Great Loss Of Information Research Articles

Revisiting international house price convergence using house price level data

The literature on house price convergence largely relies on house price indices, based in an arbitrary year, rather than on actual price levels. This is essentially due to the scarcity of comparable house price level data. However, this severely constrains the analysis. In particular, it often forces to discard a large part of the data sample, which leads to a great loss of information and hampers analysis on sub-periods. In this paper, we combine the price level estimates produced by Bricongne et al. (2019) with long OECD house price series to analyse long-run house price convergence across 18 OECD countries. Applying the Phillips and Sul (2007) procedure, we find convergence in OECD nominal house prices, but two separate convergence clubs in real house prices. We find some convergence in euro area real house prices, but no evidence of strengthening after the introduction of the euro. β-convergence regressions (linking changes in house prices to their initial levels) point to conditional convergence, related to the evolution of gaps in real GDP per capita, long-term interest rates and population growth across countries.

Postcolonial Trace in the Translation of Bumi Manusia

Abstract. Bumi Manusia as a postcolonial novel became a vehicle for Toer to articulate his national identity as Indonesian during the Dutch colonialism. Its translation into This Earth of Mankind posts two questions of whether or not power relations are brought in the translation and how the translator represents Indonesian culture in English. In order to answer the two, postcolonial translation approach was employed. This research is qualitative for it aims at analyzing the text. Seven data were selected based on two indicators representing the most relation between the colonized and colonizer or postcoloniality of the Dutch East Indies and were analyzed employing Baker’s translation strategies. The findings reveal that there are unequal relations between the source language (Indonesian) and the target language (English). In This Earth of Mankind, the translator does not show Indonesian cultural representation. There are great loss of information, omission, biased information, and great loss of impactful meaning of the source language in the target language that create another colonial domain and leave colonial trace in the target language.Keywords: Postcolonial Translation, Bumi Manusia, Postcolonialism, Colonialism, Power Relations

Image quality improvement through turbid media by using graphene nanoplates

Abstract Imaging through turbid media leads to a great loss of information decreasing the image quality. This loss of quality is due to the light interaction with the medium, since part of the light will pass through it, but another part will be scattered generating a blurred image pattern. In this work we try to decrease this problem by adding an absorbent, eliminating part of the scattered radiation responsible for the turbidity. With this aim, we use graphene nanoplates as an absorbent and we also compare the experimental results with black carbon powder.

Distribution-Sensitive Information Retention for Accurate Binary Neural Network

Model binarization is an effective method of compressing neural networks and accelerating their inference process, which enables state-of-the-art models to run on resource-limited devices. Recently, advanced binarization methods have been greatly improved by minimizing the quantization error directly in the forward process. However, a significant performance gap still exists between the 1-bit model and the 32-bit one. The empirical study shows that binarization causes a great loss of information in the forward and backward propagation which harms the performance of binary neural networks (BNNs). We present a novel distribution-sensitive information retention network (DIR-Net) that retains the information in the forward and backward propagation by improving internal propagation and introducing external representations. The DIR-Net mainly relies on three technical contributions: (1) Information Maximized Binarization (IMB): minimizing the information loss and the binarization error of weights/activations simultaneously by weight balance and standardization; (2) Distribution-sensitive Two-stage Estimator (DTE): retaining the information of gradients by distribution-sensitive soft approximation by jointly considering the updating capability and accurate gradient; (3) Representation-align Binarization-aware Distillation (RBD): retaining the representation information by distilling the representations between full-precision and binarized networks. The DIR-Net investigates both forward and backward processes of BNNs from the unified information perspective, thereby providing new insight into the mechanism of network binarization. The three techniques in our DIR-Net are versatile and effective and can be applied in various structures to improve BNNs. Comprehensive experiments on the image classification and objective detection tasks show that our DIR-Net consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art binarization approaches under mainstream and compact architectures, such as ResNet, VGG, EfficientNet, DARTS, and MobileNet. Additionally, we conduct our DIR-Net on real-world resource-limited devices which achieves \(11.1\times \) storage saving and \(5.4\times \) speedup.

Univariate or multivariate approaches for histopathological biomarkers in the context of environmental quality assessments?

