The impact of conflict on the shadow economy and FDI : evidence from causal and spatial inference

Conflict affects governance policies, rendering them fewer effective tools, which motivates people to move into the informal sector. The shadow economy activities are labour intensive and suitable for adoption with low-return capital and small-scale production. They inefficiently use the factors of production, and distort the investment environment. Moreover, the shadow economy affects official macroeconomic measurements such as of gross domestic product, consumption expenditure, the unemployment rate, and the labour force. This motivates researchers and policymakers to pay more interest to study the phenomena of the shadow economy. Therefore, this study uses the event study approach to infer whether contemporaneous conflict affects the size of the shadow economy in subsequent years. Further investigations using the difference in differences approach are conducted to test the impact of Intifada, a political conflict event that has harmed the Palestinian and Israeli economies, on the size of the shadow economy in both countries.While conflict is one phase of political unrest, it harms economies, and diminishes capital stock when armed forces and rebels target infrastructure, which is either damaged or demolished. Moreover, armed conflict increases the depreciation rate, encourages capital flight, deters new investment opportunities, and accelerates loss for businesses. Motivated by these facts, this thesis also tests the hypothesis that conflict could have an impact on FDI in the mining sector. To do that, an event-study approach is implemented that focuses on the possible dynamic and spatial spillover effects of conflict on FDI.The study finds that conflict has had a dynamic impact on the shadow economy that remains statistically significant over a span of three years. Moreover, its impact becomes higher when conflict turns out to be more intensive, yet it loses dynamism. Additionally, Intifada is found to have affected the Palestinian economy, but not the Israeli one.The results show inconsistency across different groups of countries for the dynamic impact of conflict on FDI in the mining sector. Furthermore, the study does not find significant spillover effects across neighbouring countries

Effect of Lifting Time and Drying Method on Yield, Quality and Aspergillus Flavus Incidence on Rainfed Groundnut

Two experiments were conducted over a period of five years from 1985  to 1 989, at Elobeid Agricultural Research Station Farm to study the effect of lifting time and drying method on yield, grade, kernel moisture content and aflatoxin incidence of rainfed groundnut. A randomized complete block design with three replications was used. Seven lifting times were made at 10-day intervals, staffing at 80 days and continuing up to 140 days after planting. Four drying methods were tested, two traditional ones, in which the plants were stacked with pods placed in the centre of the heap or packed over each other, and the other two included inverted windrows with pods upward and a new suggested method in which plants were stacked with pods placed up exposed to direct sunlight and air current. Lifting time significantly (P=0.05) affected yield and its grade. Early lifting increased the percentage of immature pods and resulted in low yield of poor grade, while late lifting increased the underground losses and decreased intact yield. Significant (P=0.05( positive correlation was found between lifting time and pod infection with A. flavus. Higher A. flavus infection was observed at late lifting. The results of the drying method experiment indicated that the level of aflatoxin contamination varied from one season to another. In the new suggested method and the inverted windrow method, the drying rate is faster and the percentage of contaminated samples was lower than that of the two traditional drying methods. To obtain high intact yield of good grade and reduced aflatoxin contamination, it is recommended to lift the crop at 100-110 days from planting and dry it for 8 days by stacking the plants with pods placed upward, so as to expose the pods to direct sun-light and air current. &nbsp

Aquaculture genomics, genetics and breeding in the United States: current status, challenges, and priorities for future research

Advancing the production efficiency and profitability of aquaculture is dependent upon the ability to utilize a diverse array of genetic resources. The ultimate goals of aquaculture genomics, genetics and breeding research are to enhance aquaculture production efficiency, sustainability, product quality, and profitability in support of the commercial sector and for the benefit of consumers. In order to achieve these goals, it is important to understand the genomic structure and organization of aquaculture species, and their genomic and phenomic variations, as well as the genetic basis of traits and their interrelationships. In addition, it is also important to understand the mechanisms of regulation and evolutionary conservation at the levels of genome, transcriptome, proteome, epigenome, and systems biology. With genomic information and information between the genomes and phenomes, technologies for marker/causal mutation-assisted selection, genome selection, and genome editing can be developed for applications in aquaculture. A set of genomic tools and resources must be made available including reference genome sequences and their annotations (including coding and non-coding regulatory elements), genome-wide polymorphic markers, efficient genotyping platforms, high-density and high-resolution linkage maps, and transcriptome resources including non-coding transcripts. Genomic and genetic control of important performance and production traits, such as disease resistance, feed conversion efficiency, growth rate, processing yield, behaviour, reproductive characteristics, and tolerance to environmental stressors like low dissolved oxygen, high or low water temperature and salinity, must be understood. QTL need to be identified, validated across strains, lines and populations, and their mechanisms of control understood. Causal gene(s) need to be identified. Genetic and epigenetic regulation of important aquaculture traits need to be determined, and technologies for marker-assisted selection, causal gene/mutation-assisted selection, genome selection, and genome editing using CRISPR and other technologies must be developed, demonstrated with applicability, and application to aquaculture industries. Major progress has been made in aquaculture genomics for dozens of fish and shellfish species including the development of genetic linkage maps, physical maps, microarrays, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays, transcriptome databases and various stages of genome reference sequences. This paper provides a general review of the current status, challenges and future research needs of aquaculture genomics, genetics, and breeding, with a focus on major aquaculture species in the United States: catfish, rainbow trout, Atlantic salmon, tilapia, striped bass, oysters, and shrimp. While the overall research priorities and the practical goals are similar across various aquaculture species, the current status in each species should dictate the next priority areas within the species. This paper is an output of the USDA Workshop for Aquaculture Genomics, Genetics, and Breeding held in late March 2016 in Auburn, Alabama, with participants from all parts of the United States

