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Effect of foreign direct investment on sustainable development goals? Evidence from Eurasian countries.
Get PDFPublic and private sector financing is essential in the movement of capital to achieve all seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations members by 2030. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is considered the primary source of external financing in the private sector. FDI accelerates the economic growth of any country by mobilising capital, increasing labour productivity, technological advancements, etc. The present paper aims to study the potential effect of FDI on Sustainable Development in Eurasian countries.
Our research considers a sample of 78 Eurasian countries, further distinguished by their income classes. We applied a fixed effects regression model to investigate the relation between FDI and SDG index. Our findings reveal that there is a positive and significant effect of FDI on the SDG index. Furthermore, our results also indicate that the role of FDI is more decisive and fundamental the lower the income class of the countries. Our research contributes to the current literature on Sustainable Development. We believe that our research paper will serve as a base for policy recommendations and future research studies on the influence of FDI on sustainable development for Eurasian countries
Steel reinforced self-compacting concrete (SCC) cantilever beams: bond behaviour in poor condition zones
Get PDFPrevious investigations carried out on reinforced self-compacted concrete (SCC) beams have reported contradictory results on reinforcement bond behaviour occurring in the zones defined for good bond conditions according to Eurocode2. Cantilevered SCC beams’ critical upper tension reinforcement bond behaviour has previously had limited reporting. In this study, the bond behaviour in normally vibrated concrete (NVC) and self-compacted concrete (SCC) in poor condition s zones are compared and the differences are highlighted. The effect of four parameters , including (i) concrete type (SCC and NVC), (ii) characteristic strength of SCC, (iii) lap splice length, and (iv) depth of concrete cover for the reinforcement is investigated. It was found that for the studied beams, increasing splice length improved the energy absorption and changed the failure mode to a more ductile manner even at the poor bond conditions zones. The maximum measured steel strains in SCC beams in the lap splice zones, were higher than those for NVC specimens. The mean bond stress values, for SCC beams with 25% and 50% lap splice lengths, were higher than those of NVC beams, with the same lap splice lengths, by 16% and 13%, respectively. The results of the current study showed that the empirical equations from the literature overestimated the bond strength of the splice lap length for cantilever upper steel in SCC beams with long splices which agrees with the state of the art as these equations were developed originally for short anchorage lengths
The association between internet use and depression risk among Chinese adults, middle-aged and older, with disabilities
Get PDFBackground: Globally nearly 15% people suffer from various kinds of disabilities, and China has the largest disabled population in the world. The poor mental health status of people with disabilities has become an essential issue in most countries. The main aim of this study was to explore the potential impact of internet use on depression risk among middle-aged and older adults with different types of disabilities. Methods: The data used in this study were obtained from the 2018 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) collected by Peking University. A binary logit model was used to analyze the impact of internet use on the depression risk among adults with disabilities, substitute variable method and the propensity score matching method were used to examine the robustness of the results. Results: (1) Internet use was negatively associated with depression risk among disabled people, and the higher the frequency of their internet use, the lower the probability of their depression risk. (2) different social activities related to internet had different impacts on the depression risk, the decline in depression risk was mainly related to watching videos, watching news, and chatting via the internet. (3) internet use reduced the depression risk of adults with physical disabilities, but had no impact on those with other types of disabilities. Conclusions: Our study suggests that internet use may have a positive spillover effect on decreasing the depression risk of disabled people, but the reduction effect is significantly affected by the social activities related to internet and the types of disabilities
Pro-poor tourism and poverty alleviation
No full textTourism has been utilised as a tool for poverty alleviation globally, and its growth is envisioned to directly or indirectly impact the lives of the local communities. The dialogue on poverty alleviation led to the formulation of pro-poor tourism (PPT). PPT is defined as tourism that generates net benefits to the poor, and it should be economically, socially, environmentally, or culturally beneficial. Although PPT has the potential to benefit the poor, it is not clear how the different types of tourism impact the poor. The tourism industry is mainly driven by the private sector, particularly large international companies. Therefore, their interest in ensuring that poverty is alleviated between local communities is not guaranteed. Thus, with this view, PPT has been criticised for over-emphasising local initiatives. Similarly, the understanding of the poverty concept has been overtly debated. Hence, this chapter intends to explore the concept of PPT and its effect on poor communities
Deep reinforcement learning-based resource allocation for UAV-enabled federated edge learning
No full textThe resource allocation of the federated learning (FL) for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm systems are investigated. The UAV swarms based on FL realize the artificial intelligence (AI) applications by means of distributed training on the basis of ensuring the security of private data. However, the direct application of the FL in UAV swarms will incur high overhead. Therefore, in this article, we consider the resource allocation problem in FL for UAV swarms. To avoid the high communication overhead between UAVs and the central server, we proposed an FL framework for UAV swarms based on mobile edge computing (MEC) in which model aggregation is migrated to edge servers. In the proposed framework, the total cost of the FL is defined as the weighted sum of the total delay of UAV swarms to complete the FL and system energy consumption. In order to minimize the total cost of FL, we propose a resource allocation algorithm for joint optimization of computing resources and multi-UAV association based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The simulation result shows that: 1) compared with the benchmark algorithm, the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the total cost of FL; 2) the proposed algorithm can realize the trade-off between task completion delay and system energy consumption through weight changes
