4,529 research outputs found
Recent Decisions under the Investment Canada Act: Is Canada Changing its Stance on Foreign Direct Investment?
With the globalization of the world’s economy, countries have relied heavily on foreign direct investment within their borders to spur domestic economic growth and compete in the global marketplace. Canada, historically a leading destination for foreign investors, has seen its share of global foreign direct investment decline steadily over the past several decades. Most recently, Canada has made waves in the global community by taking positive actions to interfere with foreign acquisitions of Canadian entities, despite the Canadian government’s declarations to global competitors advocating free market principles and denouncing protectionist policies. This article discusses Canada’s procedures governing foreign direct investment within its borders and examines the Canadian government’s recent foreign direct investment decisions and their potential negative implications on Canada’s position in the global marketplace. Given the benefits of foreign direct investment, this article argues that Canada needs to improve transparency regarding its decisions on foreign direct investment to alleviate global concerns of increasing government interference with foreign investors seeking to enter the Canadian economy. Additionally, the article argues that Canada should establish clearer metrics for its review of foreign direct investment to ensure that Canada maintains credibility in the global community as a leading destination for foreign investment opportunities
F_B from moving B mesons
We show results for the B meson decay constant calculated both for B mesons
at rest and those with non-zero momentum and using both the temporal and
spatial components of the axial vector current. It is an important check of
lattice systematic errors that all these determinations of f_B should agree. We
also describe how well different smearings for the B meson work at non-zero
momentum - the optimal smearing has a narrow smearing for the b quark.Comment: Lattice2001(heavyquark
Bianchi Cosmologies with Anisotropic Matter: Locally Rotationally Symmetric Models
The dynamics of cosmological models with isotropic matter sources (perfect
fluids) is extensively studied in the literature; in comparison, the dynamics
of cosmological models with anisotropic matter sources is not. In this paper we
consider spatially homogeneous locally rotationally symmetric solutions of the
Einstein equations with a large class of anisotropic matter models including
collisionless matter (Vlasov), elastic matter, and magnetic fields. The
dynamics of models of Bianchi types I, II, and IX are completely described; the
two most striking results are the following: (i) There exist matter models,
compatible with the standard energy conditions, such that solutions of Bianchi
type IX (closed cosmologies) need not necessarily recollapse; there is an open
set of forever expanding solutions. (ii) Generic type IX solutions associated
with a matter model like Vlasov matter exhibit oscillatory behavior toward the
initial singularity. This behavior differs significantly from that of
vacuum/perfect fluid cosmologies; hence "matter matters". Finally, we indicate
that our methods can probably be extended to treat a number of open problems,
in particular, the dynamics of Bianchi type VIII and Kantowski-Sachs solutions.Comment: 64 pages, 19 Figure
Semileptonic Decays: an Update Down Under
Heavy-meson semileptonic decays calculations on the lattice are reviewed. The
focus is upon obtaining reliable matrix elements. Errors that depend upon the
lattice spacing, , are an important source of systematic error. Full
improvement of matrix elements for arbitrary-mass four-component quarks is
discussed. With improvement, bottom-quark matrix elements can be calculated
directly using current lattices. Momentum dependent errors for -improved
quarks and statistical noise limit momenta to around 1 GeV/c with current
lattices. Hence, maximum recoil momenta can be reached for decays while
only a fraction of the maximum recoil momentum can be reliably studied for the
light-meson decay modes of the . Differential decay rates and partial widths
are phenomenologically important quantities in decays that can be reliably
determined with present lattices.Comment: 14 pages, 9 postscript figures, requires espcrc2.st
Faithful Low-Resource Data-to-Text Generation through Cycle Training
Methods to generate text from structured data have advanced significantly in
recent years, primarily due to fine-tuning of pre-trained language models on
large datasets. However, such models can fail to produce output faithful to the
input data, particularly on out-of-domain data. Sufficient annotated data is
often not available for specific domains, leading us to seek an unsupervised
approach to improve the faithfulness of output text. Since the problem is
fundamentally one of consistency between the representations of the structured
data and text, we evaluate the effectiveness of cycle training in this work.
