The impact of access to credit on household welfare in rural Vietnam

In this paper, we investigate the determinants of household borrowing from the formal financial sector, the determinants of credit rationing by the formal sector and the impact of credit on household welfare in rural Vietnam. We find that education, savings, the area devoted to farming and the availability of formal credit are important determinants of both household borrowing and credit rationing by the formal sector. We also find that credit has a positive (albeit small) effect on household welfare in rural Vietnam. Our findings have policy implications for land and banking sector reform

Skills for the Future: Analyses of Singapore's Graduate Labour Market and its Upper Secondary Education and Training System in Comparative Perspective

Singapore has been of long-standing interest worldwide for those interested in skills issues. This small city state has broadly succeeded over decades in maintaining a balance between the skills demanded in the economy at successive stages in its development and the skills being supplied through schools, polytechnics and workplace training, supplemented by a substantial segmented migrant workforce. Singapore also stands out for the successes of its school system, with the pupils in its schools being ranked among the highest globally in the PISA tests. This report examines two important aspects of the supply and utilisation of skills in Singapore in recent years: the graduate labour market and the system of upper secondary education and training

Imaging and Imagining Taiwan: Identity representation and cultural politics

Since the 1990s the issue of identity has been one of the most prominent and hotly-debated topics in Taiwan Studies. A rich corpus of literature has been produced in various fields in the attempt to address this problematic issue, examining questions of Taiwanese identity from political, social and cultural perspectives. Imaging and Imagining Taiwan takes a fresh approach to this important topic, examining Taiwanese identity from a visual perspective and exploring the ways in which the island is presented and imagined. In contrast to those studies that seek to address the issue of identity from an essentialist position, Imaging and Imagining Taiwan offers a new contextualization of identity, investigating the ways in which Taiwan has been represented in films, fine art, advertising, sport, and social spaces at different periods in history. Covering a diverse range of topics, the book aims to capture the fluidity, changeability, fragmentation and dynamism of Taiwanese identity as an imaginary and encompassing whole. Through seven case studies the book focuses on the ways in which Taiwan is represented, how this relates to identity politics, and how the island is imaged and imagined visually, socially, and symbolically. The essays comprising this collection are grouped into three sections, each of which focuses on a particular approach to the topic of Taiwanese identity. The first of these —Colonial Representation —deals with colonial subjectivity and traumatic experience. The second, entitled Imaging Difference, examines cultural practices in film, TV advertisements and fine art, and explores the boundaries between the inside and the outside, the difference marked by the process of othering, and the anxiety and alienation of the excluded. The third section—Identity and Place—focuses on the relationship between identity and the social construction of place, and examines the role of place-making in the new Taiwanese nation-building process. Interrogating the complex issue of Taiwanese identity from various standpoints, the seven contributors write from a range of disciplinary backgrounds (Literature, History, Film Studies, Linguistics, Anthropology and Cultural Studies) and geographical contexts (Taiwan, Europe and America). This combination of fresh perspectives and a range of disciplinary approaches offers a set of diverse yet complementary insights into how Taiwan has been envisioned and imagined, and how the Taiwanese have positioned and identified themselves at different times. By combining different themes and disciplinary approaches together in one publication, Imaging and Imagining Taiwan brings both nuance and depth to the discussion of the representation of Taiwanese identity. The book articulates and examines the complexity of identity, avoiding essentialist approaches to the topic, instead illustrating identity's multi-faceted nature and dynamic messiness. Thus, the book argues, the politics of identity is not only a politics of representation, but also a politics of positioning, whereby identity is formulated both by the construction of sameness and the inscription of difference. The interdisciplinary approach adopted by this book makes the discussion of Taiwanese identity of interest to those both studying and working in a range of subject disciplines, not limited to Taiwan Studies, but also in History, Film, Linguistics, Literary Studies, Nationalism Studies, and Urban Studies

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Clusters are Consistent with Planck