Although the simplification of multivariate histopathological data into univariate indices can be useful for the assessment of environmental quality, this implies a great loss of information. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness, in the context of environmental quality assessment, of an approach that integrates individual histopathological responses in a discriminated manner with the results of contaminants by means of multivariate analyses. This analysis was compared to the diagnosis of environmental quality provided by the use of the univariate Bernet histopathological index. Contaminant loads (sediments and fish) and the liver histopathology of Cathorops spixii were integrated through multivariate analysis. Integrated individual histopathological responses allowed classifying environmental quality from more to less impacted sites, while the univariate index showed some inconsistencies with chemical loads and allowed identifying only the most impacted site.

The Sex Therapists' Approach to the Evaluation and Management of Low Sex Drive in Men

Desire represents the most complex and fascinating among sexual response phases. It is often defined as "the subjective psychological status for initiating and maintaining human sexual behavior, triggered by internal (erotic fantasies, emotions) and/or external (attraction, pornography) stimuli." 1 Mark K Herbenick D Fortenberry D et al. The object of sexual desire: Examining the “what” in “what do you desire?. J Sex Med. 2014; 11: 2709-2719 Google Scholar In other words, desire refers to feelings and thoughts that motivate individuals to approach or be receptive to sexual stimulation. 2 Spector IP Carey MP Steinberg L. The sexual desire inventory: development, factor structure, and evidence of reliability. J Sex Marital Ther. 1996; 22: 175-190 Google Scholar Over time, researchers and clinicians seemed to agree that sexual desire is a complex construct, moving away from simplistic unidimensional definitions toward multidimensional models. For example, Levine 3 Levine SB. Reexploring the concept of sexual desire. J Sex Marital Ther. 2002; 28: 39-51 Google Scholar described desire under a biopsychosocial model (BPS) that highlights 3 components: drive (biological substratum such as anatomy and neuroendocrine system physiology), motivation (psychological components such as mental states, relationships, and social influences), and wish (cultural ideals, values, and scripts concerning sexual expression). This subdivision could be very useful in emphasizing the central role of the biological, psychological, and sociocultural components that are present in every sexual expression. On the one hand, it is important to recognize the specific role of these 3 components, for example, by exploring them in detail during the assessment phase in the evaluation of a desire problem. But on the other hand, focusing only on one component in spite of the others would imply a great loss of information, a theoretical and practical reductionism which does not help clinicians and researchers to understand desire function and related problems or to find effective treatments. In our perspective, it is fundamental to always keep an eye on the overall experience of sexual desire as reported by individuals and couples in order to be able to navigate desire.

Preservation of Privacy of Big Data Using Efficient Anonymization Technique

Big data needs to be retained private because of the increase in the amount of data. Data is generated from social networks, organizations and various other ways, which is known as big data. Big data requires large storage as well as high computational power. At every stage, the data needs to be protected. Privacy preservation plays an important role in keeping sensitive information protected and private from any attack. Data anonymization is one of the techniques to anonymize data to keep it private and protected, which includes suppression, generalization, and bucketization. It keeps personal and private data anonymous from being known by others. But when it is implemented on big data, these techniques cause a great loss of information and also fail in defense of the privacy of big data. Moreover, for the scenario of big data, the anonymization should not only focus on hiding but also on other aspects. This paper aims to provide a technique that uses slicing, suppression, and functional encryption together to achieve better privacy of big data with data anonymization.

Preservation of Privacy of Big Data Using Efficient Anonymization Technique

Big data needs to be kept private because of the increase in the amount of data. Data is generated from social networks, organizations and various other ways, which is known as big data. Big data requires large storage as well as high computational power. At every stage, the data needs to be protected. Privacy preservation plays an important role in keeping sensitive information protected and private from any attack. Data anonymization is one of the techniques to anonymize data to keep it private and protected, which includes suppression, generalization, and bucketization. It keeps personal and private data anonymous from being known by others. But when it is implemented on big data, these techniques cause a great loss of information and also fail in defense of the privacy of big data. Moreover, for the scenario of big data, the anonymization should not only focus on hiding but also on other aspects. This paper aims to provide a technique that uses slicing, suppression, and functional encryption together to achieve better privacy of big data with data anonymization.

Visualizing the Complexity of the Athlete-Monitoring Cycle Through Principal-Component Analysis.

