We consider a response system that updates its internal state in accordance with information input arriving from outside. In this paper, we define as internal time the ``number of kinds'' of codes that have been observed at least once up to a given time, and analyze how the way internal time advances is determined by the statistics of information input (arrival rate and code distribution). When arrivals follow a Poisson process, the average advancing speed of internal time decreases monotonically with time, and if the number of kinds of codes is finite, it eventually approaches an upper limit and saturates. As a result, on long time scales, internal time becomes relatively shorter than physical time. For a uniform code distribution, we provide a closed form for the correspondence between internal time and physical time, and show that the physical time required to ``advance internal time by one step'' increases in later stages. As an ancillary quantity, we quantify by conditional entropy the remaining uncertainty of ``which codes have been observed'' when only internal time is known, and we give unimodality and the maximization time in the uniform case, and upper bounds, equality conditions, and expressions of the difference from the upper bound in the non-uniform case. Finally, we also present a generalization that assigns weights (description lengths) to each code so that internal time is ticked according to the amount of information in the input.
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for their deployment in real-world applications. Recent advancements in Self-Rewarding Language Models suggest that an LLM can use its internal reward models (such as LLM-as-a-Judge) \cite{yuanself} to generate preference data, improving alignment performance without costly human annotation. However, we find that different internal reward models within the same LLM often generate inconsistent preferences. This inconsistency raises concerns about the reliability of self-generated preference data, hinders overall alignment performance, and highlights the need for further research to ensure reliable and coherent alignment with human preferences. To address this limitation, we propose Self-Consistent Internal Rewards (SCIR), a novel framework designed to enhance consistency among internal reward models during training. In each training step, we collect preference predictions from multiple pre-defined internal reward models and enforce consistency and confidence through an inconsistency penalty mechanism, thereby improving the reliability of these internal reward models. We selectively use data with consistent predictions for preference optimization, ensuring the quality of the preference data. By employing self-consistent internal rewards, our method significantly improves the alignment performance and reward modeling capability of LLMs, outperforming baseline methods by a notable margin.
The computationally cheap machine learning architecture of random feature maps can be viewed as a single-layer feedforward network in which the weights of the hidden layer are random but fixed and only the outer weights are learned via linear regression. The internal weights are typically chosen from a prescribed distribution. The choice of the internal weights significantly impacts the accuracy of random feature maps. We address here the task of how to best select the internal weights. In particular, we consider the forecasting problem whereby random feature maps are used to learn a one-step propagator map for a dynamical system. We provide a computationally cheap hit-and-run algorithm to select good internal weights which lead to good forecasting skill. We show that the number of good features is the main factor controlling the forecasting skill of random feature maps and acts as an effective feature dimension. Lastly, we compare random feature maps with single-layer feedforward neural networks in which the internal weights are now learned using gradient descent. We find that random feature maps have superior forecasting capabilities whilst having several orders of magnitude lower computational cost.
In the conditions of war, special attention is paid to the strengthening of public administration and local self-government in order to strengthen the state in order to provide a powerful repulse to the enemy and the possibility of restoring the economy of Ukraine. The development of local self-government is particularly important as it encourages the creation of a full-fledged living environment for citizens, the provision of high-quality and accessible public services, the establishment of institutions of direct people’s power, and the coordination of the interests of the state and territorial communities. The basis of the development of local self-government is the formation of local budgets, which today have significantly decreased due to the decrease in the number of the population, bankruptcy of private enterprises, etc. It should be noted that today the economic activity of business has decreased by 50 percent, and about 8 million Ukrainians are abroad. A large number of Ukrainian citizens became internal migrants. The damage caused by missile attacks to our infrastructural facilities exceeded 40 billion dollars. Each missile attack worsens the financial results of entrepreneurs, causing a decrease in earnings, a decrease in wages for employees, along with this, and tax revenues. That is why the main task for the development of territorial communities is the implementation of effective reforms that will make it possible to increase the resource and financial base. It was noted that the liberalization of taxation during the war is a forced anti-crisis measure. Lowering the rates of excise tax, value added tax, introduction of a single tax of 2% for virtually all enterprises, easing of the administrative burden on taxpayers, deregulation of business and loosening of tax control helped business survive the shock. These measures helped enterprises to focus on personnel problems, readjust business to extreme working conditions, search for new opportunities for recovery and adjustment of production. They did not deal with the issues of finding resources and means for calculating and paying taxes. While the introduced changes are temporary and short-lived, they will cease after the end of the war and the stabilization of the situation. That is why, after the recovery of business activity and reduction of the unemployment rate, the state should return to the permanent post-crisis model of taxation.
