion size on consumption: A meta-analytic review

Food marketing is facing increasing challenges in using portion size (e.g., “supersizing”) as a marketing tool.Marketers have used portion size to attract customers and encourage purchase, but social agencies areexpressing concern that larger portion sizes encourage greater consumption, which can cause excessiveconsumption and obesity. This article addresses two questions that are central to this debate: (1) How much effectdoes portion size have on consumption? and (2) Are there limits to this effect? A meta-analytic review reveals that,for a doubling of portion size, consumption increases by 35% on average. However, the effect has limits. Anextended analysis shows that the effect of portion size is curvilinear: as portions become increasingly larger, theeffect diminishes. In addition, although the portion-size effect is widespread and robust across a range of individualand environmental factors, the analysis shows that it is weaker among children, women, and overweightindividuals, as well as for nonsnack food items and in contexts in which more attention is given to the food beingeaten.

A new computerized adaptive test advancing the measurement of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in children: the Kids-CAT

Purpose: Assessing health-related quality of life (HRQoL) via Computerized Adaptive Tests (CAT) provides greater measurement precision coupled with a lower test burden compared to conventional tests. Currently, there are no European pediatric HRQoL CATs available. This manuscript aims at describing the development of a HRQoL CAT for children and adolescents: the Kids-CAT, which was developed based on the established KIDSCREEN-27 HRQoL domain structure. Methods: The Kids-CAT was developed combining classical test theory and item response theory methods and using large archival data of European KIDSCREEN norm studies (n = 10,577–19,580). Methods were applied in line with the US PROMIS project. Item bank development included the investigation of unidimensionality, local independence, exploration of Differential Item Functioning (DIF), evaluation of Item Response Curves (IRCs), estimation and norming of item parameters as well as first CAT simulations. Results: The Kids-CAT was successfully built covering five item banks (with 26–46 items each) to measure physical well-being, psychological well-being, parent relations, social support and peers, and school well-being. The Kids-CAT item banks proved excellent psychometric properties: high content validity, unidimensionality, local independence, low DIF, and model conform IRCs. In CAT simulations, seven items were needed to achieve a measurement precision between.8 and.9 (reliability). It has a child-friendly design, is easy accessible online and gives immediate feedback reports of scores. Conclusions: The Kids-CAT has the potential to advance pediatric HRQoL measurement by making it less burdensome and enhancing the patient–doctor communication.

The ProCaSP study: quality of life outcomes of prostate cancer patients after radiotherapy or radical prostatectomy in a cohort study urological oncology

Background: This study describes and compares health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of prostate cancer patients who received either radical prostatectomy (nerve-sparing, nsRP, or non-nerve-sparing, nnsRP) or radiotherapy (external RT, brachytherapy, or both combined) for treatment of localised prostate cancer. Methods: The prospective, multicenter cohort study included 529 patients. Questionnaires included the IIEF, QLQ-C30, and PORPUS-P. Data were collected before (baseline), three, six, twelve, and twenty-four months after treatment. Differences between groups' baseline characteristics were assessed; changes over time were analysed with generalised estimating equations (GEE). Missing values were treated with multiple imputation. Further, scores at baseline and end of follow-up were compared to German reference data. Results: The typical time trend was a decrease of average HRQOL three months after treatment followed by (partial) recovery. RP patients experienced considerable impairment in sexual functioning. The covariate-adjusted GEE identified a significant - but not clinically relevant - treatment effect for diarrhoea (b∈=∈7.0 for RT, p∈=∈0.006) and PORPUS-P (b∈=∈2.3 for nsRP, b∈=∈2.2 for RT, p∈=∈0.045) compared to the reference nnsRP. Most of the HRQOL scores were comparable to German norm values. Conclusions: Findings from previous research were reproduced in a specific setting of a patient cohort in the German health care system. According to the principle of evidence-based medicine, this strengthens the messages regarding treatment in prostate cancer and its impacts on patients' health-related quality of life. After adjustment for baseline HRQOL and other covariates, RT patients reported increased symptoms of diarrhoea, and nnsRP patients decreased prostate-specific HRQOL. RP patients experienced considerable impairment in sexual functioning. These differences should be taken into account by physicians when choosing the best therapy for a patient.

