A national population census is instrumental in offering a holistic view of a country’s progress, directly influencing policy formulation and strategic planning. Potential flaws in the census system ...can have detrimental impacts on national development. Our prior research has pinpointed various deficiencies in current census methodologies, including inadequate population coverage, racial and ethnic discrimination, and challenges related to data privacy, security, and distribution. This study aims to address the “missing persons” challenge in the national census population and housing system. The integration of blockchain technology emerges as a promising solution for addressing these identified issues, enhancing the integrity and efficacy of census processes. Building upon our earlier research which examined the national census system of Pakistan, we propose an architecture design incorporating Hyperledger Fabric, performing system sizing for the entire nation count. The Blockchain-Based Implementation of National Census as a Supplementary Instrument for Enhanced Transparency, Accountability, Privacy, and Security (BINC-TAPS) seeks to provide a robust, transparent, scalable, immutable, and tamper-proof solution for conducting national population and housing censuses, while also fostering socio-economic advancements. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of our research, with a primary focus on the implementation of the blockchain-based proposed solution, including prototype testing and the resulting outcomes.
The habitats of marine life, characteristics of species, and the diverse mix of maritime industries around these habitats are of interest to many researchers, authorities, and policymakers whose aim ...is to conserve the earth’s biological diversity in an ecologically sustainable manner while being in line with indispensable industrial developments. Automated detection, locating, and monitoring of marine life along with the industry around the habitats of this ecosystem may be helpful to (i) reveal current impacts, (ii) model future possible ecological trends, and (iii) determine required policies which would lead accordingly to a reduced ecological footprint and increased sustainability. New automatic techniques are required to observe this large environment efficiently. Within this context, this study aims to develop a novel platform to monitor marine ecosystems and perform bio census in an automated manner, particularly for birds in regional aerial surveys since birds are a good indicator of overall ecological health. In this manner, a new non-parametric approach, WILDetect, has been built using an ensemble of supervised Machine Learning (ML) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques. It employs several hybrid techniques to segment, split and count maritime species – in particular, birds – in order to perform automated censuses in a highly dynamic marine ecosystem. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated by experiments performed on 26 surveys which include Northern gannets (Morus bassanus) by utilising retrospective data analysis techniques. With this platform, by combining multiple techniques, gannets can be detected and split automatically with very high sensitivity (Se) (≈ 0.97), specificity (Sp) (≈ 0.99), and accuracy (Acc) (≈ 0.99) — these values are validated by precision (Pr) (≈ 0.98). Moreover, the evaluation of the system by the APEM staff, which uses a completely new evaluation dataset gathered from recent surveys, shows the viability of the proposed techniques. The experimental results suggest that similar automated data processing techniques – tailored for specific species – can be helpful both in performing time-intensive marine wildlife censuses efficiently and in establishing ecological platforms/models to understand the underlying causes of trends in species populations along with the ecological change.
•This study aims to develop a methodology for detecting maritime bio ecosystems.•The methodology employs Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning techniques.•It performs bio census automatically, particularly for birds.•More explicitly, It employs several hybrid techniques to segment, split and count birds.•The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with aerial surveys.
Planning for the 2020 census is already beginning. This book from the National Research Council examines several aspects of census planning, including questionnaire design, address updating, ...non-response follow-up, coverage follow-up, de-duplication of housing units and residents, editing and imputation procedures, and several other census operations.
This book recommends that the Census Bureau overhaul its approach to research and development. The report urges the Bureau to set cost and quality goals for the 2020 and future censuses, improving efficiency by taking advantage of new technologies.
Assessments of age-specific mortality and life expectancy have been done by the UN Population Division, Department of Economics and Social Affairs (UNPOP), the United States Census Bureau, WHO, and ...as part of previous iterations of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD). Previous iterations of the GBD used population estimates from UNPOP, which were not derived in a way that was internally consistent with the estimates of the numbers of deaths in the GBD. The present iteration of the GBD, GBD 2017, improves on previous assessments and provides timely estimates of the mortality experience of populations globally.
The GBD uses all available data to produce estimates of mortality rates between 1950 and 2017 for 23 age groups, both sexes, and 918 locations, including 195 countries and territories and subnational locations for 16 countries. Data used include vital registration systems, sample registration systems, household surveys (complete birth histories, summary birth histories, sibling histories), censuses (summary birth histories, household deaths), and Demographic Surveillance Sites. In total, this analysis used 8259 data sources. Estimates of the probability of death between birth and the age of 5 years and between ages 15 and 60 years are generated and then input into a model life table system to produce complete life tables for all locations and years. Fatal discontinuities and mortality due to HIV/AIDS are analysed separately and then incorporated into the estimation. We analyse the relationship between age-specific mortality and development status using the Socio-demographic Index, a composite measure based on fertility under the age of 25 years, education, and income. There are four main methodological improvements in GBD 2017 compared with GBD 2016: 622 additional data sources have been incorporated; new estimates of population, generated by the GBD study, are used; statistical methods used in different components of the analysis have been further standardised and improved; and the analysis has been extended backwards in time by two decades to start in 1950.
