[Ms Kate Nicholl]: To ask the Minister for the Economy, pursuant to AQW 14548/22-27, to detail any progress made on further modelling and refinement of the cost of implementing an entitlement to paid carer's leave.

[Ms Kate Nicholl]: To ask the Minister of Health to detail any improvements that can be made to the lighting and safety features of car park 8 Broadway that is used by staff at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

[Mr Gerry Carroll]: To ask the Minister for Infrastructure whether his Department has considered developing a flood alleviation scheme for the St. James area of West Belfast.

[Mr Gerry Carroll]: To ask the Minister for Infrastructure to detail the number of historic flood zones that exist in West Belfast.

[Mr Gerry Carroll]: To ask the Minister for Infrastructure to detail the amount that developers have paid towards (i) roads; and (ii) other infrastructure costs in each of the last ten years.

[Mr Gerry Carroll]: To ask the Minister for Infrastructure, in light of his Department’s introduction of the new Planning Portal, (i) whether the Gunning principles on public consultation apply to planning applications; and (ii) whether these principles informed the design of the new online system.

[Mr Gerry Carroll]: To ask the Minister of Health whether his Department collects data in relation to the proportion of patients or health service users in (i) primary care settings; and (ii) secondary care settings whose first language is not English.

[Mr Alan Chambers]: To ask the Minister for Infrastructure to confirm whether the Sydenham bypass resurfacing project is currently on schedule.

[Mr Alan Chambers]: To ask the Minister of Finance whether the unadopted status of The Point, Groomsport, is taken into account when establishing the rateable value of residential properties along this roadway.

[Mr Harry Harvey]: To ask the Minister of Finance whether her Department has any plans to mirror the 40 per cent business rates relief scheme for independent retailers announced by the UK Government for England.

Can social media platforms positively impact students' academic learning progress? This question and many more are issues confronting students and scholars in developing countries, and this study aims to address it....

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The purpose of this study was to assess the experiences of 1st-year college composition writing students in a synchronous online remote learning environment. The researcher, through this qualitative study, used a case study design to examine the quality of the learning experiences of the participant....

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We replicate and extend prior work on Florida's Bright Futures merit aid scholarship to consider its effect on college enrollment and degree completion. We estimate causal impacts using a regression discontinuity design to exploit SAT thresholds that strongly determine eligibility....

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London : Bennett & Bloom, 2006.

...

In this paper we study the following set[A={p(n)+2^nd mod 1: ngeq 1}subset [0.1],] where $p$ is a polynomial with at least one irrational coefficient on non constant terms, $d$ is any real number and for $ain [0,infty)$, $a mod 1$ is the fractional part of $a$. By a Bernoulli decomposition method, we show that the closure of $A$ must have full Hausdorff dimension.

We investigate sparse matrix bipartitioning -- a problem where we minimize the communication volume in parallel sparse matrix-vector multiplication. We prove, by reduction from graph bisection, that this problem is $mathcal{NP}$-complete in the case where each side of the bipartitioning must contain a linear fraction of the nonzeros.

We present an improved exact branch-and-bound algorithm which finds the minimum communication volume for a given matrix and maximum allowed imbalance. The algorithm is based on a maximum-flow bound and a packing bound, which extend previous matching and packing bounds.

We implemented the algorithm in a new program called MP (Matrix Partitioner), which solved 839 matrices from the SuiteSparse collection to optimality, each within 24 hours of CPU-time. Furthermore, MP solved the difficult problem of the matrix cage6 in about 3 days. The new program is on average more than ten times faster than the previous program MondriaanOpt.

Benchmark results using the set of 839 optimally solved matrices show that combining the medium-grain/iterative refinement methods of the Mondriaan package with the hypergraph bipartitioner of the PaToH package produces sparse matrix bipartitionings on average within 10% of the optimal solution.

In classification models fairness can be ensured by solving a constrained optimization problem. We focus on fairness constraints like Disparate Impact, Demographic Parity, and Equalized Odds, which are non-decomposable and non-convex. Researchers define convex surrogates of the constraints and then apply convex optimization frameworks to obtain fair classifiers. Surrogates serve only as an upper bound to the actual constraints, and convexifying fairness constraints might be challenging.

We propose a neural network-based framework, emph{FNNC}, to achieve fairness while maintaining high accuracy in classification. The above fairness constraints are included in the loss using Lagrangian multipliers. We prove bounds on generalization errors for the constrained losses which asymptotically go to zero. The network is optimized using two-step mini-batch stochastic gradient descent. Our experiments show that FNNC performs as good as the state of the art, if not better. The experimental evidence supplements our theoretical guarantees. In summary, we have an automated solution to achieve fairness in classification, which is easily extendable to many fairness constraints.

MCP1811

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118 118 Money has launched a new credit card with a difference, instead of fees, interest and charges you pay a monthly subscription. But it could end up costing you far more – here’s why.