Erratum to: A new computerized adaptive test advancing the measurement of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in children: the Kids-CAT

Abstract
Purpose
Assessing health-related quality of life (HRQoL) via Computerized Adaptive Tests (CAT) provides greater measurement precision coupled with a lower test burden compared to conventional tests. Currently, there are no European pediatric HRQoL CATs available. This manuscript aims at describing the development of a HRQoL CAT for children and adolescents: the Kids-CAT, which was developed based on the established KIDSCREEN-27 HRQoL domain structure.
Methods
The Kids-CAT was developed combining classical test theory and item response theory methods and using large archival data of European KIDSCREEN norm studies (n=10,577–19,580). Methods were applied in line with the US PROMIS project. Item bank development included the investigation of unidimensionality, local independence, exploration of Differential Item Functioning (DIF), evaluation of Item Response Curves (IRCs), estimation and norming of item parameters as well as first CAT simulations.
Results
The Kids-CAT was successfully built covering five item banks (with 26–46 items each) to measure physical well-being, psychological well-being, parent relations, social support and peers, and school well-being. The Kids-CAT item banks proved excellent psychometric properties: high content validity, unidimensionality, local independence, low DIF, and model conform IRCs. In CAT simulations, seven items were needed to achieve a measurement precision between .8 and .9 (reliability). It has a child-friendly design, is easy accessible online and gives immediate feedback reports of scores.
Conclusions
The Kids-CAT has the potential to advance pediatric HRQoL measurement by making it less burdensome and enhancing the patient–doctor communication.

The power of Australian small accounting firms’ unethical exposure

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate small business owner/manager’s exposure to unethical behavior, and to examine the influence of unethical exposure on organizational intention to implement ethical policies and practices.

Design/methodology/approach– Using a sample of 209 Australian small accounting firms with a path analysis, this paper adopts a modified ethical decision-making model to test the relationship between exposure and personal attitudes toward unethical behavior, and the relationship between exposure and intentions to implement ethical policies and practices at firm level.

Findings– The results show that increased exposure to unethical behavior triggered stronger personal attitudes with small accounting firm owners/managers tending toward accepting unethical behavior. In contrast, at the firm level, more exposure to unethical behavior creates cautious overtones and motivates owners/managers to take action and implement more ethical policies, with the underlying aim of addressing serious ethical issues.

Research limitations/implications– The study tests the ethical decision-making model but focuses only on three constructs (i.e. exposure, attitude and response). The aim is to examine whether extensive exposure to unethical behavior would change personal attitudes toward accepting such behavior, and whether unethical exposure would trigger firm owner/managers to take action and address the ethical dilemma by establishing some ethical guidelines. Other important variables (such as subjective norm, personal locus of control) embedded in the ethical decision-making model should be included in future research.

Practical implications– The study draws attention to ethical dilemmas encountered by many small accounting professionals and their organizations. It addresses the importance of upholding the ethical standard and avoiding the extensive exposure to unethical behavior. It also emphasizes the needs for small businesses to establish some ethical policies and practices.

Originality/value– The paper is purposely set out to reduce the gap in studying how small accounting firms make decisions in implementing their ethical policies and practices to address the rampant ethical dilemma faced by their employees as a result of many corporate scandals and financial crises of the past decade. The results are particularly valuable for small accounting firm owners/managers. The findings also have educational and policy implications.

An integrated framework for suicide risk prediction

Suicide is a major concern in society. Despite of great attention paid by the community with very substantive medico-legal implications, there has been no satisfying method that can reliably predict the future attempted or completed suicide. We present an integrated machine learning framework to tackle this challenge. Our proposed framework consists of a novel feature extraction scheme, an embedded feature selection process, a set of risk classifiers and finally, a risk calibration procedure. For temporal feature extraction, we cast the patient’s clinical history into a temporal image to which a bank of one-side filters are applied. The responses are then partly transformed into mid-level features and then selected in 1-norm framework under the extreme value theory. A set of probabilistic ordinal risk classifiers are then applied to compute the risk probabilities and further re-rank the features. Finally, the predicted risks are calibrated. Together with our Australian partner, we perform comprehensive study on data collected for the mental health cohort, and the experiments validate that our proposed framework outperforms risk assessment instruments by medical practitioners.