Globally, 18·7% (95% uncertainty interval 18·4–19·0) of deaths were registered in 1950 and that proportion has been steadily increasing since, with 58·8% (58·2–59·3) of all deaths being registered in 2015. At the global level, between 1950 and 2017, life expectancy increased from 48·1 years (46·5–49·6) to 70·5 years (70·1–70·8) for men and from 52·9 years (51·7–54·0) to 75·6 years (75·3–75·9) for women. Despite this overall progress, there remains substantial variation in life expectancy at birth in 2017, which ranges from 49·1 years (46·5–51·7) for men in the Central African Republic to 87·6 years (86·9–88·1) among women in Singapore. The greatest progress across age groups was for children younger than 5 years; under-5 mortality dropped from 216·0 deaths (196·3–238·1) per 1000 livebirths in 1950 to 38·9 deaths (35·6–42·83) per 1000 livebirths in 2017, with huge reductions across countries. Nevertheless, there were still 5·4 million (5·2–5·6) deaths among children younger than 5 years in the world in 2017. Progress has been less pronounced and more variable for adults, especially for adult males, who had stagnant or increasing mortality rates in several countries. The gap between male and female life expectancy between 1950 and 2017, while relatively stable at the global level, shows distinctive patterns across super-regions and has consistently been the largest in central Europe, eastern Europe, and central Asia, and smallest in south Asia. Performance was also variable across countries and time in observed mortality rates compared with those expected on the basis of development.
This analysis of age-sex-specific mortality shows that there are remarkably complex patterns in population mortality across countries. The findings of this study highlight global successes, such as the large decline in under-5 mortality, which reflects significant local, national, and global commitment and investment over several decades. However, they also bring attention to mortality patterns that are a cause for concern, particularly among adult men and, to a lesser extent, women, whose mortality rates have stagnated in many countries over the time period of this study, and in some cases are increasing.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Purpose: The lack of individual socioeconomic status (SES) information in cancer registry data necessitates the use of area-based measures to investigate health disparities. Concerns about ...confidentiality, however, prohibit publishing patients' residential locations at the subcounty level. We developed a census tract-based composite SES index to be released in place of individual census tracts to minimize the risk of disclosure. Methods: Two SES indices based on the measures identified in the literature were constructed using factor analysis. The analyses were repeated using the data from the 2000 decennial census and 2005–2009 American Community Survey to create the indices at two time points, which were linked to 2000–2009 Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results registry data to estimate incidence and survival rates. Results: The two indices performed similarly in stratifying census tracts and detecting socioeconomic gradients in cancer incidence and survival. The gradient in the incidence is positive for breast and prostate, and negative for lung cancers, in all races, although the level varies. The positive gradient in survival is more salient for regionalstaged breast, colorectal, and lung cancers. Conclusions: The census tract-based SES index provides a valuable tool for monitoring the disparities in cancer burdens while avoiding potential identity disclosure. This index, divided into tertiles and quintiles, is now available to the researchers on request.
Knowledge over the number of animals in large wildlife reserves is a vital necessity for park rangers in their efforts to protect endangered species. Manual animal censuses are dangerous and ...expensive, hence Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with consumer level digital cameras are becoming a popular alternative tool to estimate livestock. Several works have been proposed that semi-automatically process UAV images to detect animals, of which some employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a recent family of deep learning algorithms that proved very effective in object detection in large datasets from computer vision. However, the majority of works related to wildlife focuses only on small datasets (typically subsets of UAV campaigns), which might be detrimental when presented with the sheer scale of real study areas for large mammal census. Methods may yield thousands of false alarms in such cases. In this paper, we study how to scale CNNs to large wildlife census tasks and present a number of recommendations to train a CNN on a large UAV dataset. We further introduce novel evaluation protocols that are tailored to censuses and model suitability for subsequent human verification of detections. Using our recommendations, we are able to train a CNN reducing the number of false positives by an order of magnitude compared to previous state-of-the-art. Setting the requirements at 90% recall, our CNN allows to reduce the amount of data required for manual verification by three times, thus making it possible for rangers to screen all the data acquired efficiently and to detect almost all animals in the reserve automatically.
•We address animal detection in realistic UAV imagery (large dataset, vast areas).•We show how to train Convolutional Neural Networks on such a dataset.•We introduce new evaluation protocols suitable for animal censuses.•Based on those, our model yields a precision improvement by orders of magnitude.