Cycle training uses two models which are inverses of each other: one that
generates text from structured data, and one which generates the structured
data from natural language text. We show that cycle training, when initialized
with a small amount of supervised data (100 samples in our case), achieves
nearly the same performance as fully supervised approaches for the data-to-text
generation task on the WebNLG, E2E, WTQ, and WSQL datasets. We perform
extensive empirical analysis with automated evaluation metrics and a newly
designed human evaluation schema to reveal different cycle training strategies'
effectiveness of reducing various types of generation errors. Our code is
publicly available at https://github.com/Edillower/CycleNLG.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, ACL 202
Heavy quark physics from lattice QCD
I review the current status of lattice calculations of heavy quark
quantities. Particular emphasis is placed on leptonic and semileptonic decay
matrix elements.Comment: Lattice2001(plenary), 12 pages, 6 figures. Table 1 updated and typos
in Figure 6 correcte
NRQCD Results on Form Factors
We report results on and semi-leptonic decay form factors using
NRQCD. We investigate scaling behavior of decay amplitudes. For
Effect of higher order relativistic correction terms are also studied.Comment: 9 pgs. 10 figures. Latex2e. espcrc2.sty included. Talk presented at
the Internatioal Workshop "LATTICE QCD ON PARALLEL COMPUTERS", March 1997,
Tsukub
Real World Deniability in Messaging
This work discusses real world deniability in messaging. We highlight how the different models for cryptographic deniability do not ensure practical deniability. To overcome this situation, we propose a model for real world deniability that takes into account the entire messaging system. We then discuss how deniability is (not) used in practice and the challenges arising from the design of a deniable system. We propose a simple, yet powerful solution for deniability: applications should enable direct modification of local messages; we discuss the impacts of this strong deniability property
Poverty rate prediction using multi-modal survey and earth observation data
This work presents an approach for combining household demographic and living
standards survey questions with features derived from satellite imagery to
predict the poverty rate of a region. Our approach utilizes visual features
obtained from a single-step featurization method applied to freely available
10m/px Sentinel-2 surface reflectance satellite imagery. These visual features
are combined with ten survey questions in a proxy means test (PMT) to estimate
whether a household is below the poverty line. We show that the inclusion of
visual features reduces the mean error in poverty rate estimates from 4.09% to
3.88% over a nationally representative out-of-sample test set. In addition to
including satellite imagery features in proxy means tests, we propose an
approach for selecting a subset of survey questions that are complementary to
the visual features extracted from satellite imagery. Specifically, we design a
survey variable selection approach guided by the full survey and image features
and use the approach to determine the most relevant set of small survey
questions to include in a PMT. We validate the choice of small survey questions
in a downstream task of predicting the poverty rate using the small set of
questions. This approach results in the best performance -- errors in poverty
rate decrease from 4.09% to 3.71%. We show that extracted visual features
encode geographic and urbanization differences between regions.Comment: In 2023 ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable
Societies (COMPASS 23) Short Papers Trac
Challenges and perceptions of implementing mass testing, treatment and tracking in malaria control: a qualitative study in Pakro sub-district of Ghana.
BACKGROUND: Malaria remains endemic in Ghana despite several interventions. Studies have demonstrated very high levels of asymptomatic malaria parasitaemia in both under-five and school-age children. Mass testing, treatment and tracking (MTTT) of malaria in communities is being proposed for implementation with the argument that it can reduce parasite load, amplify gains from the other control interventions and consequently lead to elimination. However, challenges associated with implementing MTTT such as feasibility, levels of coverage to be achieved for effectiveness, community perceptions and cost implications need to be clearly understood. This qualitative study was therefore conducted in an area with on-going MTTT to assess community and health workers' perceptions about feasibility of scale-up and effectiveness to guide scale-up decisions. METHODS: This qualitative study employed purposive sampling to select the study participants. Ten focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted in seven communities; eight with community members (n = 80) and two with health workers (n = 14). In addition, two in-depth interviews (IDI) were conducted, one with a Physician Assistant and another with a Laboratory Technician at the health facility. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, translated and analyzed using QSR NVivo 12. RESULTS: Both health workers and community members expressed positive perceptions about the feasibility of implementation and effectiveness of MTTT as an intervention that could reduce the burden of malaria in the community. MTTT implementation was perceived to have increased sensitisation about malaria, reduced the incidence of malaria, reduced household expenditure on malaria and alleviated the need to travel long distances for healthcare. Key challenges to implementation were doubts about the expertise of trained Community-Based Health Volunteers (CBHVs) to diagnose and treat malaria appropriately, side effects of Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (ACTs) and misconceptions that CBHVs could infect children with epilepsy. CONCLUSION: The study demonstrated that MTTT was perceived to be effective in reducing malaria incidence and related hospital visits in participating communities. MTTT was deemed useful in breaking financial and geographical barriers to accessing healthcare. The interventions were feasible and acceptable to community members, despite observed challenges to implementation such as concerns about CBHVs' knowledge and skills and reduced revenue from internally generated funds (IGF) of the health facility
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