1,721,202 research outputs found

    Book review: Mishra, Deepak K. (Ed.), Internal Migration in Contemporary India

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    Mishra, Deepak K. (Ed.), Internal Migration in Contemporary India. New Delhi: SAGE, 2016, pp. 364, ₹995, ISBN: 978-93-51508-57-1. </jats:p

    Light Manufacturing in Vietnam : Creating Jobs and Prosperity in a Middle-Income Economy

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    Light Manufacturing in Vietnam makes the case that, if the country is to continue along a rapid economic growth path and create jobs, it must undertake a structural transformation that can lift workers from low-productivity agriculture and the mere assembly of imported inputs to higher-productivity activities. Vietnam needs to address fundamental issues in the manufacturing sector that, until now, have been masked by economic growth. The book shows that there is a dichotomy between domestic enterprises and enterprises supported by foreign direct investment. The dominant state-owned enterprises and foreign-invested firms are often not integrated with smaller, domestic firms through backward or forward links in the use of domestically produced inputs or intermediate products. Growth in the domestic light manufacturing sector has arisen from the sheer number of micro and small enterprises rather than from expansion in the number of medium and large firms. As a consequence, final products have little value added; technology and expertise are not shared; and the economy has failed to move up the structural transformation ladder. This structure of production is one of the reasons Vietnam's rapid process of industrialization over the last three decades has not been accompanied by a favorable trade balance. Policy measures to address problems in competitiveness in Vietnam must confront the dual structure of the light manufacturing sector, while raising the value added in the industry. To that end, measures must be taken to nurture the expansion of small domestic firms, while helping these firms to achieve greater productivity through trade integration. This will require improvements in labor skills and technology and in the quality and variety of products able to compete with imports. Policies to reduce the role of the state-owned sector, promote trading companies, encourage clustering and subcontracting, and raise foreign and social networking are important in this respect. To boost the value added of its goods, Vietnam needs to integrate the supply chain in assembly activities by investing in the upstream production of the goods in which it has a comparative advantage in production and in which it has already established a market share, such as agribusiness, garments, and wood. Unlike downstream activities, however, the production of the associated raw materials and intermediate goods is capital intensive and technology driven, and it requires skilled labor. Inviting foreign direct investment into these areas and reforming education and vocational systems are the best means to reach this goal. For this reason, the government should launch a complete review of the incentives for foreign direct investment to focus on upstream production and on bringing in capital and technical expertise, while improving labor and entrepreneurial skills. Based on this analysis, Light Manufacturing in Vietnam proposes concrete policy measures to increase employment and spur job creation by addressing sector-specific constraints. The book presents a set of practical recommendations for policy makers to identify, prioritize, and remove the most serious constraints in each sector. This book will be valuable for policy makers, entrepreneurs, workers, professional economists, and anyone interested in economic development, industrialization, and the structural transformation of Vietnam and of developing countries

    Joint Optimization Schemes for Cooperative Wireless Information and Power Transfer over Rician Channels

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    Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) can lead to uninterrupted network operation by integrating radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting with data communication. In this paper, we consider a two-hop source-relay-destination network and investigate the efficient usage of a decode-and-forward (DF) relay for SWIPT toward the energy-constrained destination. In particular, by assuming a Rician fading environment, we jointly optimize power allocation (PA), relay placement (RP), and power splitting (PS) so as to minimize outage probability under the harvested power constraint at the destination node. We consider the two possible cases of source-to-destination distance: (1) small distance with direct information transfer link; and (2) relatively large distance with no direct reachability. Analytical expressions for individual and joint optimal PA, RP, and PS are obtained by exploiting convexity of outage minimization problem for the no direct link case. In case of direct source-to-destination link, multipseudoconvexity of joint-optimal PA, RP, and PS problem is proved, and alternating optimization is used to find the global optimal solution. Numerical results show that the joint optimal solutions, although strongly influenced by the harvested power requirement at the destination, can provide respectively 64% and 100% outage improvement over the fixed allocation scheme for without and with direct link

    Creating Landscape-Scale Maps of Coral Reef Cover for Marine Reserve Management from High-Resolution Multispectral Remote Sensing

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    New methods are needed for the study of coral reefs, as they are changing rapidly. Satellite remote sensing has become a common method for benthic mapping with advances in satellites and sensors and as methods are devised to account for atmospheric and water-column effects. Images from the QuickBird satellite have proven useful in reef mapping. Sand was distinguished from coral with an overall accuracy of 75% on the shallow reef off of the Caribbean island of Bonaire. Coral and sand had user accuracies of 50% and 90%, respectively. Increased samples of field-collected data would further increase the accuracies of such classifications

    Pulsatile flow dynamics in symmetric and asymmetric bifurcating vessels

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    Bifurcating vessel is a characteristic feature of biological systems such as arteries in the cardiovascular system and pulmonary airways. In cardiovascular system, the bifurcations are often asymmetric, flow is pulsatile, and the fluid, blood, shows a complex rheology. In this work, we study computationally pulsatile flow in planar symmetric and asymmetric, three-dimensional bifurcating vessels. The fluid is considered to be Newtonian as well as non-Newtonian following Carreau's model, and the results are compared. While the flow divides in the two daughter tubes equally in symmetric bifurcations, the flow distribution is time-dependent during a cardiac cycle in asymmetric bifurcations. The flow pattern changes significantly during a cardiac cycle. The secondary flow caused by a turning streamline is analyzed in terms of secondary velocity, vorticity, and helicity. Significant variation is observed in the secondary flow in a cardiac cycle. The secondary flow is observed to be stronger at the start of the diastole despite reduced flow rate. The separated flow on the outer wall causes a significant reduction in time-averaged wall shear stress, a biomarker to assess the possibility of atherosclerotic plaque development. While no significant difference is observed in the results obtained for Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids at high shear rates, for example, during systole, significant differences are observed when the shear rate is low, during diastole or in the separation region. The velocity profile for the non-Newtonian fluid is observed to be flatter than that for Newtonian fluid. Further oscillatory shearing index, relative residence time, the parameters used as biomarkers are presented

    Electrochemical oxidative Z-selective C(sp2)-H chlorination of acrylamides

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    An electrochemical method for the oxidative Z-selective C(sp2)–H chlorination of acrylamides has been developed. This catalyst and organic oxidant free method is applicable across various substituted tertiary acrylamides, and provides access to a broad range of synthetically useful Z-β-chloroacrylamides in good yields (22 examples, 73% average yield). The orthogonal derivatization of the products was demonstrated through chemoselective transformations and the electrochemical process was performed on gram scale in flow

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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