Adaptive Learning Expert System for Diagnosis and Management of Viral Hepatitis

Viral hepatitis is the regularly found health problem throughout the world among other easily transmitted diseases, such as tuberculosis, human immune virus, malaria and so on. Among all hepatitis viruses, the uppermost numbers of deaths are result from the long-lasting hepatitis C infection or long-lasting hepatitis B. In order to develop this system, the knowledge is acquired using both structured and semi-structured interviews from internists of St.Paul Hospital. Once the knowledge is acquired, it is modeled and represented using rule based reasoning techniques. Both forward and backward chaining is used to infer the rules and provide appropriate advices in the developed expert system. For the purpose of developing the prototype expert system SWI-prolog editor also used. The proposed system has the ability to adapt with dynamic knowledge by generalizing rules and discover new rules through learning the newly arrived knowledge from domain experts adaptively without any help from the knowledge engineer. Keywords: Expert System, Diagnosis and Management of Viral Hepatitis, Adaptive Learning, Discovery and Generalization MechanismComment: 14 page

Fiscal rules and discretion under persistent shocks

This paper studies the optimal level of discretion in policymaking. We consider a fiscal policy model where the government has time-inconsistent preferences with a present-bias towards public spending. The government chooses a fiscal rule to trade off its desire to commit to not overspend against its desire to have flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value of spending. We analyze the optimal fiscal rule when the shocks are persistent. Unlike under i.i.d: shocks, we show that the ex-ante optimal rule is not sequentially optimal, as it provides dynamic incentives. The ex-ante optimal rule exhibits history dependence, with high shocks leading to an erosion of future fiscal discipline compared to low shocks, which lead to the reinstatement of discipline. The implied policy distortions oscillate over time given a sequence of high shocks, and can force the government to accumulate maximal debt and become immiserated in the long run

Income and Democracy

We revisit one of the central empirical findings of the political economy literature that higher income per capita causes democracy. Existing studies establish a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy, but do not typically control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables. We show that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the statistical association between income per capita and various measures of democracy. We also present instrumental-variables using two different strategies. These estimates also show no causal effect of income on democracy. Furthermore, we reconcile the positive cross-country correlation between income and democracy with the absence of a causal effect of income on democracy by showing that the long-run evolution of income and democracy is related to historical factors. Consistent with this, the positive correlation between income and democracy disappears, even without fixed effects, when we control for the historical determinants of economic and political development in a sample of former European colonies.

Reevaluating the Modernization Hypothesis

This paper revisits and critically reevaluates the widely-accepted modernization hypothesis which claims that per capita income causes the creation and the consolidation of democracy. We argue that existing studies find support for this hypothesis because they fail to control for the presence of omitted variables. There are many underlying historical factors that affect both the level of income per capita and the likelihood of democracy in a country, and failing to control for these factors may introduce a spurious relationship between income and democracy. We show that controlling for these historical factors by including fixed country effects removes the correlation between income and democracy, as well as the correlation between income and the likelihood of transitions to and from democratic regimes. We argue that this evidence is consistent with another well-established approach in political science, which emphasizes how events during critical historical junctures can lead to divergent political-economic development paths, some leading to prosperity and democracy, others to relative poverty and non-democracy. We present evidence in favor of this interpretation by documenting that the fixed effects we estimate in the post-war sample are strongly associated with historical variables that have previously been used to explain diverging development paths within the former colonial world.

From Education to Democracy?

The conventional wisdom views high levels of education as a prerequisite for democracy. This paper shows that existing evidence for this view is based on cross-sectional correlations, which disappear once we look at within-country variation. In other words, there is no evidence that countries that increase their education are more likely to become democratic.

Análise de fatores de risco para doença arterial coronariana em pacientes atendidos no CSI fazenda do Rio Tavares.

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Ciências da Saúde, Departamento de Saúde Pública, Curso de Medicina, Florianópolis, 200

Conversão de capoeira alta da Amazônia em povoamento de produção madeireira: o método do "recru" e espécies promissoras.

bitstream/item/30793/1/CPATU-BP25.pd

Caracterização de um pomar caseiro no município de Mazagão, AP.

Caracterizar um pomar caseiro quanto à composição florística, geração de renda e auto abastecimento, em Mazagão, Estado do Amapá