Changing social norms and CEO pay: the role of norms entrepreneurs

This is the third in a series of papers examining different aspects of the CEO compensation debate. This Article will explore attempts by norms entrepreneurs to create or modify social norms. It argues that the relevant social norms are in a state of flux because of the work of norms entrepreneurs, whose efforts might reduce the need for legislative intervention. Several new norms like majority voting for board election, say on pay, smaller multiples for severance packages, and respect for shareholder activists may be emerging due to the work of norms entrepreneurs. Part II analyzes the rich literature on social norms to determine if there are models capable of application to better correlate executive compensation with performance. Despite several problems at the definitional level, it argues that the actions of constituencies relevant to the CEO pay debate might be explained by signaling, esteem, and expressive theories. Further, social norms theories neglecting internalization are deficient; corporate actors undertake self-improvement only when they internalize norms. Part III identifies the work of norms entrepreneurs in creating or changing norms pertaining to CEO compensation, and analyzes the reasons for their success. The examples considered demonstrate the effects of dynamic normative transformations on corporate actors and illustrate the contrast in behavioral changes accompanying resistance and acceptance of new norms. Part IV concludes that norm creation in corporate law is facilitated by the role of groups where membership benefits are dependent on reputation; that directors cannot tradeoff reputation like CEOs, making the deployment of reputational sanctions against them powerful; that behavioral change is more effective when there is norm internalization; and that norms entrepreneurs ought to focus on socializing relevant actors if they aspire to be successful in achieving normative change.

Stakeholders’ perspectives on the role of regulatory reform in integrated reporting

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the preferences of users of non-financial reporting for regulatory or voluntary approaches to integrated reporting (IR). While it is well known that companies prefer voluntary approaches to non-financial reporting, considerably less is known about the preferences of the users of non-financial information. IR is the latest development in attempts over 30 or more years to broaden organisational non-financial reporting and accountability to include the wider social and environmental impacts of business. It promises to provide a more cohesive and efficient approach to corporate reporting by bringing together financial information, operational data and sustainability information to focus only on material issues that impact an organisation’s ability to create value in the short, medium and long term. The study found more support for voluntary approaches to IR as the majority of participants thought that it was too early for regulatory reform. They suggested that IR will become the reporting norm over time if left to market forces as more and more companies adopt the IR practice. Over time IR will be perceived as a legitimate practice, where the actions of integrated reporters are seen as desirable, proper, or appropriate. While there is little appetite for regulatory reform, half of the investors support mandatory IR because, in their experience, voluntary sustainability reporting has not led to more substantive disclosures or increased the quality of reporting. There is also evidence that IR privileges financial value creation over stewardship, inhibiting IR from moving beyond a weak sustainability paradigm.

Modeling intermittent cycling performance in hypoxia using the critical power concept

PURPOSE: This study investigated the efficacy of an intermittent critical power model, termed the "work-balance" (W'BAL) model, during high-intensity exercise in hypoxia. METHODS: Eleven trained, male cyclists (mean ± SD; age 27 ± 6.6 yr, V[Combining Dot Above]O2peak 4.79 ± 0.56 L.min) completed a maximal ramp test and a 3 min "all-out" test to determine critical power (CP) and work performed above CP (W'). On another day an intermittent exercise test to task failure was performed. All procedures were performed in normoxia (NORM) and hypoxia (HYPO; FiO2 ≈ 0.155) in a single-blind, randomized and counter-balanced experimental design. The W'BAL model was used to calculate the minimum W' (W'BALmin) achieved during the intermittent test. W'BALmin in HYPO was also calculated using CP + W' derived in NORM (N+H). RESULTS: In HYPO there was an 18% decrease in V[Combining Dot Above]O2peak (4.79 ± 0.56 vs 3.93 ± 0.47 L.min ; P<0.001) and a 9% decrease in CP (347 ± 45 vs 316 ± 46 W; P<0.001). No significant change for W' occurred (13.4 ± 3.9 vs 13.7 ± 4.9 kJ; P=0.69; NORM vs HYPO). The change in V[Combining Dot Above]O2peak was significantly correlated with the change in CP (r = 0.72; P=0.01). There was no difference between NORM and HYPO for W'BALmin (1.1 ± 0.9 kJ vs 1.2 ± 0.6 kJ). The N+H analysis grossly overestimated W'BALmin (7.8 ± 3.4 kJ) compared with HYPO (P<0.001). CONCLUSION: The W'BAL model produced similar results in hypoxia and normoxia, but only when model parameters were determined under the same environmental conditions as the performance task. Application of the W'BAL model at altitude requires a modification of the model, or that CP and W' are measured at altitude.