Jingzi Huang, Henry C. Burridge, Maarten van Reeuwijk
We study the mixing processes inside a forced fountain using data from direct numerical simulation. The outer boundary of the fountain with the ambient is a turbulent/non-turbulent interface. Inside the fountain, two internal boundaries, both turbulent/turbulent interfaces, are identified: 1) the classical boundary between upflow and downflow which is composed of the loci of points of zero mean vertical velocity; and 2) the streamline that separates the mean flow emitted by the source from the entrained fluid from the ambient (the separatrix). We show that entrainment due to turbulent fluxes across the internal boundary is at least as important as that by the mean flow. However, entrainment by the turbulence behaves substantively differently from that by the mean flow and cannot be modelled using the same assumptions. This presents a challenge for existing models of turbulent fountains and other environmental flows that evolve inside turbulent environments.
Abstract We argue that tax revenues and political institutions placing constraints on the executive power may reinforce each other over time and so co-evolve in the long run. This may also bring a shift in the composition of revenues, from taxes levied on a narrow base to broadly levied taxes. To test these hypotheses, we use historical cross-country data covering 31 countries for 1800–2012 and panel time series methods allowing for different forms of country-specific heterogeneity and cross-section dependence. The results offer three main findings. First, executive constraints, whether they are judicial or legislative, and tax revenues are cointegrated. While in the short run they can drift apart, this will be temporary because there is a long-run relationship between the two. Second, evidence of cointegration is strongest for revenues from direct taxes, suggesting that the existence and nature of a long-run relationship may be mainly related to the emergence of broad-based taxation. Third, long-run causality runs mostly from executive constraints to taxation. This is most evident for income taxes. Our findings link Sustainable Development Goals 16 and 17, implying that the goal of promoting inclusive and accountable institutions may work in synergy with that of generating internal resources to finance development goals.
W e know there has been a difference in pay between males and females in medicine. Apparently, we have not made headway in rectifying this issue. A recent article1 has shown only that we still have a long way to go. We have known about this issue in Canada,2 and south of the border the pay gap is a canyon; female doctors in the US have been estimated to earn $2 million less over a 40-year career than males after adjustment for factors that we have used to explain observed differences in income.3 These factors include hours worked, clinical revenue, practice type and specialty among others. Women do not work fewer hours in Canada — or at least not few enough to account for a large gap. The 2019 Canadian Medical Association Physician Workforce Survey4 showed that women worked only 4.7% fewer hours per week and 8.6% fewer hours on-call — small differences in relation to the disparity in income. The new Canadian numbers are rather telling. Adjusting for demographics and hours/weeks of work, female physicians earn about 9% less than their male counterparts.1 A national study2 reported that the adjusted pay gap is slightly larger among specialists than family physicians (10.2% v. 8.5%). There is even a provincial difference in the gap: Manitoba has the largest adjusted average gender net earnings gap at 19.8%, while Quebec has the smallest at 6.6%.2 The study’s approach was unique in that Canada Revenue Agency taxation files were linked to estimate the gap in earnings, not just gross billings, but also adding overhead practice expenses. Additionally, the researchers were able to adjust for work effort (hours and weeks of work) and other characteristics. In fact, female physicians in Canada earned less than comparable males at all points of their earnings distribution, with the gap widening more at the higher end.2 This may also reflect underrepresentation of female physicians in senior roles — an issue we already know about. The authors speculated that the variation across provinces in the adjusted gender pay gap may be due to differences in the amount and type of non-fee-forservice payment (i.e., capitation, salary) and in internal fee setting structures. These are manageable changes, or at least examinations to prove the point.1 In general, the pay gap cannot be explained by women working less (classically the excuse given), but relates more to systemic bias in medical school, hiring, promotion, clinical care arrangements, mechanisms used to pay physicians and societal structures broadly. We know that the percentage of female physicians is growing; the proportion of women among Canadian physicians has grown rapidly, from 11% in 1978 to 43% in 2018.2 Women made up less than 35% of physicians among 10 specialties with the highest gross and net incomes; in contrast, women accounted for 47%, 48% and 62% of physicians in the 3 specialties with the lowest estimated net income: family medicine, psychiatry, and pediatrics.2 Hopefully with the increasing number of female medical students there will be some shift in those numbers. Biases built into the referral structure may also account for some part of the ongoing gap. Tough cases that need more discussion and may not be procedure driven are potentially being referred to female physicians in some systems. Large surgical or specialty technician driven cases are potentially sent to males. Further alignment with provincial billing codes would help veri fy this. This has happened despite specific gender and inequity policies and other approaches for pay and working conditions. We can talk ad nauseum about the strategies proposed by provincial and federal bodies to help diminish the gender gap, but based on these recent statistical analyses, female physicians in Canada require more headway. A more objective and granular site-bysite and system-by-system analysis is desperately needed to further understand the underlying factors and influences at work. This is not intended as a woke article; it is just an observation that we are not being fair. Given the deep diversity in health care systems and physician reimbursement plans across Canada (e.g., salaried v. fee for service, bonus structures, expected/contracted de liverables), the need for unbiased and objective data to ensure a fair compensation structure for people of all genders has never been clearer.
