Exchange rate volatility and exports: the case of emerging East Asian economies.

This thesis provides an empirical analysis of the impact of exchange rate volatility on the exports of five emerging East and South East Asian economies; China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The countries under consideration are the main members of the impending ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (ACFTA), and the options for a closer monetary integration including proposais for the eventual formation of a currency union within the region are currently an active area of research and policy debate. Therefore, an understanding of the degree to which exchange rate volatility affects their export activity is important for setting the optimal exchange rate policy in emerging East Asian countries. Recognizing the specificity of the exports of the sample countries which is different from those of industrialised countries this study employs an augmented generalised gravity model instead of a pure gravity model. A GMM-IV approach is used to overcome the potential econometric problems of endogeneity and heteroskedasticity. In addition, this study is the first to conduct the recently developed panel unit-root and cointegration tests to verify the existence of a long-run stationary relationship between real exports and exchange-rate volatility. The benchmark measure of the exchange rate volatility which represents uncertainty is the standard deviation of the first difference of the logarithmic exchange rate. In order to check the robustness of the results two additional measures of exchange rate volatility - the moving average standard deviation of the logarithmic exchange rate (MASD) and the conditional exchange rate volatility which follows a Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedascity process (GARCH) are also used to estimate the model. The results provide a strong evidence that exchange rate volatility has an economically and statistically significant negative impact not only on the overall exports to the world market but also on the intra-regional exports of emerging East Asian countries. In addition, the results indicate that the adverse effect of exchange rate volatility on exports is not a linear and is conditional on the financial sector development of the exporting country: the more financially developed an economy is, the less its exports are adversely affected by exchange rate volatility. These results are robust across different estimation techniques and do not depend on the variable chosen to proxy exchange rate uncertainty. In conclusion, the results of the thesis suggest that whilst exchange rate flexibility has desirable properties as a 'shock absorber' to dampen the impact of real shocks, on average it still has an adverse effect on the exports of the emerging East Asian countries, and the impact is more severe on a financially less developed economy

A Global Optimisation Toolbox for Massively Parallel Engineering Optimisation

A software platform for global optimisation, called PaGMO, has been developed within the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) at the European Space Agency, and was recently released as an open-source project. PaGMO is built to tackle high-dimensional global optimisation problems, and it has been successfully used to find solutions to real-life engineering problems among which the preliminary design of interplanetary spacecraft trajectories - both chemical (including multiple flybys and deep-space maneuvers) and low-thrust (limited, at the moment, to single phase trajectories), the inverse design of nano-structured radiators and the design of non-reactive controllers for planetary rovers. Featuring an arsenal of global and local optimisation algorithms (including genetic algorithms, differential evolution, simulated annealing, particle swarm optimisation, compass search, improved harmony search, and various interfaces to libraries for local optimisation such as SNOPT, IPOPT, GSL and NLopt), PaGMO is at its core a C++ library which employs an object-oriented architecture providing a clean and easily-extensible optimisation framework. Adoption of multi-threaded programming ensures the efficient exploitation of modern multi-core architectures and allows for a straightforward implementation of the island model paradigm, in which multiple populations of candidate solutions asynchronously exchange information in order to speed-up and improve the optimisation process. In addition to the C++ interface, PaGMO's capabilities are exposed to the high-level language Python, so that it is possible to easily use PaGMO in an interactive session and take advantage of the numerous scientific Python libraries available.Comment: To be presented at 'ICATT 2010: International Conference on Astrodynamics Tools and Techniques

