The right not to know is often defended on the basis of the principle of respect for personal autonomy. If I choose not to acquire personal information that impacts on my future prospects, such a choice should be respected, because I should be able to decide whether to access information about myself and how to use it. But, according to the incoherence objection to the right not to know in the ...

Online auctions are a popular means for exchanging items over the Internet. However, are many inherent security and fairness concerns. Participants can behave in an undesirable and fraudulent manner in an attempt to gain an advantage at the expense of rivals. For example, a bidder might seek to suppress the price by bid sniping, or the seller could introduce fake bids to inflate the price. In a...

This article investigates the multirate disturbance rejection control problem for linear systems with mismatched and measurement delay using predictor-based extended state observer. A new observer together output predictor is first designed to obtain estimation values of system disturbance, where used compensate influences sampling output. To attenuate undesirable influence we then design a sam...

In the typical speech translation system, the first-best speech recognizer hypothesis is segmented into sentence-like units which are then fed to the downstream machine translation component. The need for a sufficiently large context in this intermediate step and for the MT introduces delays which are undesirable in many application scenarios, such as real-time subtitling of foreign language br...

For many discriminative classifiers, it is desirable to convert an unnormalized confidence score output from the classifier to a normalized probability estimate. Such a method can also be used for creating better estimates from a probabilistic classifier that outputs poor estimates. Typical parametric methods have an underlying assumption that the score distribution for a class is symmetric; we...

Discrete-time, linear control systems with specified pointwise-in-time constraints, such as those imposed by actuator saturation, are considered. The constraints are enforced by the addition of a nonlinear ‘reference governor’ that attenuates, when necessary, the input commands. Because the constraints are satisfied, the control system remains linear and undesirable response effects such as ins...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Malmquist–Luenberger index Urban water utilities Greenhouse gas emissions Nonparametric productivity measurement The energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in the provision of urban water and sewerage services have become an increasingly important issue in recent times. However, the impact of negative externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions on the product...

This study examines the productivity growth of the nationwide banks of China over the ten years to 2006. Using a bootstrap method for the Malmquist index estimates of productivity growth are constructed with appropriate confidence intervals. The paper adjusts for the quality of the output by accounting for the non-performing loans on the balance sheets and test for the robustness of the results...