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This paper reviews several dimensions in terms of which electronic/Internet and paper voting can be compared (vote secrecy, verifiability, ballot box integrity, transparency and trust base). We conclude that, for many vulnerabilities of Internet voting systems, there exist related weakness in paper systems as well. The main reason why paper-based elections are perceived as more secure is historical experience. We argue that recent criticisms of Internet voting have unfairly concentrated on the associated risks and neglected the benefits. Remote electronic voting lowers the cost of election participation and provides the most secure means for absentee voting. The latter is something that is urgently required in the contemporary, increasingly mobile world. Hence, we need to give Internet voting a chance, even if it means risking unknown threats and learning by trial and error.

In education field, the importance of education system is the part of the most significant aspect of our social orders at all levels. Thus, a student's performance can only be tested by providing them with an examination or assessment. Examinations are very crucial as it is an activity which is performed to evaluate the performances of students. Besides students performances, the quality of the examination questions prepared would also determine the quality of the students but the most important yet challenging task is the creation of the examination questions paper which is known to be very tedious, time consuming and expensive therefore it should be prepared with full focus, right formatting and with the right selection of questions.

We discuss the recent paper by A. Dar\'os and L.K. Arruda (On the instability of elliptic traveling wave solutions of the modified Camassa-Holm equation, J. Diff. Equat., 266 (2019), 1946-1968). Our intention is to correct some imperfections left by the authors and present the orbital stability of periodic snoidal waves in the energy space., Comment: 10 pages and 2 figures

We suggest corrections to the paper by Kanabar and Simmons and provide analyses for deriving the internal rate of return arising from a UK state pension deferral decision and for an actuarially fair deferral scheme.

The purpose of this note is to discuss how paper folding can be used to find the exact trigonometric ratios of the following four angles: 22.5°, 67.5°, 27°, and 63°.

What can be learned from data about human survival at extreme age? In this rejoinder we give our views on some of the issues raised in the discussion of our paper Rootzen and Zholud (Extremes 20(4), 713–728, 2017).

This paper deals with the functionality of membrane computing which is a vivid research area in computer science. Membrane Computing associates with the generation of new computational logics and m...

In a recent paper referred to in the title, the author used the concept of quasi self-adjointness to obtain conservation laws for a system of the ( 2 + 1 ) -dimensional Bogoyavlensky–Konopelchenko equation. Apart from the adjoint system of equations, all the results on the quasi self-adjointness and the subsequent conservation laws obtained are inaccurate. In this comment, we clarify these inaccuracies and also generate conservation laws for a potential form of the underlying equation through Noether theorem.

We give a comprehensive account of Chern's Theorem that S^6 admits no omega-compatible almost complex structures. No claim to originality is being made, as the paper is mostly an expanded version of material already in the literature. This article extends the talks that both authors gave in Marburg during the conference "(Non)existence of complex structures on S^6" in April 2017., Misprints corrected

In this short review note we show that the new proof of theorem 1.1 given by Zheng Jie Sun and Ling Zhu in the paper Simple proofs of the Cusa-Huygens-type and Becker-Stark-type inequalities is logically incorrect and present another simple proof of the same.

This American College of Physicians position paper, initiated and written by its Health and Public Policy Committee and approved by the Board of Regents on 16 February 2016, reports policy recommendations from the American College of Physicians to address the escalating costs of prescription drugs in the United States. Prescription drugs play an important part in treating and preventing disease. However, the United States often pays more for some prescription drugs than other developed countries, and the high price and increasing costs associated with prescription medication is a major concern for patients, physicians, and payers. Pharmaceutical companies have considerable flexibility in how they price drugs, and the costs that payers and patients see are dependent on how payers are able to negotiate discounts or rebates. Beyond setting list prices are issues of regulatory approval, patents and intellectual property, assessment of value and cost-effectiveness, and health plan drug benefits. These issues are linked, and comprehensive efforts will be needed to affect how drugs are priced in the United States.