Previous studies showed that resources recovery through landfill mining (LFM) is generally challenging from an economic perspective and that a large share of project costs is related to the external treatment and disposal of bulk process wastes such as combustibles and fines residue. Building on these analyses, this study aims to explore the potential for improving the economy of LFM in Europe by creating value from these bulk process wastes. Specifically, the combustibles are treated through internal incineration with subsequent energy recovery, while fines residue is utilized as construction aggregates. These explored possibilities are investigated considering other varying factors at the site, project, and system levels that cover possible LFM project settings in Europe. A set-based modelling approach is adapted to generate multiple LFM scenarios (531,441) and investigate the underlying critical factors that drive the economy of LFM through global sensitivity analysis. Results show that an additional 16% of LFM scenarios become net profitable, mainly driven by fines residue utilization. Avoided costs for re-landfilling are higher than the revenues from construction aggregates. By contrast, internal incineration is driven by the revenues from recovered energy rather than the avoided gate fee, which is substituted by the costs for building and operating own plants. Overall, the policy conditions remain critical to further improve the economy of LFM in Europe. Recommendations include an inclusive quality standard that relies on pollutant leachability rather than total concentration for higher-value application of fines residue and incentive rather than taxation for producing renewable energy from the combustibles.
We give an explicit correspondence between stated skein algebras, which are defined via explicit relations on stated tangles in [Costantino F., Lê T.T.Q., arXiv:1907.11400], and internal skein algebras, which are defined as internal endomorphism algebras in free cocompletions of skein categories in [Ben-Zvi D., Brochier A., Jordan D., J. Topol. 11 (2018), 874-917, arXiv:1501.04652] or in [Gunningham S., Jordan D., Safronov P., arXiv:1908.05233]. Stated skein algebras are defined on surfaces with multiple boundary edges and we generalise internal skein algebras in this context. Now, one needs to distinguish between left and right boundary edges, and we explain this phenomenon on stated skein algebras using a half-twist. We prove excision properties of multi-edges internal skein algebras using excision properties of skein categories, and agreeing with excision properties of stated skein algebras when $\mathcal{V} = \mathcal{U}_{q^2}(\mathfrak{sl}_2)\text{-}{\rm mod}^{\rm fin}$. Our proofs are mostly based on skein theory and we do not require the reader to be familiar with the formalism of higher categories.
In this paper, we present an impulse response identification scheme that incorporates the internal positivity side-information of the system. The realization theory of positive systems establishes specific criteria for the existence of a positive realization for a given transfer function. These transfer function criteria are translated to a set of suitable conditions on the shape and structure of the impulse responses of positive systems. Utilizing these conditions, the impulse response estimation problem is formulated as a constrained optimization in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space equipped with a stable kernel, and suitable constraints are imposed to encode the internal positivity side-information. The optimization problem is infinite-dimensional with an infinite number of constraints. An equivalent finite-dimensional convex optimization in the form of a convex quadratic program is derived. The resulting equivalent reformulation makes the proposed approach suitable for numerical simulation and practical implementation. A Monte Carlo numerical experiment evaluates the impact of incorporating the internal positivity side-information in the proposed identification scheme. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using data from a heating system experiment.
This study discusses the development of fiscal capacity in Central Java, Indonesia. The purpose of this study is to analyze internal and external factors that increase regional fiscal capacity, and formulate strategies by analyzing internal and external elements to obtain four alternative strategies namely 'strength opportunity' strategy, 'strength threat' strategy, 'weakness opportunity' strategy and Strategy for 'weaknesses threats'. This study uses secondary data to analyze indicators of regional fiscal capacity and primary data collected through focused discussions, to analyze strategies. The results of the analysis indicate that there are several main strategies to increase regional fiscal in Central Java Province, namely the program of intensification and extensification of regional taxes; improving the quality of human resources with special competencies in the field of taxation; synergy and internal coordination between regional government institutions; improvement of the supervision system for taxpayers; realizing clear and legal regional regulations, simplifying the mechanism for managing investment licenses in Central Java and optimizing regional revenues through modernizing the collection of taxes and levies by utilizing technology. Modernization of increasing regional fiscal capacity will encourage the achievement of equitable regional revenue, increase public participation, administrative efficiency, consistent law enforcement, and improve the level of public confidence in the implementation of good governance.
