Transaction Costs and Housing Affordability in Asia

Asia is home to some of the fastest growing cities in the world. As urbanization increases, demand for housing also increases. Well functioning housing markets can minimize problems associated with rapid urbanization such as unaffordable housing and urban slums. This paper explores the different aspects of the residential property sales markets in Asian countries. Using data gathered by the Global Property Guide, transaction costs associated with residential property purchases are analyzed. Housing markets are also examined in terms of tenure, protection of property rights, and openness and transparency. Roundtrip transaction costs for buying properties are high, above 10% in several countries in Asia. High transaction costs and unaffordable housing combined with weak protection of property rights are seen to be conducive to the creation of urban slums.Property markets, Transaction costs, Housing affordability, Slums

Assessing the impact of “more-flexible” learning as part of a study program

With the increasing use of Flexible Learning approaches in Higher Education at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), measuring their effectiveness, from both an educational and a participant's point of view, is of particular importance. In response to the limited scientific contributions on this topic, this article presents a possibility of how an assessment can take place: this study analyzes 62 undergrad-uate student responses to a Blended Learning task and compares the participant findings with a pre-existing educational competency framework

Regulatory Disclosure Policies and Potential Induced Changes in Behavior: An Outcome Evaluation of Santa Clara County’s Enhanced Food Safety Program Elements

Despite countless advances in food microbiology and public health regulations, foodborne illness continues to be a major strain on public health outcomes and a costly economic burden. In the United States, many agencies are responsible for ensuring the quality of food, both domestically produced and imported. States and localities are delegated the responsibility of identifying and ensuring sound practices in the latter stages of the food production process, namely the retail distribution of food products to consumers. Regulatory policies across the nation have only recently incorporated the evidenced-based principles of hazard risk management (Law, 2003). Still, food-related acute gastrointestinal illnesses have remained pervasive in the country, demonstrating the limits of existing standards and approaches employed by regulators. Even more recent is the adoption of these principles in the retail food domain. The trend has been complemented by transparency requirements augmented by technological developments such as the internet and mobile applications. Santa Clara County has recently become among the latest jurisdictions to adopt a placarding requirement and a searchable website in an attempt to improve compliance with retail food safety rules, as well as public health. This paper will attempt to determine whether or not the efforts to make inspection data more assessable to consumers has resulted in greater compliance with food safety laws by food retailers

Propuesta para la identificación de “barrios” con riesgo hidrometeorológico

Ponència presentada a: Session 5: Del diseño a la construcción: Sostenibilidad (temas de diseño ambiental) / From design to construction: Sustantibility (enviromental design issues

Samsung R&D Institute Philippines at WMT 2023

In this paper, we describe the constrained MT systems submitted by Samsung R&D Institute Philippines to the WMT 2023 General Translation Task for two directions: en$\rightarrow$he and he$\rightarrow$en. Our systems comprise of Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence models that are trained with a mix of best practices: comprehensive data preprocessing pipelines, synthetic backtranslated data, and the use of noisy channel reranking during online decoding. Our models perform comparably to, and sometimes outperform, strong baseline unconstrained systems such as mBART50 M2M and NLLB 200 MoE despite having significantly fewer parameters on two public benchmarks: FLORES-200 and NTREX-128.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation 2023 (WMT

Documentación del sistema de gestión ambiental en la empresa Carangel S.A.S. bajo los lineamientos de la Norma NTC ISO 14001:2004

El presente trabajo surge de la responsabilidad que tiene CARANGEL S.A.S con los residuos peligrosos y la necesidad de disponerlos de una forma adecuada debido al manejo inapropiado y al riesgo al que estaban expuestos los trabajadores de la organización. Es por esto que se decide enfocar el rumbo de la empresa hacia la creación de un sistema de gestión ambiental a través de acciones que permitan identificar y tratar los aspectos e impactos generados durante el proceso productivo, con la finalidad de comercializar y distribuir productos de alta calidad con un menor impacto al ambiente. Se comenzó con una etapa diagnóstica para determinar la situación ambiental de empresa, se identificaron los requisitos legales aplicables de la organización, se creó una figura corporativa ambiental y la política ambiental que permitiera ver el compromiso que tiene CARANGEL S.A.S frente al tema ambiental y finalmente se propuso un plan de gestión ambiental constituido por objetivos, actividades y metas ambientales.This work arises from the resposibility CARANGEL S.A.S has with the hazardous waste and its need to use them in an appropriate way due to improper handling and the risk which workers were exposed in the organization, so it was decided to focus the direction of the company towards the creation an environmental management system through actions to identify and address issues and impacts generated during the production process in order to market and distribute high quality products with less impact to the environment. So it begins with a step diagnosed to determine the company's environmental situation, identify the applicable legal requirements of the organization, creating a corporate figure and an environmental policy that can view the CARANGELS.A.S commitment to environmental issues against and finally propose environmental management plan consists of objectives, activities and targets