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Modelling the Macroeconomic Determinants of Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the G-7 Countries: The Roles of Technological Innovation and Institutional Quality Improvement
No full textThe group of seven (G-7) countries are seven of the most advanced global nations. Yet, these nations have not been able to achieve environmentally sustainable economic growth (EG) in the past. Consequently, despite growing economically, the environmental quality in the G-7 countries has persistently deteriorated. Hence, the present study examined the environmental impacts associated with EG, technological innovation, institutional quality (IQ), renewable energy consumption (RENE) and population using the carbon dioxide emission figures to measure environmental quality in the G-7 economies for the period 1996-2018. The econometric analyses involved the application of different estimation techniques that control the cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity issues in the data. Overall, the results indicated that greater EG and higher population size increase environmental pollution by boosting the carbon dioxide emission levels. In contrast, technological innovation, IQ improvement , and greater RENE were found to impede the carbon dioxide emission levels. In line with these key findings, several environmental development-related policies are recommended. Graphical Abstract Note: (a) Red colour and numerical sign of PLUS shows that the variable is increasing the CO 2 emission. (b) Green colour and numerical sign of MINUS shows that the variable is decreasing CO 2 emission
Machine Learning Assisted Doppler Features for Enhancing Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis: A Multi-cohort Study
Get PDFBackground: This pilot study aims at exploiting machine learning techniques to extract colour Doppler Ultrasound (CDUS) features and to build an artificial neural network (ANN) model based on these CDUS features for improving the diagnostic performance of thyroid cancer classification.
Methods: A total of 674 patients with 712 thyroid nodules (TNs) (512 from in-ternal dataset and 200 from external dataset) were randomly selected in this retrospective study. We used ANN to build a model (TDUS-Net) for classifying malignant and benign TNs using both the automatically extracted quantitative CDUS features (whole ratio, intranodular ratio, peripheral ratio, and number of vessels) and grey-scale Ultrasound (US) features defined by the ACR Thyroid Imaging Reporting and Data System (TI-RADS). Then, we compared the diagnostic performance of the model, the performance of another ANN model based on the grey-scale US features alone (TUS-Net), and that of radiologists.
Results: The TDUS-Net (0.898, 95%CI: 0.868-0.922) achieved a higher area under the curve (AUC) than that of TUS-Net (0.881, 95%CI: 0.850-0.908) in the internal tests. Compared with radiologists, TDUS-Net (AUC: 0.925, 95% CI: 0.880-0.958) performed better than radiologists (AUC: 0.810, 95% CI: 0.749-0.862) in the external tests.
Conclusions: Applying a machine learning model by combining both gray-scale US features and CDUS features can achieve comparable or even higher performance than radiologists in classifying thyroid nodules
Development and evaluation of a spiral model of assessing EBM competency using OSCEs in undergraduate medical education
Get PDFBackground: Medical students often struggle to understand the relevance of Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) to
their clinical practice, yet it is a competence that all students must develop prior to graduation. Objective structured
clinical examinations (OSCEs) are a valued assessment tool to assess critical components of EBM competency,
particularly different levels of mastery as they progress through the course. This study developed and evaluated
EBM based OSCE stations with an aim to establish a spiral approach for EBM OSCE stations for undergraduate
medical students.
Methods: OSCE stations were developed with increasingly complex EBM tasks. OSCE stations were classified
according to the classification rubric for EBP assessment tools (CREATE) framework and mapped against the
recently published core competencies for evidence-based practice (EBP). Performance data evaluation was
undertaken using Classical Test Theory analysing mean scores, pass rates, and station item total correlation (ITC)
using SPSS.
Results: Six EBM based OSCE stations assessing various stages of EBM were created for use in high stakes
summative OSCEs for different year groups across the undergraduate medical degree. All OSCE stations, except for
one, had excellent correlation coefficients and hence a high reliability, ranging from 0.21–0.49. The domain mean
score ranged from 13.33 to 16.83 out of 20. High reliability was demonstrated for the each of the summative OSCE
circuits (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.67–0.85).
In the CREATE framework these stations assessed knowledge, skills, and behaviour of medical students in asking,
searching, appraising, and integrating evidence in practice. The OSCE stations were useful in assessing six core
evidence-based practice competencies, which are meant to be practiced with exercises. A spiral model of OSCEs of
increasing complexity was proposed to assess EBM competency as students progressed through the MBChB course.
Conclusions: The use of the OSCEs is a feasible method of authentically assessing leaner EBM performance and
behaviour in a high stakes assessment setting. Use of valid and reliable EBM-based OSCE stations provide evidence
for continued development of a hierarchy of assessing scaffolded learning and mastery of EBM competency.
