This paper discusses the main aspects regarding the performance gap in Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems, which is an important issue regarding their acceptability. We also detail the main problems that lead to the performance gap: the use of many features to represent images, the lack of appropriate indexing structures for images and features, deficient query plans employed to execu...

Following 25 years of landmark progress, health psychology faces even greater change in the foreseeable future. Evolving patterns of health and illness and developments in medicine and related fields will shape the future of health psychology. The articles in this special section discuss these future issues in several areas: the biopsychosocial model, changes in demographics, prevention, clinic...

This article examines the meaning of federalism for health care financing (HCF) and is based on two considerations. First, federal institutions are embedded in their national context and interact with them. The design and performance of HCF policy will be influenced by contexts, the workings of the federal institutions, and the interactions of these institutions with different elements of the c...

External financing is important when inventors and small technology-based firms commercialize their inventions. However, the private information of inventors about the quality of their products causes information asymmetries and moral hazard problems. To help compensate for potentially non-existing capital markets, the Swedish Government has intervened by offering loans with different terms to ...

In real investment, there is a relationship between external financing and abnormal stock returns. This study predicts a negative correlation between external financing and stock returns. The dependent variable of the research is stock returns and the independent variables are net financing and equity ratio. Also, control variables of the research includes assets growth, company’s size and comp...

The main goal of this paper it is to present our experiments in ImageCLEF 2009 Campaign (photo retrieval task). In 2008 we proved empirically that the Text-based Image Retrieval (TBIR) methods defeats the Content-based Image Retrieval CBIR “quality” of results, so this time we developed several experiments in which the CBIR helps the TBIR. The TBIR System [6] main improvement is the named-entit...

INTRODUCTION Equitable health financing remains a key health policy objective worldwide. In low and middle-income countries (LMICs), there is evidence that many people are unable to access the health services they need due to financial and other barriers. There are growing calls for fairer health financing systems that will protect people from catastrophic and impoverishing health payments in t...

This chapter discusses key aspects concerning the performance of Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems. The so-called performance gap plays an important role regarding the acceptability of CBIR systems by the users. It provides a timely answer to the actual demand for computational support from CBIR systems that provide similarity queries processing. Focusing on the performance gap, this...

A recent literature has criticised the sensitivity of a firm’s investment to its own cash flow as an adequate measure of financing constraints. In this paper we develop a new method to detect the presence of financing constraints at firm level. We consider a structural dynamic model of investment with financing imperfections and with both fixed and variable capital. We solve the model and simul...