The goal of the Ending the HIV Epidemic Initiative is to reduce new infections in the United States by 90% by 2030. Success will require fundamentally changing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention and care delivery to engage more persons with HIV and at risk of HIV in treatment. While the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic reduced in-person visits to care facilities and led to concern about interruptions in care, it also accelerated growth of alternative options, bolstered by additional funding support. These included the use of telehealth, medication delivery to the home, and increased flexibility facilitating access to Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program services. While the outcomes of these programs must be studied, many have improved accessibility during the pandemic. As the pandemic wanes, long-term policy changes are needed to preserve these options for those who benefit from them. These new care paradigms may provide a roadmap for progress for those with other chronic health issues as well.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has revolutionized the practice of ambulatory medicine, triggering rapid dissemination of digital healthcare modalities, including synchronous video visits. However, social determinants of health, such as age, race, income, and others, predict readiness for telemedicine and individuals who are not able to connect virtually may become lost to care. This is particularly relevant to the practice of infectious diseases (ID) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) medicine, as we care for high proportions of individuals whose health outcomes are affected by such factors. Furthermore, delivering high-quality clinical care in ID and HIV practice necessitates discussion of sensitive topics, which is challenging over video without proper preparation. We describe the “digital divide,” emphasize the relevance to ID and HIV practice, underscore the need to study the issue and develop interventions to mitigate its impact, and provide suggestions for optimizing telemedicine in ID and HIV clinics.

The field of Quantitative Information Flow (QIF) is concerned with quantifying information leakage in systems. This work generalises the QIF framework to the quantum setting, having as foundations the recently developed g-leakage framework. Next, some recent results of the field of quantum statistical decision are presented and translated in terms of the "quantum" g-leakage framework, including a recently developed quantum generalisation of the Coriasceous Theorem, an important result for QIF.

We congratulate the authors Bertsimas, Pauphilet and van Parys (hereafter BPvP) and Hastie, Tibshirani and Tibshirani (hereafter HTT) for providing fresh and insightful views on the problem of variable selection and prediction in linear models. Their contributions at the fundamental level provide guidance for more complex models and procedures.

These notes aim to provide a deeper insight on the specifics of two articles dealing with chemotaxis models with nonlinear production. More precisely, we are referring to the papers “Boundedness of solutions to a quasilinear parabolic–parabolic chemotaxis model with nonlinear signal production” by Tao et al. (2019) [2] and “Boundedness for a fully parabolic Keller–Segel model with sublinear segregation and superlinear aggregation” by Frassu and Viglialoro (2021) [1] . These works, independently published in these last years, present results leaving open room for further improvement. Indeed, in the first a gap in the proof of the main claim appears, whereas the cornerstone assumption in the second is not sharp. In these pages we give a more complete picture to the relative underlying comprehension.

Propositions 1.1–1.3 stated below contribute to results and certain problems considered in [E-S], on the behavior of products $$\Pi^n_1(1-z^{a_j}),1\leq{a_1}...\leq{a_n}$$ integers. In the discussion below, {a1,..., an} will be either a proportional subset of {1,..., n} or a set of large arithmetic diameter.

We thank Holger Rootzen and Dmitrii Zholud’s for their stimulating work, that led us to further investigate the problem of best fitting the human life span distribution. Their assertion “human life is unlimited but short” is based on their conclusion that the exponential model is the best to fit. We provide results based on standard Extreme Value approaches, the Block Maxima and Peaks-over-Threshold, and on the whole data available in the IDL database (IDL A, B validations and GRG). We verify that negative values for the extreme value index are more likely, supporting the conclusion that models with finite endpoint seem better to fit to the human life span distribution.

O. Einstein (2008) proved Bollob\'as-type theorems on intersecting families of ordered sets of finite sets and subspaces. Unfortunately, we report that the proof of a theorem on ordered sets of subspaces had a mistake. We prove two weaker variants., Comment: 6 pages. Improved bound for Theorem 4

A number of applications involving wave propagation are asymptotically stable, but the decay rate of the mode does not increase with increasing wave number. Applications include electrical transmission, acoustic waves and water waves. There are many different approximation methods for these systems that are fine for simulation. But the qualitative behaviour of the approximated eigenvalues can be quite different. Controller and estimator design with different approximations can yield different results. A number of partial differential equations (PDEs) are derived using Hamilton’s principle. This provides information about the energy of the system that can be a guideline in establishing well-posedness on an appropriate state space. Recent work on a port-Hamiltonian approach to approximation shows promise in obtaining finite-dimensional approximations that are useful for control and estimation. A key feature of the port-Hamiltonian approach is careful attention to how the energy in the system is modelled and approximated. How does this approach compare to more traditional approaches to scientific computation? In particular, what are the similarities and what are the differences? These questions will be examined in the talk, and in discussion, through several relatively simple examples.