Knowledge Management System’s Characteristics that facilitate Knowledge Sharing to Support Decision Making Processes in Multinational Corporations

Nowadays we are living an era which is marked by efforts for originality, innovation, collaboration, accumulation ofexperience and integration with and through many inventions such as computers, the internet, and technologies that havefacilitated knowledge sharing and communication among people. This research seeks to extend the existing literature onKMS and knowledge sharing by proposing a conceptual framework, namely ECCCT (Evolution, Collaboration, Connection,Codification and Technical) that can be used to study how knowledge management systems (KMS) facilitate knowledgesharing to support decision making processes in multinational corporations (MNC). In this research, 42 semi-structuredinterviews have been conducted with participants from 35 MNC in 11 countries. All participants are KMS professionals,managers and employees in MNC who are using KMS in different sectors and at different levels. The work will assistmanagers in MNC in finding new ways of leveraging and sharing knowledge

To Share Or Not To Share: An Exploratory Review Of Knowledge Management Systems And Knowledge Sharing In Multinational Corporations

In the current fluid environment, the challenge for Multinational Corporations (MNCs) is how to accumulate knowledge that stems from various sources, facilitate the management of knowledge, and maximise value generated from all available assets. For this purpose, MNCs use Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) to share, utilise, and integrate knowledge. This paper seeks to explore how knowledge sharing takes place through the use of KMSs in MNCs. Based on 42 semi-structured interviews, main themes underlying knowledge sharing were identified and summarised in a more holistic conceptual framework. First, Knowledge Management Systems includes three sub-themes: Technology Acceptance, Communication Tools, and KMS Usage. Second, Knowledge Sharing Practices includes the following sub-themes: Content, Willingness to Share and External Factors. The paper clarifies the existing literature on KMSs and KS by proposing a holistic conceptual framework which will help managers to identify ways of initiating knowledge sharing in MNCs

Evidence of Vocal Tract Articulation in Self-Supervised Learning of Speech

Recent self-supervised learning (SSL) models have proven to learn rich representations of speech, which can readily be utilized by diverse downstream tasks. To understand such utilities, various analyses have been done for speech SSL models to reveal which and how information is encoded in the learned representations. Although the scope of previous analyses is extensive in acoustic, phonetic, and semantic perspectives, the physical grounding by speech production has not yet received full attention. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to link speech representations to articulatory trajectories measured by electromagnetic articulography (EMA). Our analysis is based on a linear probing approach where we measure articulatory score as an average correlation of linear mapping to EMA. We analyze a set of SSL models selected from the leaderboard of the SUPERB benchmark and perform further layer-wise analyses on two most successful models, Wav2Vec 2.0 and HuBERT. Surprisingly, representations from the recent speech SSL models are highly correlated with EMA traces (best: r = 0.81), and only 5 minutes are sufficient to train a linear model with high performance (r = 0.77). Our findings suggest that SSL models learn to align closely with continuous articulations, and provide a novel insight into speech SSL

Generation and collective interaction of giant magnetic dipoles in laser cluster plasma

Interaction of circularly polarized laser pulses with spherical nano-droplets generates nanometer-size magnets with lifetime on the order of hundreds of femtoseconds. Such magnetic dipoles are close enough in a cluster target and magnetic interaction takes place. We investigate such system of several magnetic dipoles and describe their rotation in the framework of Lagrangian formalism. The semi-analytical results are compared to particle-in-cell simulations, which confirm the theoretically obtained terrahertz frequency of the dipole oscillation