Stable feature selection with support vector machines

The support vector machine (SVM) is a popular method for classification, well known for finding the maximum-margin hyperplane. Combining SVM with l1-norm penalty further enables it to simultaneously perform feature selection and margin maximization within a single framework. However, l1-norm SVM shows instability in selecting features in presence of correlated features. We propose a new method to increase the stability of l1-norm SVM by encouraging similarities between feature weights based on feature correlations, which is captured via a feature covariance matrix. Our proposed method can capture both positive and negative correlations between features. We formulate the model as a convex optimization problem and propose a solution based on alternating minimization. Using both synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that our model achieves better stability and classification accuracy compared to several state-of-the-art regularized classification methods.

Spectral unmixing based on nonnegative matrix factorization with local smoothness constraint

Spectral unmixing (SU) is an emerging problem in the remote sensing image processing. Since both the endmember signatures and their abundances have nonnegative values, it is a natural choice to employ the attractive nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) methods to solve this problem. Motivated by that the abundances are sparse, the NMF with local smoothness constraint (NMF-LSC) is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, the smoothness constraint is utilized to impose the sparseness, instead of the traditional L1-norm which is restricted by the underlying column-sum-to-one requirement of the to the abundance matrix. Simulations show the advantages of our algorithm over the compared methods.

Functional observer design with application to pre-compensated multi-variable systems

Partial state estimation of dynamical systems provides significant advantages in practical applications. Likewise, pre-compensator design for multi variable systems invokes considerable increase in the order of the original system. Hence, applying functional observer to pre-compensated systems can result in lower computational costs and more practicability in some applications such as fault diagnosis and output feedback control of these systems. In this note, functional observer design is investigated for pre-compensated systems. A lower order pre-compensator is designed based on a H2 norm optimization that is designed as the solution of a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Next, a minimum order functional observer is designed for the pre-compensated system. An LTI model of an irreversible chemical reactor is used to demonstrate our design algorithm, and to highlight the benefits of the proposed schemes.

A Light, investimento estrangeiro no Brasil: uma luz sobre o ciclo privado-público-privado em 80 anos pela análise de taxa de retorno

A Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Company ("Light"), formada por empreendedores canadenses em 1899, operou por 80 anos praticamente toda a infraestrutura (bondes, luz, telefones, gás) do eixo Rio-São Paulo. A empresa passou por vários ciclos políticos, desde sua fundação até sua estatização em 1979. Durante este período de 80 anos, a infra-estrutura nacional, inicialmente privada, foi gradativamente passando para as mãos do Estado. O setor voltaria a ser privado a partir dos anos 90, configurando o ciclo privado-público-privado, similar ao ocorrido nos países mais desenvolvidos. A Light, símbolo maior do capital estrangeiro até os anos 50, foi inicialmente bem recebida no país, posto que seu desenvolvimento era simbiótico, causa e conseqüência, ao desenvolvimento industrial. Dos anos 20 em diante, crescem os debates econômicos ou ideológicos quanto ao papel do capital privado estrangeiro no desenvolvimento nacional, vis-a-vis a opção do setor público como ator principal. Sempre permaneceu sob névoa quais teriam sido os lucros da Light no Brasil, e se esses seriam excessivos, acima do razoável. Outra questão recorrente se refere até que ponto os congelamentos de tarifas teriam contribuido para a crise de oferta de infra-estrutura. Através de um trabalho de pesquisa em fontes primárias, esta dissertação procura reconstituir a história da Light, sob um foco de Taxa de Retorno sob o capital investido. Foi reconstruída a história financeira da Light no Brasil, a partir da qual calculou-se, para vários períodos e para os seus 80 anos de vida, os retornos obtidos pelos acionistas da empresa. A partir dos resultados obtidos, e utilizando-se de benchmarks comparativos, foi possível mostrar que: i) ao contrário da crença vigente à época, o retorno obtido pelo maior investidor estrangeiro no setor de infra-estrutura do Brasil do Séc. XX, se mostrou bem abaixo do mínimo aceitável, e ii) o represamento de tarifas, por várias décadas, foi de fato determinante para o subdesenvolvimento do setor de infra-estrutura no Brasil.