In this short paper, we look into a conclusion drawn by Alzalg (J Optim Theory Appl 169:32---49, 2016). We think the conclusion drawn in the paper is incorrect by pointing out three things. First, we provide a counterexample that the proposed inner product does not satisfy bilinearity. Secondly, we offer an argument why a pth-order cone cannot be self-dual under any reasonable inner product structure on $$\mathbb {R}^n$$Rn. Thirdly, even under the assumption that all elements operator commute, the inner product becomes an official inner product and the arbitrary-order cone can be shown as a symmetric cone, we think this condition is still unreasonable and very stringent so that the result can only be applied to very few cases.

The aim of this paper is the development of a mathematical model to compute the optimal inventory mix to face stochastic demand at minimum cost in a two-level supply chain. The paper addresses a multi-product dynamic lot-sizing problem under stochastic demand subject to capacity and service level constraints. This model is executed to compare a Make To Order (MTO) strategy to a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) partnership between the supplier and their customers. Both strategies provide the demand order to be produced. A schedule of production orders is determined over the planning horizon in order to minimize the inventory holding costs of the supply chain, taking into consideration that the supplier is also responsible of initiating the replenishment orders and deliveries of their customers according to the VMI partnership. The simulation model is illustrated empirically using a real case study: a paper manufacturing company that pursues to improve customer service level and supply chain inventory costs through a proper production planning of their paper machines and a suitable VMI order replenishment schedule.

The paper introduces a new taxonomy of ill-posed parametric inverse problems, formulated as global optimization ones. It systematizes irremediable problems, which appear quite often in the real life but cannot be solved using the regularization method. The paper also shows a new way of solving irremediable inverse problems by a complex memetic approach including: genetic computation with adaptive accuracy, random sample clustering and a sophisticated local approximation of misfit plateau regions. Finally, we use a benchmark function featuring cross-shaped plateau to discuss some factors that influence the quality of plateau shape approximation.

For more than 20 years, the American College of Physicians (ACP) has advocated for the need to address firearm-related injuries and deaths in the United States. Yet, firearm violence continues to be a public health crisis that requires the nation's immediate attention. The policy recommendations in this paper build on, strengthen, and expand current ACP policies approved by the Board of Regents in April 2014, based on analysis of approaches that the evidence suggests will be effective in reducing deaths and injuries from firearm-related violence.

International audience; This survey was written by students of L. D. Faddeev under the editorship of L. A. Takhtajan. Sections 1.1, 1.2, 2–4, and 6 were written by Takhtajan, §§1.3 and 1.4 by F. A. Smirnov, §§5.1 and 5.2 by E. K. Sklyanin, §§5.3–5.6 by Sklyanin, Smirnov, and Takhtajan, §7.1 by M. A. Semenov- Tian-Shansky, §§7.2–7.6 by Takhtajan and S. L. Shatashvili, §7.7 by A. Yu. Alekseev and Shatashvili, and §8 by I. Ya. Aref'eva.

We estimate the orientation of wood fibers in porous networks like paper, paperboard or fiberboard by computing digital thermal conductivity experiments on micro-computed tomography ( μ CT) images with artificial isotropic thermal conductivity parameters. The accuracy of mechanical and thermal constitutive models for porous wood fiber based materials crucially depends on knowing the wood fiber orientation. Unfortunately, due to the high porosity, the micro-heterogeneity of wood fibers, the high carbon content of organic materials and the unknown additives present in industrial paper, μ CT-scans often exhibit low contrast and strong artifacts. Conventional image processing approaches encounter difficulties, as they rely upon convex fiber cross sections. We propose a solution by circumventing the segmentation of single wood fibers in μ CT images, by performing thermal conductivity simulations on binarized wood fiber structures, where an artificial isotropic thermal conductivity is associated to the fibers and the pore space is considered as isolating. The local and global temperature fluxes are assembled into a fiber orientation tensor. This method overcomes the limitations of the mentioned local image processing approaches, as individual fibers need not be resolved and convergence for increasing resolution is a consequence of abstract mathematical theory. We use our novel method to analyze large three-dimensional μ CT-scans and a synchrotron scan of a paperboard sample, serving as the starting point of an accurate micromechanical modeling of the effective anisotropic mechanical behavior of paper and paperboard. These results are crucial for calculating the mechanical strength of deep-drawn paperboard, which will be accomplished in a subsequent article.

