Payments to financial institutions comprise over 20% of all US consumer payments. Financial institutions expecting monthly payments from their customers may soon find that the check is no longer in the mail. Consumers are increasingly choosing not to write a check when paying bills. Internet usage continues to increase and paying bills online is becoming a mainstream activity, no longer the pro...

BACKGROUND One promising way to improve the motivation of healthcare providers and the quality of healthcare services is performance-based incentives (PBIs) also referred as performance-based financing. Our study aims to explore healthcare providers' preferences for an incentive scheme based on local resources, which aimed at improving the quality of maternal and child health care in the Nouna ...

The distinction between concrete and abstract concepts is psychologically valid but so far it can hardly be quantified in any objective way, which prevents it from being further studied in computational linguistics. This paper proposes a systematic way to measure concreteness from the surface structure of dictionary definitions. Comparing the scores from WordNet definitions with human ratings, ...

In most developed countries, gender equality and neutrality have been widely promoted and embraced— through public policy—as a socio-cultural goal since at least the mid-twentieth century. Accordingly, we predicted that a population of highly educated youth from a relatively wealthy developed country (mostly students from a Canadian university) would display little or no significant gender bias...

Food manufacturers need to understand the taste preferences of their consumers in order to develop successful new products. The existence of consumer segments that differ in systematic ways in their taste preferences can have important implications for product development. Rather than developing a product to please all potential consumers, the manufacturer may decide to optimize the product for...

A mobile phone today is rapidly evolving into Personal Trusted Device with the ability to handle a wide variety of new services and applications including mobile electronic commerce. Managing and sailing the Web content to mobile users based on their preferences and location are becoming now a leading trend in mobile commerce. M-commerce services should be able to integrate different types of i...

We consider the problems of allocating several heterogeneous objects owned by governments to a group of agents and how much agents should pay. Each agent receives at most one object and has nonquasi-linear preferences. Nonquasi-linear preferences describe environments in which large-scale payments influence agents’ abilities to utilize objects or derive benefits from them. The “minimum price Wa...

We present a user-centric system for visualization and layout for content-based image retrieval and browsing. Image features (visual and/or semantic) are analyzed to display and group retrievals as thumbnails in a 2-D spatial layout which conveys mutual similarities. Moreover, a novel subspace feature weighting technique is proposed and used to modify 2-D layouts in a variety of context-depende...

We consider situations where a society tries to efficiently allocate several homogeneous and indivisible goods among agents. Each agent receives at most one unit of the good. For example, suppose that a government wishes to allocate a fixed number of licenses to operate in its country to private companies with highest abilities to utilize the licenses. Usually companies with higher abilities ca...