Further work is needed to assess their predictive validity
The Role of Female Cryptanalysts from 1914 to 1946
Get PDFThis thesis shows that the history of cryptanalysis in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century has focussed on the contribution of men to the virtual exclusion of that of women, and produces evidence to prove that, from the First World War onwards, women, although in a minority, were working at the same level as their male counterparts, despite their lack of mention in the published literature which generally holds that only men worked as cryptanalysts during this period. The present research identifies that this was not the case, and that though the number of confirmed female cryptanalysts remains small and elusive, these women were nonetheless important for the role that they played.
This thesis examines published work on British cryptanalysis between 1914 and 1946, demonstrating that these accounts are almost exclusively by men and about men. The research presented uses original documentation and interviews to advance and place on record knowledge about female cryptanalysts who worked in high-level codebreaking during time both of war and peace in a gendered approach. The analysis sets out the case studies of six women - four cryptanalysts, one linguist and a decoder - who typify the roles that women held in cryptanalysis between 1914 and 1946, providing an in-depth study of their backgrounds and roles they carried out for the British Admiralty’s Room 40, the War Office’s MI1(b) and HushWAACs, and the Foreign Office’s Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).
The thesis provides a detailed historiographical chronology in a gendered approach of the women’s role in cryptanalysis from the beginnings of modern codebreaking in the First World War, through the interwar creation of GC&CS, to the vast cryptanalytical organisation at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, setting out the context of relevant literature and archival materials. Definitions are derived for key terms whose meanings have changed over the period, causing confusion and erroneous conclusions to be drawn, and key themes are identified which can be used in the identification of future female cryptanalysts.
This thesis clearly identifies that women were working as high-grade cryptanalysts during the period 1914 to 1946, and offers pointers and analytical tools to potential further identifications in future research
Disrupted Dialogues: Exploring Misgendered Diagnoses and Experiences of Melancholia and Depression Through the Lens of Pericles and Contemporary Psychiatric Practice
Get PDFThis article disrupts present-day readings of women’s
experience of and diagnoses with depression by reading
them in the light of the patriarchally inscribed experience
of melancholia in the early modern period as explored in
Shakespeare and Wilkins’ Pericles. It reads the paralleled
experiences of Pericles and Marina and early modern
proto-medical treatises in the light of contemporary
psychiatric diagnostic practice and psychosocial research. It considers how norms, gendering, and privilege can affect
the way an individual’s expression of their experience is
read, received, diagnosed, and treated, as eroticised cures
are laid against talking therapies in Pericles, and the
gendered application of the labels of melancholia and
depression and the gendered assumptions undergirding
therapeutic interventions are probed. In so doing, it shows
the value of reading early modern drama through a
medical humanities lens to underline the biases which still
have a measurable impact in mental health diagnostic
settings today. The stark consequences of these biases for
women emerge when these texts are brought into
interdisciplinary and transhistorical dialogue. The early
modern and present strands are pulled together by
exploring how Pericles pushes back against the way gender
can be leveraged to mistreat, exploit or silence
EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF SECTORAL AND TOTAL FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT ON ECONOMIC GROWTH EVIDENCE FROM NIGERIA (1981-2018)
Get PDFForeign Direct Investment (FDI) is a vehicular mechanism for an economy to attain growth and development. It helps deliver important benefits such as the creation of employment, transfer of technology, economic boost, and spill-overs (horizontal or vertical) to other sectors of the economy. However, the Nigerian economy has a different experience. While there are numerous empirical studies on the impact of FDI and economic growth in Nigeria, there is a dearth of studies that measure the impacts of both sectoral and total FDI on the country's economic growth and unveil how the impact of the sectoral FDI compares with the total FDI. In view of this, this study was conducted to investigate the impacts of sectoral and total FDI on the economic growth of Nigeria, with specific reference to how the sectoral FDI compares with the total FDI from 1980 to 2018.
The study used the Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) model as a technique to estimate all relevant variables and modelled it on the primary, secondary and services sectors of the economy to show the sectoral FDI’s impacts; and the overall FDI. These were carried out using the short and the long-run dynamics. Findings showed that in the short-run, FDI has an insignificant effect in the sectors and total on economic growth. Whereas in the long run, the FDI has a negative and significant impact in the primary sector, a positive and significant impact in the secondary sector, but had an insignificant impact in the service sector on economic growth. The impact in the total was found significant only in the long run.
The negative effect of FDI on the primary sector, in the long run, was adduced to the resource curse factor and possibly due to the limited linkages of the primary sector. While the secondary sector has positive and significant results, in the long run, are due to its ample forward and backward linkages to the economic activities, although the secondary sector is around 20% only of the FDI. Meanwhile, the FMOLS and DOLS showed significant results for the sectors and total in the short run. In both the FMOLS and DOLS, the primary sector is negative, the secondary sector is positive, the service is positive in the FMOLS, and the DOLS negative. The total FDI is positive and significant in both the FMOLS and the DOLS.