Research on neighborhood effects has focused largely on residential neighborhoods, but people are exposed to many other places in the course of their daily lives—at school, at work, when shopping, ...and so on. Thus, studies of residential neighborhoods consider only a subset of the social-spatial environment affecting individuals. In this article, we examine the characteristics of adults' "activity spaces"—spaces defined by locations that individuals visit regularly—in Los Angeles County, California. Using geographic information system (GIS) methods, we define activity spaces in two ways and estimate their socioeconomic characteristics. Our research has two goals. First, we determine whether residential neighborhoods represent the social conditions to which adults are exposed in the course of their regular activities. Second, we evaluate whether particular groups are exposed to a broader or narrower range of social contexts in the course of their daily activities. We find that activity spaces are substantially more heterogeneous in terms of key social characteristics, compared to residential neighborhoods. However, the characteristics of both home neighborhoods and activity spaces are closely associated with individual characteristics. Our results suggest that most people experience substantial segregation across the range of spaces in their daily lives, not just at home.
We present final Spitzer trigonometric parallaxes for 361 L, T, and Y dwarfs. We combine these with prior studies to build a list of 525 known L, T, and Y dwarfs within 20 pc of the Sun, 38 of which ...are presented here for the first time. Using published photometry and spectroscopy as well as our own follow-up, we present an array of color–magnitude and color–color diagrams to further characterize census members, and we provide polynomial fits to the bulk trends. Using these characterizations, we assign each object a T(eff) value and judge sample completeness over bins of T(eff) and spectral type. Except for types ≥T8 and T(eff) < 600 K, our census is statistically complete to the 20 pc limit. We compare our measured space densities to simulated density distributions and find that the best fit is a power law (dN/dM ∝ M^(-α) with α = 0.6 ± 0.1. We find that the evolutionary models of Saumon & Marley correctly predict the observed magnitude of the space density spike seen at 1200 K < T(eff) < 1350 K, believed to be caused by an increase in the cooling timescale across the L/T transition. Defining the low-mass terminus using this sample requires a more statistically robust and complete sample of dwarfs ≥Y0.5 and with T(eff) < 400 K. We conclude that such frigid objects must exist in substantial numbers, despite the fact that few have so far been identified, and we discuss possible reasons why they have largely eluded detection.
Social scientists regularly rely on population estimates when studying change in small areas over time. Census tract data in the United States are a prime example, as there are substantial shifts in ...tract boundaries from decade to decade. This study compares alternative estimates of the 2000 population living within 2010 tract boundaries to the Census Bureau's own retabulation. All methods of estimation are subject to error; this is the first study to directly quantify the error in alternative interpolation methods for U.S. census tracts. A simple areal weighting method closely approximates the estimates provided by one standard source (the Neighborhood Change Data Base), with some improvement provided by considering only area not covered by water. More information is used by the Longitudinal Tract Data Base (LTDB), which relies on a combination of areal and population interpolation as well as ancillary data about water-covered areas. Another set of estimates provided by the National Historical Geographic Information Systems (NHGIS) uses data about land cover in 2001 and the current road network and distribution of population and housing units at the block level. Areal weighting alone results in a large error in a substantial share of tracts that were divided in complex ways. The LTDB and NHGIS perform much better in all situations but are subject to some error when boundaries of both tracts and their component blocks are redrawn. Users of harmonized tract data should be watchful for potential problems in either of these data sources.
To evaluate trends in racial, ethnic, and sex representation at US medical schools across 16 specialties: internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery, psychiatry, radiology, anesthesiology, obstetrics and ...gynecology, neurology, family practice, pathology, emergency medicine, orthopedic surgery, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and dermatology. Using a novel, Census-derived statistical measure of diversity, the S-score, we quantified the degree of underrepresentation for racial minority groups and female faculty by rank for assistant, associate, and full professors from 1990-2016.
This longitudinal study of faculty diversity uses data obtained from the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) Faculty Roster from US allopathic medical schools. The proportion of professors of racial minority groups and female faculty by rank was compared to the US population based on data from the US Census Bureau. The Roster includes data on 52,939 clinical medical faculty in 1990, and 129,545 in 2016, at the assistant professor level or higher. The primary measure used in this study was the S-score, a measure of representation based on the probability of the observed frequency of faculty from a racial/ethnic group and sex, given the racial and ethnic distribution of the US. Pearson correlations and 95% confidence intervals for S-score with time were used to measure trends.
Blacks and Hispanics showed statistically significant trends (p<0.05) towards increasing underrepresentation in most specialties and are more underrepresented in 2016 than in 1990 across all ranks and specialties analyzed, except for Black females in obstetrics & gynecology. White females were also underrepresented in many specialties and in a subset of specialties trended toward greater underrepresentation.
Current efforts to improve faculty diversity are inadequate in generating an academic physician workforce that represents the diversity of the US. More aggressive measures for faculty recruitment, retention, and promotion are necessary to reach equity in academia and healthcare.
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