Women Incarceration and Attitudes Towards Restraints Used During a Child’s Birth

The complexities of women\u27s incarceration are misunderstood and often not spoken of, and as a criminal justice worker myself, it is very interesting to me to learn more about crimes, especially finding out more about crimes among female offenders’ because most of the time, we hear about crimes and the majority of the offenders are males. Therefore, I believe that it is important to find out more about crimes on the women\u27s side and see what it is like and how they differ from the men. Unlike male offenders, female offenders have a different background in committing crimes. For instance, many female offenders experienced traumatic events during their childhood from an abusive family at the hands of their father. It often reoccurs down the road, but now with their intimate partners. According to Bach, “Children who are abused, particularly girls, are at risk of becoming repeat victims of violence throughout their lives. Herrenkohl (1998) said abused girls who repeatedly internalize their feelings may eventually reach a threshold at which their repressed emotions turn outward and aggressive — perhaps pushing them to the point of criminal behavior” (2015, p. 5). Women often depend on their partners, and women that fall into the loophole of bad decisions are influenced by their intimate partners that are also involved in illegal activities. While looking into women\u27s crime incarceration, we see patterns of women coming in and out of the corrections system because they do not have the proper treatment and programs while incarcerated. For instance: According to Morash (1998), “Similarly, in 40 percent of the jail jurisdictions, jail administrators indicated no need for new models or approaches to holding women in jail, whereas administrators of women’s prisons noted many management problems resulting from crowding, lack of programming, and difficulties with classification and intake systems. Women\u27s prison administrators also pointed to high staff turnover, the need for better-qualified staff, lack of parity in programming, and high numbers of women prisoners (p. 3). Another reason is that women are often caught up in petty crimes yet to serve their time, which ultimately leaves them stuck inside jail. In contrast, women\u27s incarceration has been on the rise, and most of these women prisoners are mothers. According to Bender (2021), it states, “Over half (58%) of all women in U.S. prisons are mothers, as are 80% of women in jails” (para 14), including many who are incarcerated and awaiting trial simply because they can\u27t afford bail. In fact, according to OK Justice reform, “Most of these women are incarcerated for non-violent offenses” (para. 15). This research shows the nature of prisons for women, especially mothers, and how they are being treated while in labor. At the same time, many states in the United States still use restraints during a child’s birth, which causes many female prisoners to experienced trauma physically and mentally. On top of that, there are no laws to completely ban this practice in the United States, even when there is much evidence as to why it is not an ethical practice

Machine Prognosis with Full Utilization of Truncated Lifetime Data

Intelligent machine fault prognostics estimates how soon and likely a failure will occur with little human expert judgement. It minimizes production downtime, spares inventory and maintenance labour costs. Prognostic models, especially probabilistic methods, require numerous historical failure instances. In practice however, industrial and military communities would rarely allow their engineering assets to run to failure. It is only known that the machine component survived up to the time of repair or replacement but there is no information as to when the component would have failed if left undisturbed. Data of this sort are called truncated data. This paper proposes a novel model, the Intelligent Product Limit Estimator (iPLE), which utilizes truncated data to perform adaptive long-range prediction of a machine component's remaining lifetime. It takes advantage of statistical models' ability to provide useful representation of survival probabilities, and of neural networks ability to recognise nonlinear relationships between a machine component's future survival condition and a given series of prognostic data features. Progressive bearing degradation data were simulated and used to train and validate the proposed model. The results support our hypothesis that the iPLE can perform better than similar prognostics models that neglect truncated data

Optimal Properties of Experimental Designs

Abstract Not Provided

Runtime protection via dataflow flattening

Software running on an open architecture, such as the PC, is vulnerable to inspection and modification. Since software may process valuable or sensitive information, many defenses against data analysis and modification have been proposed. This paper complements existing work and focuses on hiding data location throughout program execution. To achieve this, we combine three techniques: (i) periodic reordering of the heap, (ii) migrating local variables from the stack to the heap and (iii) pointer scrambling. By essentialy flattening the dataflow graph of the program, the techniques serve to complicate static dataflow analysis and dynamic data tracking. Our methodology can be viewed as a data-oriented analogue of control-flow flattening techniques. Dataflow flattening is useful in practical scenarios like DRM, information-flow protection, and exploit resistance. Our prototype implementation compiles C programs into a binary for which every access to the heap is redirected through a memory management unit. Stack-based variables may be migrated to the heap, while pointer accesses and arithmetic may be scrambled and redirected. We evaluate our approach experimentally on the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suit

Computational Analysis of Gas Kinetic Bhatnagar-Grosskrook Scheme for Inviscid Compressible Flow

