Disinformation and other forms of manipulative, antidemocratic communication have emerged as a problem for Internet policy. While such operations are not limited to electoral politics, efforts to influence and disrupt elections have created significant concerns. Data-driven digital advertising has played a key role in facilitating political manipulation campaigns. Rather than stand alone incidents, manipulation operations reflect systemic issues within digital advertising markets and infrastructures. Policy responses must include approaches that consider digital advertising platforms and the strategic communications capacities they enable. At their root, these systems are designed to facilitate asymmetrical relationships of influence.
Conclusions This analysis indicates that PI is a valid and reliable instrument which can be effectively used to monitor safety conditions at workplaces. Commercial janitors are an important group of low wage, largely immigrant workers who face significant potential risks at work, and yet have only been minimally studied for occupational injury and illness. Anecdotal reports from a local union representing commercial janitors in the Seattle area suggest pressures on the industry have produced a dramatic increase in workload over the past few years, raising the possibility of increased injury and illness. A cross sectional survey was designed to assess a range of exposures among commercial janitors including both union (n = 275) and non-union (n-75) sectors, and using a group of security guards (n-75) as controls. A novel participatory approach to data collection was developed, utilising workers to recruit subjects and conduct interviews in three languages, using electronic data collection tools linked to an internet-based database. Further, a novel subjective workload scale was adopted, and changes in workload and injury and illness rates over the past three years were assessed. Exposures assessed include general workload, musculoskeletal stressors, chemical use, as well as psychosocial risks such as work stress, safety climate, discriminatory management practices and work-life balance. Outcomes included acute injury, musculoskeletal pain, pulmonary and dermatological symptoms, and sleep disturbance. Initial results indicate a significant increase in workload with 28.5% reporting >7 on a 10 point scale two years ago, up to 35% in the current year. A concomitant increase in injuries was similarly observed. The paper describes the approach to data collection and describes rates of exposure and health and safety outcomes by group. Measures adopted to validate the self-reported conditions are also described. Background and Objective Cadmium (Cd) exposure, like Itaiitai disease, may present with erythropoietin (EPO) hypoproduction, and associated erythroid abnormalities. Anemia may be associated with toxic metal (Cd and lead) poisoning with interaction with essential trace elements (iron, zinc, copper) in humans. We aimed at assessing the relationship among erythrocyte parameters (EP), anemia (hemoglobin < 12 g/dL) and blood Cd (BCd) among adult residents in an environmentally high-exposed community near electroplating industry area. Methods A total of 1,062 residents were included through stratified random sampling by three age groups (35-44, 45-54, and 55-64 years) and gender from an electroplating-related metal contaminated area located in central Taiwan during 2002~2005. B-Cd levels were measured by an ELAN 6100 inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer (ICP-MS). Multiple logistic regression models were used for test the association between anemia and B-Cd with serum ferritin taken into account. Results B-Cd levels was negatively associated with the red blood cell (RBC) count, mean cell hemoglobin (MCH), and...
This paper presents research toward generalizing the optimization of the allocation of simulation replications to an arbitrary number of designs, when the problem is to maximize the Probability of Correct Selection among designs, the best design being the one with the smallest probability of a rare event. The simulation technique within each design is an optimized version of the splitting method. An earlier work solved this problem for the special case of two designs. In this paper an alternative two-stage approach is examined in which, at the first stage, allocations are made to the designs by a modified version of the Optimal Computing Budget Allocation. At the second stage the allocation among the splitting levels within each design is optimized. Our approach is shown to work well on a two-tandem queuing model. INTRODUCTIONIt is well known that standard Monte Carlo (MC) techniques do not efficiently estimate the probability of rare events. Their inadequacy is exacerbated when simulations, subject to a computational budget constraint, are made over several designs, for the purpose of selecting the design with the smallest rare event probability. This paper explores methods to improve performance by optimizing the allocation of the computational budget among designs and, within each design, among the levels of a fixed effort splitting technique. The computational budget is defined in terms of time. The problem of allocating this time optimally, in order to maximize the probability of correct selection (the probability of selecting the "best" design, however best is defined) is addressed by the Optimal Computing Budget Constraint (OCBA) (Chen et al. 2000;He et al. 2007;Fu et al. 2007). OCBA implicitly assumes that standard MC is the simulation technique used within each design. It thus suffers, in the context of rare events, from the inefficiencies of MC. Applying OCBA, by itself, to optimize the allocation of the budget among designs offers only slight improvement over equal budget allocations, when MC is used to estimate rare event probabilities within the designs.There are several approaches to the problem of efficiently estimating rare events, within a single system or design. L'Ecuyer, Demers, and Tuffin (2006), L'Ecuyer et al. (2009), and Asmussen and Glynn 3998 978-1-4577-2109-0/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
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