To discuss the use of principal-component analysis (PCA) as a dimension-reduction and visualization tool to assist in decision making and communication when analyzing complex multivariate data sets associated with the training of athletes. Using PCA, it is possible to transform a data matrix into a set of orthogonal composite variables called principal components (PCs), with each PC being a linear weighted combination of the observed variables and with all PCs uncorrelated to each other. The benefit of transforming the data using PCA is that the first few PCs generally capture the majority of the information (ie,variance) contained in the observed data, with the first PC accounting for the highest amount of variance and each subsequent PC capturing less of the total information. Consequently, through PCA, it is possible to visualize complex data sets containing multiple variables on simple 2D scatterplots without any great loss of information, thereby making it much easier to convey complex information to coaches. In the future, athlete-monitoring companies should integrate PCA into their client packages to better support practitioners trying to overcome the challenges associated with multivariate data analysis and interpretation. In the interim, the authors present here an overview of PCA and associated R code to assist practitioners working in the field to integrate PCA into their athlete-monitoring process.

Monitoring the quality of cardiac surgery based on three or more surgical outcomes using a new variable life-adjusted display.

The traditional variable life-adjusted display (VLAD) is a graphical display of the difference between expected and actual cumulative deaths. The VLAD assumes binary outcomes: death within 30 days of an operation or survival beyond 30 days. Full recovery and bedridden for life, for example, are considered the same outcome. This binary classification results in a great loss of information. Although there are many grades of survival, the binary outcomes are commonly used to classify surgical outcomes. Consequently, quality monitoring procedures are developed based on binary outcomes. With a more refined set of outcomes, the sensitivities of these procedures can be expected to improve. A likelihood ratio method is used to define a penalty-reward scoring system based on three or more surgical outcomes for the new VLAD. The likelihood ratio statistic W is based on testing the odds ratio of cumulative probabilities of recovery R. Two methods of implementing the new VLAD are proposed. We accumulate the statistic W-W¯R to estimate the performance of a surgeon where W¯R is the average of the W's of a historical data set. The accumulated sum will be zero based on the historical data set. This ensures that if a new VLAD is plotted for a future surgeon of performance similar to this average performance, the plot will exhibit a horizontal trend. For illustration of the new VLAD, we consider 3-outcome surgical results: death within 30 days, partial and full recoveries. In our first illustration, we show the effect of partial recoveries on surgical results of a surgeon. In our second and third illustrations, the surgical results of two surgeons are compared using both the traditional VLAD based on binary-outcome data and the new VLAD based on 3-outcome data. A reversal in relative performance of surgeons is observed when the new VLAD is used. In our final illustration, we display the surgical results of four surgeons using the new VLAD based completely on 3-outcome data. Full recovery and bedridden for life are two completely different outcomes. There is a great loss of information when different grades of 'successful' operations are naively classified as survival. When surgical outcomes are classified more accurately into more than two categories, the resulting new VLAD will reveal more accurately and fairly the surgical results.

Semantic Pooling for Complex Event Analysis in Untrimmed Videos.

Pooling plays an important role in generating a discriminative video representation. In this paper, we propose a new semantic pooling approach for challenging event analysis tasks (e.g., event detection, recognition, and recounting) in long untrimmed Internet videos, especially when only a few shots/segments are relevant to the event of interest while many other shots are irrelevant or even misleading. The commonly adopted pooling strategies aggregate the shots indifferently in one way or another, resulting in a great loss of information. Instead, in this work we first define a novel notion of semantic saliency that assesses the relevance of each shot with the event of interest. We then prioritize the shots according to their saliency scores since shots that are semantically more salient are expected to contribute more to the final event analysis. Next, we propose a new isotonic regularizer that is able to exploit the constructed semantic ordering information. The resulting nearly-isotonic support vector machine classifier exhibits higher discriminative power in event analysis tasks. Computationally, we develop an efficient implementation using the proximal gradient algorithm, and we prove new and closed-form proximal steps. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world video datasets and achieve promising improvements.