Fluids with internal microstructure like dense suspensions, biological and polymer added fluids, are commonly found in the turbulent regime in many applications. Their flow is extremely difficult to be studied as microstructure complexity and Reynolds number increase, even nowadays. This bottleneck is novelty and efficiently treated here by the micropolar theory. Our findings support that when denser microstructure occurs turbulence is intensified by the chaotic rotation of internal fluid's elements. Unlike in Newtonian fluids, shear stress is now decreased, and viscous and microstructure interrotational stresses increase near the walls and mark the turbulence intensification.
A probability model is underdetermined when there is no rational reason to assign a particular infinitesimal value as the probability of single events. Pruss claims that hyperreal probabilities are underdetermined. The claim is based upon external hyperreal-valued measures. We show that internal hyperfinite measures are not underdetermined. The importance of internality stems from the fact that Robinson's transfer principle only applies to internal entities. We also evaluate the claim that transferless ordered fields (surreals, Levi-Civita field, Laurent series) may have advantages over hyperreals in probabilistic modeling. We show that probabilities developed over such fields are less expressive than hyperreal probabilities.
The oil industry occupies an important place in Russian economy and in the global energy supply system. The industry has recently been facing a number of internal and external problems, for example, the deteriorating quality and structure of the product base and an increase in the share of tight oil reserves. Confronting these challenges will inevitably incur costs, which will directly affect oil companies’ financial performance. The Russian government uses taxation to incentivize oil companies to improve their efficiency, which renders the question of tax burden particularly salient. This study aims to analyze the tax burden on the Russian oil industry in the period from 2010 to 2017 and to identify the key factors that shape the structure and dynamics of oil companies’ tax payments. The article provides an overview of Russian and international research literature on the problem of tax burden. The role of oil and gas revenues in the structure of the Russian federal budget is shown. The analysis demonstrates that there has been a steady decline in the tax burden on oil companies in recent years due to the changes in the method of calculating the mineral extraction tax and export duties as well as the expanding range of preferential categories of subsurface use objects. The factor analysis combined with quantitative analysis reveals the factors that determine the dynamics and structure of oil companies’ tax payments. The method of cluster analysis is applied in this study to compare the performance of Russian oil companies according to a set of tax burden parameters. The companies are divided into three clusters and specific recommendations are provided for each cluster. For example, Gazprom Neft and LUKOIL have a low tax burden and can be seen, therefore, as potential donors of tax revenues; Rosneft, Bashneft and Tatneft need to increase their efficiency through non-tax optimization; a suitable strategy for Surgutneftegaz, RussNeft, and Slavneft, in our view, would be to adjust the structure of their production activities to increase the share of the domestic crude oil market. Based on the results of the cluster analysis, the authors propose guidelines for reforming taxation of the oil industry and describe the main stages of this process. For citation Filimonova I. V., Provornaya I. V., Shumilova S. I., Zemnukhova E. A. Cluster analysis of Russian oil companies based on tax burden parameters. Journal of Tax Reform. 2019;5(1):42–56. DOI: 10.15826/jtr.2019.5.1.059 Article info Received September 24, 2018; accepted March 20, 2019
Milad Abolpour, Mahtab Mirmohseni, Mohammad Reza Aref
Sharing resource blocks in NOMA systems provides more opportunity to the internal users to overhear the messages of the other users. Therefore, some sort of secrecy against the internal users in addition to the external eavesdroppers must be provided. In this paper, we investigate the secrecy performance of a two-user NOMA system in existence of the external and internal passive eavesdroppers, where the far user acts as an internal eavesdropper and tries to overhear the message of the near user. Our system consists of a single antenna base station, two legitimate users and an external passive eavesdropper. We present the closed-forms for the ergodic secrecy rates of the users. Moreover, to derive the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the system, we use Gaussian-Chebyshev quadrature method, which gives an approximation for the SOP. Numerical results show that this approximation is very close to the exact value of the SOP of the system. Finally, we eliminate the external eavesdropper and present the closed-forms for the ergodic rate of the far user, the ergodic secrecy rate of the near user and also the SOP of the system.
Matthieu J. Mercier, Manikandan Mathur, Louis Gostiaux
et al.
In this paper, we present the first laboratory experiments that show the generation of internal solitary waves by the impingement of a quasi-two-dimensional internal wave beam on a pycnocline. These experiments were inspired by observations of internal solitary waves in the deep ocean from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, where this so-called mechanism of 'local generation' was argued to be at work, here in the form of internal tidal beams hitting the thermocline. Nonlinear processes involved here are found to be of two kinds. First, we observe the generation of a mean flow and higher harmonics at the location where the principal beam reflects from the surface and pycnocline; their characteristics are examined using particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements. Second, we observe internal solitary waves that appear in the pycnocline, detected with ultrasonic probes; they are further characterized by a bulge in the frequency spectrum, distinct from the higher harmonics. Finally, the relevance of our results for understanding ocean observations is discussed.