Institutional failure: policing in permacrisis
Get PDFRecent scandals have once again highlighted ongoing failings in the Metropolitan Police force, for which yet more urgent reforms have been proposed. While police denialism of institutional racism continues to be a problem, the institutional failure that creates the recurring cycles of crisis goes beyond the Met. It is also rooted in a stunted mediascape, and, more seriously, a failing political culture that is addicted to the sugar rush of immediate political news, and mired in an authoritarian and zombie politics of law and order that seeks to manage dissent through producing first shock and then amnesia. This institutional permacrisis underlines the failures of all three institutions to recognise and address institutional racism. It is symptomatic of a failure to go beyond the facile assumption - in the face of decades of evidence to the contrary - that deeply embedded structural problems can be solved through the fix of culture-change programmes or the appointment of a heroic new leader. Recent reports have also found the Met to be marked by institutional misogyny and institutional corruption. This extension of the idea of systemic failure seems unlikely to prompt the kind of systemic and structural change that is needed
Automated Analysis of Mitral Inflow Doppler Using Deep Neural Networks
No full textDoppler echocardiography is a widely applied modality for the functional assessment of heart valves, such as the mitral valve. Currently, Doppler echocardiography analysis is manually performed by human experts. This process is not only expensive and time-consuming, but often suffers from intra- and inter-observer variability. An automated analysis tool for non-invasive evaluation of cardiac hemodynamic has potential to improve accuracy, patient outcomes, and save valuable resources for health services. Here, a robust algorithm is presented for automatic Doppler Mitral Inflow peak velocity detection utilising state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. The proposed framework consists of a multi-stage convolutional neural network which can process Doppler images spanning arbitrary number of heartbeats, independent from the electrocardiogram signal and any human intervention. Automated measurements are compared to Ground-truth annotations obtained manually by human experts. Results show the proposed model can efficiently detect peak mitral inflow velocity achieving an average F1 score of 0.88 for both E- and A-peaks across the entire test set
Feeling the future — haptic audio: editorial
Get PDFThis Special Issue in Arts aligns with the journal’s established theme of ‘Music and the Machine’. It is concerned with haptics—the transmission and understanding of touch and force-related information—and its application to music and audio.
Haptics increasingly pervades our interaction with technology; the vibrating phone is a simple everyday experience for billions of people. However, increasingly sophisticated haptic applications are developing in numerous industries, from autonomous cars to surgical simulation, wearables to wellbeing, and in creative sectors such as gaming and fashion.
It is well understood that the sense of touch is crucial to any musician—the string sliding under the finger, the vibration of the embouchure, the key hitting its end-stop. Yet, these qualities often remain elusive in the contemporaneous generation of (often electronic) new musical instruments and controllers, and this often compromises the human body’s ability to exert control upon them, foster experiential performative memory and develop increasing mastery.
The era of working and playing in some form of extended reality is in its naissance, yet it is coming in more ways than we can yet typically imagine. Music performance is just one area that will increasingly explore this medium, and it is haptics that will not just bring an increased sense of realism, but also offer an essential modality to the transparent and relatively lifeless world of purely visual and audio experiences.
In recent decades, such research has built increasing momentum and has given rise to many novel tactile interfaces and approaches to musicking. Conversely, research on force feedback in musical applications has traditionally suffered from issues such as hardware cost and the lack of community-wide accessibility to software and hardware platforms for prototyping applications. Typically, associated publications often require the quantitative analysis of primary data, formal user testing in controlled conditions, or present mathematical contexts for novel interfaces. Although many of these approaches have proved valuable, the literature tends to be rooted in engineering, technology or computing – thus proving out of reach to many in the creative arts.
The field has yet to demonstrate an amalgamated and compelling case for the actual benefit of haptics to audio and musical applications without employing any such overbearing mathematics or statistics. Accordingly, presenting this case to the artistic community represents the scope of this Special Issue: ‘Feeling the Future—Haptic Audio’. It offers a variety of reviews, case studies, insights, and explorations by a team of world experts.
We believe it is time to discuss future opportunities more openly, to propose directions in which this field can blossom, and eventually precipitate more ubiquitous tools for audio and music interaction.
Prof. Dr. Justin Paterson
Prof. Dr. Marcelo M. Wanderley
Guest Editor
Joint task scheduling and multi-UAV deployment for aerial computing in emergency communication networks
Get PDFThis article studies mobile edge computing technologies enabled by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in disasters. First, considering that the ground servers may be damaged in emergency scenarios, we proposed an air-ground cooperation architecture based on ad-hoc UAV networks. We defined the system cost as the weighted sum of task delay and energy consumption because of different delay sensitivity and energy sensitivity tasks in emergency communication networks. Then, we formulated the system cost-minimization problem of task scheduling and multi-UAV deployments. To solve the proposed mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, we decomposed it to two sub-problems that were solved by proposing a swap matching-based task scheduling sub-algorithm and a successive convex approximation-based multi-UAV deployment sub-algorithm. Accordingly, we propose a joint optimization algorithm by iterating the two sub-algorithms to obtain a low complexity sub-optimal solution. Finally, the simulation results show that (i) the proposed algorithm converges in several iterations, and (ii) compared with the benchmark algorithms, the proposed algorithm has better performance of reducing task delay and energy consumption and achieves a good trade-off between them for diverse tasks