Differential Privacy for Social Science Inference

Social scientists often want to analyze data that contains sensitive personal information that must remain private. However, common techniques for data sharing that attempt to preserve privacy either bring great privacy risks or great loss of information. A long literature has shown that anonymization techniques for data releases are generally open to reidentification attacks. Aggregated information can reduce but not prevent this risk, while also reducing the utility of the data to researchers. Even publishing statistical estimates without releasing the data cannot guarantee that no sensitive personal information has been leaked. Differential Privacy, deriving from roots in cryptography, is one formal, mathematical conception of privacy preservation. It brings provable guarantees that any reported result does not reveal information about any one single individual. In this paper we detail the construction of a secure curator interface, by which researchers can have access to privatized statistical results from their queries without gaining any access to the underlying raw data. We introduce differential privacy and the construction of differentially private summary statistics. We then present new algorithms for releasing differentially private estimates of causal effects and the generation of differentially private covariance matrices from which any least squares regression may be estimated. We demonstrate the application of these methods through our curator interface.

Study on Design Processes of Urban Residence Based on Whole Life Cycle Concept

As we enter 21st century, the environmental problem is increasingly prominent. Chinese urban residence construction stands in the transition period of sustainable development. How to realize low energy consumption, long service life and high quality of residence becomes a subject to be solved in Chinese residence construction in new era. For China's traditional residential design and construction method formed as a linear process and single data feedback as well as great loss of information in design, the residential quality and properties have not only been unimproved, but have also led to relatively more time and costs spent. This paper introduces a design concept of whole life cycle and points out the traditional design concept and processes of the residence construction must be charged in order to realize its sustainable development. According to the design concept of the whole life cycle, this paper puts forward the residence design principle based on whole life cycle and institutes the residence design processes based on whole life cycle.

Taxonomic resolution needed to describe invertebrate assemblages and to detect harvesting effects on coral reef ecosystems

Due to the cost and time required for species identification, the taxonomic sufficiency approach has been developed in order to detect community response to a disturbance, using high taxonomic level without great loss of information. This concept has been widely applied to pollution monitoring studies but rarely to other forms of perturbations such as anthropogenic exploitation of marine resources. We applied this method both to soft-bottom (seagrasses) and hard-bottom (coralline) tropical invertebrate communities in New Caledonia, South Pacific. The objective was to test whether intermediate or high taxonomic levels (genus, family, class or phylum instead of species) are good descriptors of community patterns and changes in assemblages related to harvesting, by comparing harvested to non-harvested areas for the 2 habitats. We pooled species data into coarser taxonomic categories (from genus to phylum) and showed that matrices at different taxonomic resolutions were highly correlated, particularly for genus and family level for both habitats. Differences between harvested and non-harvested locations appeared to be clearly habitat-dependent; for soft habitats, genus and family resolution allowed the detection of changes between exploited and protected assemblages, while for hard habitats, the separation between harvested and non-harvested areas was less clear at high taxonomic level and required species-level identifications. These results suggest that the taxonomic sufficiency approach could be carefully applied to poorly known environments. Family level is a good descriptor of community composition for tropical reef invertebrates. Detecting changes due to anthropogenic exploitation requires different taxonomic resolutions depending on the considered habitat.

Theory of elastoplastic media with mesostructure

It is known for a long time that under elastoplastic deformation, solid matter develops certain internal structures that can be observed with instruments which make it possible to look into the interior of the solids. Such a behavior is particularly pronounced in crystalline materials in which the plastic deformation occurs by sliding over crystallographic glide planes. Internal structure or microstructure may have a different appearance on several scale levels. Hence, it is also common to speak of multilevel structures. These structures and their influence on the material behavior is the subject of this investigation. It is argued that a continuum theory of elastoplasticity with dislocations is possible only on the microscopic scale where dislocations of opposite sign are considered. The macroscopic dislocation theory takes into account only the excess dislocations of one sign per unit macro-volume. It results in a great loss of information. This means that the macroscopic dislocation theory must be classified as a mean field theory as in statistical physics. The theory can be extended by application of correlation functions. Two examples for the development of a three level structure will be discussed.