In this short note, we show that Theorem 4.3 of Liu and Yu (Monatshefte Math 195:173–176, 2021) is a consequence of Lemma 2 of Ballester-Bolinches and Esteban-Romero (J Aust Math Soc 75:181–191, 2003).

Blakeley B. McShane and Ulf Böckenholt argue for single paper meta-analysis to be the default statistical tool whenever multiple similar studies of a common phenomenon are published in one paper

We give comments for the paper from Liu et al. (2019) about the Item Response Theory (IRT) model under consideration, the justification to compute Marginal likelihood, about what we learn with the data analysis performed and finally, about the computational issues in this paper.

Introduction. Medication nonadherence can have a significant negative impact on treatment effectiveness. Standard intention-to-treat analyses conducted alongside clinical trials do not make adjustments for nonadherence. Several methods have been developed that attempt to estimate what treatment effectiveness would have been in the absence of nonadherence. However, health technology assessment (HTA) needs to consider effectiveness under real-world conditions, where nonadherence levels typically differ from those observed in trials. With this analytical requirement in mind, we conducted a review to identify methods for adjusting estimates of treatment effectiveness in the presence of patient nonadherence to assess their suitability for use in HTA. Methods. A “Comprehensive Pearl Growing” technique, with citation searching and reference checking, was applied across 7 electronic databases to identify methodological papers for adjusting time-to-event outcomes for nonadherence using individual patient data. A narrative synthesis of identified methods was conducted. Methods were assessed in terms of their ability to reestimate effectiveness based on alternative, suboptimal adherence levels. Results. Twenty relevant methodological papers covering 12 methods and 8 extensions to those methods were identified. Methods are broadly classified into 4 groups: 1) simple methods, 2) principal stratification methods, 3) generalized methods (g-methods), and 4) pharmacometrics-based methods using pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics (PKPD) analysis. Each method makes specific assumptions and has associated limitations. Five of the 12 methods are capable of adjusting for real-world nonadherence, with only g-methods and PKPD considered appropriate for HTA. Conclusion. A range of statistical methods is available for adjusting estimates of treatment effectiveness for nonadherence, but most are not suitable for use in HTA. G-methods and PKPD appear to be more appropriate to estimate effectiveness in the presence of real-world adherence.

Publication doctorant; International audience; Our research team is specialized in human-computer systems and their engineering, with focus on interactive software systems for aeronautics (from cockpits to control towers). This context stands out by the need for certification, such as DO-178 or ED-12. Today, formal methods are pushed forward, as one of the best tools to achieve the verification and validation of properties, leading to the certification of these systems. Interactive systems are reactive computer systems that process information from their environment and produce a representation of their internal state. They offer new rich interfaces with sophisticated interactions. Their certification is a challenge, because the validation is often a human based process since traditional formal tools are not always suitable to the verification of graphical properties in particular.In this paper, we explore the scientific work that has been done in formal methods for interactive systems over the last decade, in a systematic study of publications in the International Workshop on Formal Methods for Interactive Systems. We describe an analytical framework that we apply to classify the studied work into classes of properties and used formalisms. We then discuss the emerging findings, mainly the lack of papers addressing the formal specification or validation of perceptibility properties. We conclude with an overview of our future work in this area.

We correct a mistake in a lemma in the paper cited in the title and show that it did not affect any of the other results of the paper. To this end, we prove results on linearly disjoint field extensions that do not seem to be commonly known. We give an example to show that a separability assumption in one of these results cannot be dropped (doing so had led to the mistake). Further, we discuss recent generalizations of the original classification of defect extensions.

The Territorial Papers of the United States are a valuable and underused resource containing almost 10,000 documents written between 1789 and 1848 about the formation of new sovereign states from US territory. These communications between the federal government and frontier settlers comprise the actual discourse of the nation’s expansion over six decades. Digitizing the Territorial Papers permits the possibility of analyzing the entire corpus globally. Text mining and topic modeling methods give us a lens on the language patterns through which new state governments and the expanding nation were formed. An initial statistical analysis of the textual information provides a visualization of content, helps discern how ideals about governance emerged, and lays the foundation for developing more sophisticated hypotheses and theoretical constructs.