Many numerical schemes have been developed in the field of computational fluid dynamics to simulate inviscid, compressible flows.Among those most notable and successful are the Godunov-type schemes and flux vector splitting schemes.Besides these numerical schemes, schemes based on the gas kinetic theory have been developed in the past few years.Stemming from this approach, the gas kinetic Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) scheme is realized.In this thesis, the BGK scheme based on the BGK model of the approximate Boltzmann equation has been fully analyzed and developed accordingly.The numerical algorithms for the BGK scheme are first developed for simulating one-dimensional flow, and then follow by the-two dimensional flow realms. Higher-order spatial accuracy of the scheme is achieved through the reconstruction of the flow variables via the Monotone Upstream-Centered Schemes for Conservation Laws (MUSCL) approach. For time integration method, an explicit method is adopted for the first-order schemes in both one and two-dimensional flow problems.The classical Runge-kutta multistage method is employed only for schemes with higher-order of accuracy. In addition, an implicit time integration method known as the Approximate Factorization-Alternating Direction Implicit (AF-ADI) would be employed when dealing with two-dimensional flow problems in higher-order.In order to investigate the computational characteristics of the BGK scheme in detail, several cases of shock-shock interaction problem have been numerically analyzed.Developed code for the onedimensional flow is validated with three typical test cases, namely,quasi-onedimensional supersonic-subsonic nozzle flow, shock tube, and two interacting blast waves.Likewise,four typical two-dimensional test cases that are found in the literatures are used to validate the developed code for the two-dimensional flow.They are regular shock reflection,supersonic flow over a wedge, channel with a fifteen-degree ramp, and flow past a cylinder.From these validation cases, computed results are compared with the available exact solutions and with other computational results obtained by using some well known numerical discretization schemes.In comparison,the BGK scheme exhibits the most accurate shock resolution capabilities,least diffusiveness, least oscillatory,and great robustness

Content representation in the human medial temporal lobe

The transformation of sensory inputs into complex memory representations is fundamental to human experience; yet, little is known about how this crucial process is achieved. When you meet your friend at the new cafe in town, what part of the brain encodes this novel scene into long term memory? What part encoded your friend’s favorite t-shirt, so that the sight of it gives you a feeling of familiarity rather than surprise? It is well-established that the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is crucial to both processes, but the MTL is not a single homogeneous region. In fact, it is composed of several anatomically distinct subregions including hippocampus, perirhinal cortex (PRC) and parahippocampal cortex (PHC). However, the computations performed by each subregion to encode individual events is still unclear. The present research tests the central hypothesis that different forms of event content are transformed into memory by distinct subregions within the MTL. A critical barrier in the study of content representation thus far has been its focus on comparing univariate peak activations in a region to different stimulus materials. To go beyond this limited approach, we employed multivariate statistical analyses that takes into account how event content is represented by distributed activity in MTL subregions. First, we examine the content-specific contributions of MTL subregions to episodic encoding and retrieval. Then, we demonstrate how these distributed representations support memory-based prediction to resolve ambiguities in our environment.Neuroscienc

Assessing the conditions for compliance in the squid light fisheries in Myeik, Myanmar

Light fishing is one of the most advanced and successful methods in several fisheries worldwide. Light fishing operations in Myanmar involve using light luring methods in inshore and offshore fisheries, especially for catching squids and pelagic fishes in squid seine (stick-held falling net) and purse seine vessels. Technological advancements have led fishers to use more power, light intensity, and small mesh-size fishing net to increase catches. The results have decreased the catches of squids and increased the catches of immature fish and vulnerable pelagic species. These negative impacts result from fishers’ non-compliance with the regulations of light fishing in Myanmar. This study assesses fishers’ knowledge and compliance with light fishing regulations in Myanmar, with a focus on the fishers in the Myeik offshore fisheries. The study explores the possible reasons why fishers disobey the existing regulations of light fishing with the four different hypotheses (ignorance, lack of opportunities, disagreement, and profit-maximising behaviour) to postulate reasons for non-compliance. Profit-maximising behaviour is perceived to be more significant despite the interrelations between the four hypotheses for predicting possible reasons for non-compliance. Weaknesses and insufficient monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) systems in the department of fisheries (DoF) contribute to fishers’ non-compliance with the regulations of light fishing in Myanmar. Keywords: light fishing, MCS, compliance, and legitimacy, Myeik offshore fishery