Application of continuum theory and multi-grid methods to motion evaluation from 3D echocardiography

As the motion of the heart is a 3D phenomenon, its evaluation from sequences of 2D images causes a great loss of information on the motion itself. Our aim is therefore to process real 3D echocardiographic images and to carry out an automatic way of evaluating the movements of the cardiac structures. To estimate the optical flow, a mathematical model based on the continuum theory is used; echocardiographic images can indeed be considered a function of a conserved quantity (the acoustic impedance). Since we need to calculate the velocity vector for every point in the image and every image is built with more than 2 million voxels (128x128x128), we implement a multigrid relaxation method to accelerate the computation of an approximate solution otherwise too slow with a simple iterative solver. The experiments on simulated velocity fields have demonstrated an effective speed-up in the evaluation of motion, and the calculation on real echo images has given a realistic estimation of the 3D dynamics of the heart.

Facies characterization of mid-mesozoic deep-water sediments by quantitative analysis of siliceous microfaunas

Quantitative approaches to the analysis of Late Mesozoic radiolarian faunas are rare and often poorly defined. In order to overcome preservational and taxonomic biases, general information indices were tested for their paleoecologic potential. 300 samples from different Tethyan localities and Antarctica were used for this study. The general information indices defined here are: absolute radiolarian abundance, nassellarian/spumellarian ratio, percentage of sponge spicules, morphological diversity and degree of recrystallization and fragmentation. Indices like radiolarian, nassellarian and sponge spicule abundance are suitable for a simple characterization of samples and sections even in poorly preserved material. The spicule abundance in basinal sediments indicates turbiditic influences and provides a proxy for shelf distance and water depth. The relative nassellarian content is useful for a bathymetrical interpretation in Tethyan sediments. Although there is a great loss of information in using only general information indices, the method has the advantage of being appropriate for sedimentologists unfamilar with radiolarian taxonomy, thus providing a fast and powerful tool for paleoecological analysis, which is applicable to different geological periods.

Testing for Linkage Between a Marker Locus and a Major Gene Locus in Half-Sib Families

Large half-sib families are commonly generated in animal breeding by mating one male to many females. One such situation is where sires must be progeny tested to determine their genotype at a major gene locus. The families of those sires found to be heterozygous for the major gene provide a good pedigree structure for a linkage analysis between the gene and genetic markers. This is the case even when the dams have not been individually identified for the progeny test, and so the only genotype information known about them is that they are noncarriers of the major gene (marker genotype is unknown). This article examines the methods and general application of linkage analysis between a marker locus and a major gene locus for large half-sib families. The methods presented, which use information from all the progeny, are compared with those using only the progeny that can be assigned as being recombinant or nonrecombinant (given the sire's phase). The use of all the progeny has the most advantage for diallelic systems with unequal gene frequencies of the marker alleles in the dam population. It is also shown that in many cases the lack of dam marker information does not result in a great loss of information.

Consistent estimators of the variance-covariance matrix of the gmanova model with missing data

A common problem in multivariate general linear models is partially missing response data. The simplest method of analysis in the presence of missing data has been to delete all observations on any individual with any missing data(listwise deletion) and utilize a traditional complete data approach. However: this can result in a great loss of information: and perhaps inconsistencies in the estimation of the variance-covariance matrix. In the generalized multivariate analysis of variance(GMANOVA) model with missing data: Kleinbaum(1973) proposed an estimated generalized least squares approach. In order to apply this: however: a consistent estimate of the variance-covariance matrix is needed. Kleinbaum proposed an estimator which is unbiased and consistent: but it does not take advantage of the fact that the underlying model is GMANOVA and not MANOVA. Using the fact that the underlying model is GMANOVA we have constructed four other con¬sistent estimators. A Monte Carlo simulation experiment is conducted tto further examine how well these estimators compare to the estimator proposed by Kleinbaum.

Risk assessment for herbaceous biomass crops: The case of perennial grasses

The production of two perennial grasses, tall fescue and switchgrass, for biomass energy were included as alternative activities in a single-index model (SIM) of portfolio selection for an agricultural enterprise. Results indicate that, from the risk efficiency point of view, switchgrass is a good alternative and is included in a risk efficient farm enterprise, while tall fescue, due to its low expected return, is not included. The correlation of returns of the grass crops with those of the conventional activities was low or negative, suggesting that the energy crops may be good candidates for diversification. However, the high correlation between the returns on the two grass crops indicates that only one of them would be included in a risk efficient farm enterprise. The SIM regression estimates seemed sufficient to determine the risk characteristics of the new energy crops. The SIM quadratic-programming results added little additional information; thus, this stage of the analysis can be obviated without great loss of information.