One of the simplest examples of a robust heteroclinic cycle involves three saddle equilibria: each one is unstable to the next in turn, and connections from one to the next occur within invariant subspaces. Such a situation can be described by a third-order ordinary differential equation (ODE), and typical trajectories approach each equilibrium point in turn, spending progressively longer to cycle around the three points but never stopping. This cycle has been invoked as a model of cyclic competition between populations adopting three strategies, characterised as Rock, Paper and Scissors. When spatial distribution and mobility of the populations is taken into account, waves of Rock can invade regions of Scissors, only to be invaded by Paper in turn. The dynamics is described by a set of partial differential equations (PDEs) that has travelling wave (in one dimension) and spiral (in two dimensions) solutions. In this paper, we explore how the robust heteroclinic cycle in the ODE manifests itself in the PDEs. Taking the wavespeed as a parameter, and moving into a travelling frame, the PDEs reduce to a sixth-order set of ODEs, in which travelling waves are created in a Hopf bifurcation and are destroyed in three different heteroclinic bifurcations, depending on parameters, as the travelling wave approaches the heteroclinic cycle. We explore the three different heteroclinic bifurcations, none of which have been observed in the context of robust heteroclinic cycles previously. These results are an important step towards a full understanding of the spiral patterns found in two dimensions, with possible application to travelling waves and spirals in other population dynamics models., Comment: 36 pages, 8 figures

Call for papers is an invitation to researchers for paper publication. Finding relevant conference for paper publication is important as it has a direct impact on researchers' profile, papers' acceptance and future citation of research work. However finding relevant conference is a time consuming job for researchers due to increasing number of conferences on daily basis. To address these issues, various Recommender Systems (RS) have been developed. Most of them are based on collaborative approaches which exploit users' preferences for recommendations, however such RS suffer from cold start problem. On the other hand, systems based on content based approaches uses items' features for recommendations, however these RS face various problems including limited content analysis and irrelevant recommendations. We addressed these issues by developing a content based CFP (Call for Papers) recommender system using selected features that can reflect researchers' preferences. These features include title, abstract, keywords, cited papers' titles and cited events. Experimental results show that the proposed system solve problems that traditional CFP recommender systems face and produce quality recommendation results.

Sometimes the quality of a process is best expressed by a relationship between response variables and explanatory variables. Checking over the time the stability of such functional relationships using statistical methods is called “profile monitoring”. Since 2007, when a detailed review paper in the field of profile monitoring was presented, an increasing number of papers have been published in this area. In this paper, we present a conceptual classification scheme and classify the papers in this area since 2008 up to 2018. The relevant papers are categorized and analyzed under different metrics and directions for future studies are recommended.

This is an invited discussion of review paper “Nonparametric Bayesian Inference in Applications” by Peter Muller, Fernando A. Quintana and Garritt L. Page.

In 1903, Epstein published his proof of meromorphic continuation and a functional equation for Dirichlet series associated with quadratic forms, now called Epstein zeta-functions. However, already in 1889 (or even earlier) Hurwitz was aware of these results as his mathematical diaries and some unpublished notes (in an almost final form) found in his estate at the ETH Zurich show. In this article we present and analyze Hurwitz's notes and compare his reasoning with Epstein's paper in detail.

The optimal control of a Dubins car endowed with a circular or a line segment capture set is considered and the connection to their Homicidal Chauffeur differential game (HCDG) analogues is discussed. The capture set endowed Dubins cars are tasked to reach a stationary target point in minimum time. The solutions to the Dubins car optimal control problems (DCOCP) are similar to the solutions of the HCDG where the Evader, which is slower than the pursuing car, has simple motion. The similarities can be attributed to the fact that both the DCOCPs and the HCDG dynamics have two states and the Pursuer in the HCDG is modeled as a Dubins car. Because of these similarities, the solutions to the DCOCPs yield insights into the solutions of the attendant HCDGs where the Pursuer is endowed with a circular, or a line segment, capture set. This paper develops the solution to the optimal control problem of a Dubins car with a line segment capture set, presents the solution when the car is endowed with a circular capture set, and then draws comparisons to the respective HCDGs.

In this paper we consider, discuss and slightly complement recent fixed point results for mappings in b-metric spaces established by Sintunavarat (J Fixed Point Theory Appl 18:397–416, 2016). Thus, all our results are with shorter proofs. In addition, an application to integral equations is given to illustrate the usability of our approach.

A class of games for finding a leader among a group of candidates is studied in detail. This class covers games based on coin tossing and rock-paper-scissors as special cases and its complexity exhibits similar stochastic behaviors: either of logarithmic mean and bounded variance or of exponential mean and exponential variance. Many applications are also discussed.