Based on the study's findings, it is important that the government and other policymakers put in appropriate measures to ensure that foreign investment inflow effectively benefits the economy in the country. The adoption of the free float determination of exchange rate which the market would determine; and increasing focus on a more open economy and adopt policies like export promotion strategy which would aid the growth of infant industries
Anglo-French Relations and the ‘Protestant Party’: The Earl of Leicester and His Circle, 1636-41
Get PDFThis thesis considers the foreign policy of Charles I of England towards the France of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu between 1636 and 1641 in the context of the
Paris embassy of Robert Sidney, second earl of Leicester, the English King’s extraordinary ambassador to the French King and a leading Caroline Protestant diplomat. Against the background of the Thirty Years War, the earl was dispatched to Paris in May 1636 to negotiate an anti-Habsburg Anglo-French alliance. The objective of such a league would be to secure the restitution of Charles’s nephew, the dispossessed Charles I Louis, the Prince Elector Palatine, to the dignities and lands that his father, Frederick V, had lost in the early 1620s.
The primary argument of the thesis is that, contrary to traditional historical thinking, Charles’s foreign policy was not directionless or consistently pro-Spanish
throughout the 1630s, but that, between May 1636 and October 1639, he made a serious attempt to forge an alliance with Spain’s great continental rival, France. This thesis will also contend that the realization of an Anglo-French league represented the English King’s main diplomatic objective in the period between February 1637 and October 1639. Charles’s commitment to an alliance with France, therefore, persisted well after mid-1637 or 1638, challenging the current orthodoxy on Caroline foreign policy in the later 1630s. It was only the political and strategic revolution brought about by Spain’s defeat at the Battle of the Downs in the autumn
of 1639 that prompted the English King to revert to a pro-Spanish stance. The primary sources used to substantiate these contentions are the three surviving Anglo-French treaties of 1637 and Leicester’s diplomatic correspondence, totalling more than 500 letters, the latter probably representing the largest body of unexamined manuscript material relating to Caroline foreign policy during the second half of the
1630s, if not the whole decade. Neither of these original sources has been subject to comprehensive study.
Leicester’s embassy is examined in nine chapters and six appendices.
Chapter 1 sets out the European and English background to the earl’s mission. It considers the historiography regarding the embassy and states the main arguments
that the thesis will advance. It also looks at the history of the Sidney family and the earl’s career preceding his embassy to Paris in 1636. The negotiations surrounding the Anglo-French treaties of 1637 and their provisions and (immediate) fate are examined in chapters 2, 3 and 4. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the continuing treaty talks with the French, and how these discussions impacted Charles’s foreign and domestic policies in the later 1630s as well as analysing Charles’s further
instructions to Leicester of April 1639. Chapter 7 investigates the impact on the earl’s mission in particular, and on Caroline foreign policy more generally, of Spain’s naval defeat by the Dutch at the Battle of the Downs in October 1639, the English King’s loss to the Scots in the Second Bishops’ War in August 1640 and the revolts suffered by Spain in the Iberian Peninsula in that year. Chapter 8 assesses the final phase of the earl’s mission – his embassy concluded in October 1641 – against the background of the opening session of the Long Parliament, the Anglo-Dutch
marriage alliance of May 1641, Leicester’s appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in June and the Anglo-Scottish Union of August. The conclusions of the thesis are presented in chapter 9. Appendix 1 sets out the chronology of the key developments regarding the Anglo-French treaties of 1637 and the significant
proceedings in England and Europe between May 1636 and June 1637. Appendices 2 to 6 contain the essential primary sources relating to Leicester’s mission, including the original manuscript texts and modern English translations (commissioned by myself) of the three extant Anglo-French treaties of 1637. The bibliography provides details of the primary (manuscript and printed) and secondary sources used in the
writing of the thesis
The effects of regional trade integration and renewable energy transition on environmental quality: Evidence from South Asian neighbors?
No full textImproving environmental quality across South Asia has become one of the utmost important policy agendas of the concerned governments. The susceptibility of the majority of the South Asian countries to multifaceted climate change adversities has motivated the need to identify the factors that can function to ensure environmental sustainability within this region. Although several studies have highlighted the importance of globalization and cleaner energy use in tackling the environmental woes of the South Asian countries, very little is known regarding the impacts of regional trade and renewable energy transition in this regard. Hence, this paper aims to scrutinize the effects of enhancing intra-regional trade integration and undergoing renewable energy transition on per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the context of six South Asian nations between 1990 and 2016. Besides, the impacts of economic growth, financial development, and urbanization on carbon dioxide emissions are also examined. The results from the recently developed cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag regression approach, accounting for cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity issues, reveal that facilitating trade among the South Asian neighbors reduces carbon emissions both in the short-and long run. Moreover, enhancing the share of renewable energy in the aggregate energy consumption figures is also found to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in both the short-and long-run. Furthermore, both regional trade integration and renewable energy transition are found to jointly reduce carbon dioxide emissions in South Asia. The results also authenticate the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis while financial development and urbanization are found to boost carbon dioxide emissions only in the long run. Hence, the findings from this study impose key policy takeaways concerning environmental sustainability within South Asia