Crowding Out Voluntary Contributions to Public Goods

We test the null hypothesis that involuntary transfers for the provision of a public good will completely crowd out voluntary transfers against the warm-glow hypothesis that crowding-out will be incomplete because individuals care about giving. Our design differs from the related design used by Andreoni in considering two levels of the involuntary transfer and a wider range of contribution possibilities, and in mixing groups every period instead of every four periods. We analyse the data with careful attention to boundary effects. We retain the null hypothesis of complete crowding-out in two of three pairwise comparisions, but reject it in favour of incomplete crowding-out in the comparison most closely akin to Andreoni’s design. Thus we confirm the existence of incomplete crowding-out in some environments, but suggest that the warm-glow hypothesis is inadequate in explaining it.

Exploratory Study of the Download Speed of Leading University Hospitality and Tourism Department Websites Worldwide

Increased broadband penetration (BP) rates around the world have encouraged web designers to include more web content and additional functions on their web sites, thereby enhancing the richness and playfulness of the information. However, it is often very difficult for web surfers who are still using narrowband connections to access such web sites. Many university web sites target international audiences; therefore their download performance should be considered, as it may directly influence the user experience. This exploratory study examined 331 university hospitality and tourism department web sites in 37 countries. The empirical results showed that entry web pages of universities in Asia, with a medium BP rate (mid-BP), have the slowest download speeds, and those in Australia and New Zealand perform the best. The adoption rate of the Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) in Asia is relatively lower than that of other regions

Heterogeneity and the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods

We investigate the effects of heterogeneity, incomplete information and communication on aggregate contributions to a public good using the voluntary contribution mechanism in a nonlinear laboratory environment. One-dimensional heterogeneity (heterogeneity in income or preferences) and two-dimensional heterogeneity (heterogeneity in income and preferences) both increase voluntary contributions. The effect is greatest when information is incomplete in the sense that subjects do not know each other’s payoffs. Incomplete information also reduces contributions in the homogeneous case. Communication reverses the relative importance of oneand two-dimensional heterogeneity in promoting cooperation.

Joint Blind Motion Deblurring and Depth Estimation of Light Field

Removing camera motion blur from a single light field is a challenging task since it is highly ill-posed inverse problem. The problem becomes even worse when blur kernel varies spatially due to scene depth variation and high-order camera motion. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to estimate all blur model variables jointly, including latent sub-aperture image, camera motion, and scene depth from the blurred 4D light field. Exploiting multi-view nature of a light field relieves the inverse property of the optimization by utilizing strong depth cues and multi-view blur observation. The proposed joint estimation achieves high quality light field deblurring and depth estimation simultaneously under arbitrary 6-DOF camera motion and unconstrained scene depth. Intensive experiment on real and synthetic blurred light field confirms that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art light field deblurring and depth estimation methods

Optimized Longitudinal Monitoring of Stem Cell Grafts in Mouse Brain Using a Novel Bioluminescent/Near Infrared Fluorescent Fusion Reporter

Biodistribution and fate of transplanted stem cells via longitudinal monitoring has been successfully achieved in the last decade using optical imaging

Epidemiology, prehospital care and outcomes of patients arriving by ambulance with dyspnoea: An observational study

Background: This study aimed to determine epidemiology and outcome for patients presenting to emergency departments (ED) with shortness of breath who were transported by ambulance. Methods: This was a planned sub-study of a prospective, interrupted time series cohort study conducted at three time points in 2014 and which included consecutive adult patients presenting to the ED with dyspnoea as a main symptom. For this sub-study, additional inclusion criteria were presentation to an ED in Australia or New Zealand and transport by ambulance. The primary outcomes of interest are the epidemiology and outcome of these patients. Analysis was by descriptive statistics and comparisons of proportions. Results: One thousand seven patients met inclusion criteria. Median age was 74 years (IQR 61-68) and 46.1 % were male. There was a high rate of co-morbidity and chronic medication use. The most common ED diagnoses were lower respiratory tract infection (including pneumonia, 22.7 %), cardiac failure (20.5%) and exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (19.7 %). ED disposition was hospital admission (including ICU) for 76.4 %, ICU admission for 5.6 % and death in ED in 0.9 %. Overall in-hospital mortality among admitted patients was 6.5 %. Discussion: Patients transported by ambulance with shortness of breath make up a significant proportion of ambulance caseload and have high comorbidity and high hospital admission rate. In this study, >60 % were accounted for by patients with heart failure, lower respiratory tract infection or COPD, but there were a wide range of diagnoses. This has implications for service planning, models of care and paramedic training. Conclusion: This study shows that patients transported to hospital by ambulance with shortness of breath are a complex and seriously ill group with a broad range of diagnoses. Understanding the characteristics of these patients, the range of diagnoses and their outcome can help inform training and planning of services

Perplexity: Evaluating Transcript Abundance Estimation in the Absence of Ground Truth

There has been rapid development of probabilistic models and inference methods for transcript abundance estimation from RNA-seq data. These models aim to accurately estimate transcript-level abundances, to account for different biases in the measurement process, and even to assess uncertainty in resulting estimates that can be propagated to subsequent analyses. The assumed accuracy of the estimates inferred by such methods underpin gene expression based analysis routinely carried out in the lab. Although hyperparameter selection is known to affect the distributions of inferred abundances (e.g. producing smooth versus sparse estimates), strategies for performing model selection in experimental data have been addressed informally at best. Thus, we derive perplexity for evaluating abundance estimates on fragment sets directly. We adapt perplexity from the analogous metric used to evaluate language and topic models and extend the metric to carefully account for corner cases unique to RNA-seq. In experimental data, estimates with the best perplexity also best correlate with qPCR measurements. In simulated data, perplexity is well behaved and concordant with genome-wide measurements against ground truth and differential expression analysis. To our knowledge, our study is the first to make possible model selection for transcript abundance estimation on experimental data in the absence of ground truth

Trends in Educational Mobility: How Does China Compare to Europe and the United States?

Despite impressive rise in school enrollment rates over the past few decades, there are concerns about growing inequality of educa- tional opportunity in China. In this paper, we examine the level and trend of educational mobility in China, and compare them to those of Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. Educational mo- bility is defined as the association between parents’ and children’s educational attainment. We show that China’s economic boom has been accompanied by a large decline in relative educational mobility chances, as measured by odds ratios. To elaborate, relative rates of educational mobility in China were, by international standards, quite high for those who grew up under state socialism. For the most recent cohorts, however, educational mobility rates have dropped to a level that is comparable to those of European countries, though it is still higher than the US level.Our research is supported by an ESRC research grant, award number ES/L015927/1