The recent Dark Energy Survey Year 1 (DES-Y1) analysis of galaxy cluster abundances and weak lensing produced $\Omega_{\rm m}$ and $\sigma_8$ constraints in 5.6$\sigma$ tension with Planck. It is suggested in that work that this tension is driven by unmodelled systematics in optical cluster selection. We present a novel simulation-based forward modeling framework that explicitly incorporates cluster selection into its model predictions. Applying this framework to the DES-Y1 data we find consistency with Planck, resolving the tension found in the DES-Y1 analysis. An extension of this approach to the final DES data set will produce robust constraints on $\Lambda$CDM parameters and correspondingly strong tests of cosmological models.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, Supplemental material with 2 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letter

Grounding Classical Task Planners via Vision-Language Models

Classical planning systems have shown great advances in utilizing rule-based human knowledge to compute accurate plans for service robots, but they face challenges due to the strong assumptions of perfect perception and action executions. To tackle these challenges, one solution is to connect the symbolic states and actions generated by classical planners to the robot's sensory observations, thus closing the perception-action loop. This research proposes a visually-grounded planning framework, named TPVQA, which leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to detect action failures and verify action affordances towards enabling successful plan execution. Results from quantitative experiments show that TPVQA surpasses competitive baselines from previous studies in task completion rate

Integrating Action Knowledge and LLMs for Task Planning and Situation Handling in Open Worlds

Task planning systems have been developed to help robots use human knowledge (about actions) to complete long-horizon tasks. Most of them have been developed for "closed worlds" while assuming the robot is provided with complete world knowledge. However, the real world is generally open, and the robots frequently encounter unforeseen situations that can potentially break the planner's completeness. Could we leverage the recent advances on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable classical planning systems to deal with novel situations? This paper introduces a novel framework, called COWP, for open-world task planning and situation handling. COWP dynamically augments the robot's action knowledge, including the preconditions and effects of actions, with task-oriented commonsense knowledge. COWP embraces the openness from LLMs, and is grounded to specific domains via action knowledge. For systematic evaluations, we collected a dataset that includes 1,085 execution-time situations. Each situation corresponds to a state instance wherein a robot is potentially unable to complete a task using a solution that normally works. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms competitive baselines from the literature in the success rate of service tasks. Additionally, we have demonstrated COWP using a mobile manipulator. Supplementary materials are available at: https://cowplanning.github.io/Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2210.0128

Evaluations of entomopathogenic fungi, Metarhizium anisopliae inoculate on the treated soils towards Paederus fuscipes

Rove beetle, Paederus fuscipes Curtis is a natural predator of several crop pests in the agriculture ecosystem, however, their high intrusion into human settlements caused them to become public health concern due to Paedarus dermatitis infection among humans. The entomopathogenic effectiveness of Metarhizium anisopliae Mechnikov was tested as biological control towards adults Paederus fuscipes by inoculating on soils. The mortality of P. fuscipes was observed and data were subjected to analysis using ANOVA and Kaplan-Meier method. Results show that P. fuscipes tested with the highest concentration at 1.3 × 1010 conidia/mL exhibited the shortest mean mortality time at 11.0 ± 2.5 days and survival time of 7.6 ± 0.7 days, yet the secondhighest concentration exhibited at 2.2 × 109 showed mean mortality of 18.4 ± 4.2 days and survival time of 11.9 ± 0.8 days. Log Rank (Mantel-Cox) pairwise comparison indicated the significant differences between the highest concentration of 1.3 × 1010 with the control (χ2 = 62.3, df=1 p<0.0005). Both mean mortality time and survival time of P. fuscipes showed inconsistent trends from the highest concentration of M. anisopliae towards the lowest. Pathogenicity was observed at the concentrations of 106, 109, and 1010 after performing Koch’s postulates. The results were unexpected but could indicate that M. anisopliae has the potential to be a biocontrol agent at a higher concentration