Recent developments in monetary and financial integration in Asia.

Asia’s share of world trade has expanded constantly over the last two decades. This increase reflects, inter alia, the considerable strengthening of trade links between the countries of the region, fostered by the vertical specialisation of the Asian economies. In the 1980s, the most advanced economies in the region, e.g. Japan, relocated the most labour-intensive stages of their production processes to the newly-industrialised Asian economies like South Korea and Singapore and then, in the 1990s, to emerging Asia, i.e. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The emergence of China has also given signifi cant impetus to regional trade integration. Surging intra-regional direct investment fl ows have accompanied and shored up trade fl ows, however, portfolio investment fl ows and cross-border bank loans have remained limited. Given that production processes within the region are complementary and that the final destination for exports is outside the region, the lack of a regional exchange rate arrangement in Asia does not appear to be a concern in the short term. Indeed, the regional integration initiatives adopted in Asia in the aftermath of the 1997-1998 financial crisis aim to build further resilience to fi nancial market turbulence. Firstly, deeper and more liquid local bond markets should make it possible to reduce the double financial mismatch, i.e. the currency mismatch and maturity mismatch, which largely sustained the crisis. In this regard, the ASEAN+3 Asian Bond Market Initiative examines the supply-side issues while the Asian Bond Funds initiative of the Executives’ Meeting of East Asia-Pacifi c Central Banks (EMEAP) deals with demand-side issues via the pooling of resources to buy bonds issued by member countries. Secondly, the Chiang Mai Initiative, which consists in a network of currency swap arrangements between the central banks of the ASEAN+3 member states, provides these countries with a regional fi nancial assistance mechanism in the event of a liquidity crisis. The Asian vertical model of production appears to have reached its limit and is evolving towards a more “horizontal” model in terms of both production (substitutability of production processes as a result of the shift towards higher value-added activities) and consumption (expansion of the regional market linked to the growth potential of domestic Chinese demand). Regional monetary co-operation could therefore aim in the future at curbing intra-regional exchange rate fl uctuations in order to promote trade and investment within the region.

Robust quantum control by shaped pulse

Considering the problem of the control of a two-state quantum system by an external field, we establish a general and versatile method that allows the derivation of smooth pulses, suitable for ultrafast applications, that feature the properties of high-fidelity, robustness, and low area. Such shaped pulses can be viewed as a single-shot generalization of the composite pulse technique with a time-dependent phase

Arbitrary state controlled-unitary gate by adiabatic passage

We propose a robust scheme involving atoms fixed in an optical cavity to directly implement the universal controlled-unitary gate. The present technique based on adiabatic passage uses novel dark states well suited for the controlled-rotation operation. We show that these dark states allow the robust implementation of a gate that is a generalisation of the controlled-unitary gate to the case where the control qubit can be selected to be an arbitrary state. This gate has potential applications to the rapid implementation of quantum algorithms such as of the projective measurement algorithm. This process is decoherence-free since excited atomic states and cavity modes are not populated during the dynamics.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure, submitted to Phys. Rev.

CNOT gate by adiabatic passage with an optical cavity

We propose a scheme for the construction of a CNOT gate by adiabatic passage in an optical cavity. In opposition to a previously proposed method, the technique is not based on fractional adiabatic passage, which requires the control of the ratio of two pulse amplitudes. Moreover, the technique constitutes a decoherence-free method in the sense that spontaneous emission and cavity damping are avoided since the dynamics follows dark states.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, submitted to EPJ

A conceptual framework for phase-dependent, composite flood risk index (FRI) curves based on the relationship between temporal probability of flood occurring (PH) and flood vulnerability index (FVI) along with maps of FVI within the Amite River Basin based on the August 2016 Flood.

Efforts directed at determining community vulnerability to flooding are limited and only include economic (dollar damages) and public safety impacts and do not consider the phase dependency of the system, i.e., pre-, during- and post-storm, both critical shortcomings for more broadly assessing community risk and developing comprehensive plans and mitigation strategies. This thesis first develops a framework based on a Flood-Vulnerability Index (FVI) approach and then demonstrates its usefulness, at the census tract level of detail, for three parishes in the Greater Baton Rouge, LA area, based on the August 2016 flood. FVI’s indicators are multidimensional and phase dependent: “Pre-Flood” Susceptibility Indicator (FSIPF); “During-Flood” Exposure Indicator (FEIDI); and “Post-Flood” Adaptive Capacity Indicator (FACIPF). The social and economic component of FSI, and FACI, were both computed using well-being variables developed as part of the Inland from the Coast (IFC) project (Moles, A., Birch, T., Chan, et al., 2020). FSIep was created using the Flood Hazard Index (FHI) methodology developed by Kazakis et al., (2015); which serves to identify flood prone zones based on the community’s hydrological, morphological and land-use, land-cover (LULC) characteristics. FEI was developed utilizing a structure inventory, included in Dewberry’s Amite River Basin Numerical model, and direct economic loss shapefiles, produced for HEC-FIA (Flood Impact Analysis) model. These two shapefiles were spatially joined using only matching attributes between the two shapefiles, which plans to represent the exposed elements of risk. Results from this work showed two primary trends. First, the shift from high pre-storm FVI values, indicating greater levels of susceptibility, in the East Baton Rouge Parish census tracts to high during-storm FVI values, indicating larger levels of exposure, in Livingston and Ascension Parishes that were inundated by floodwaters from the Amite and Comite Rivers. Furthermore, going from during-flood to during-recovery phase FVI, the number of highly vulnerable census tract areas increased within Ascension Parish and Livingston Parish along the southern end of the Amite River Basin. Given the severity and extent of the August 2016 event, this is not unexpected, but does highlight the ability of this approach to capture the spatial and temporal aspects of community vulnerability. In addition, while this demonstration used only a single event, future work could utilize this framework with probabilistic storm events to develop Flood Risk Indices. Finally, the framework allows for a very comprehensive and wide-ranging set of data types and sources, scaling and weighting techniques, and data aggregation methods. While the methodology and results in this work are limited by the availability of datasets and certain assumptions for scaling and weighting, the framework provides opportunities to identify data gaps and incorporation of more rigorous and meaningful statistics

Decouverte, en luxembourg belge, de Schlotheimiidae primitives (Ammonites) dans le pre-planorbis beds (Hettangien inférieur)

Les sondages d'Arlon et de Villers-devant-Orval (Belgique) ont montré l'existence, dans l'Hettangien inférieur de la Bordure Ardennaise, de Pre-Planorbis Beds fossilifères. Un niveau à petites Ammonites Schlotheimiidae y a été repéré. Ce sont les plus anciennes Schlotheimia stratigraphiquement bien localisées, connues à ce jour

L'Hettangien dans le NE du bassin de Paris: Biostratigraphie et evolution sedimentaire

The Ammonite-fauna allows to follow the evolution in time and space of the Luxembourg-sandstone-formation in the North-East of the Paris Basin. The biostratigraphic subdivision is specified for the whole Hettangian. The occurrence of Mesogean elements belonging to the genus Waehneroceras and Discamphiceras among a fauna with boreal features leads to some paleogeographic considerations. The presence of early Schlotheimiidae in the lower Hettangian raises a phylogenetic remark

Thermally stable low current consuming gallium and germanium chalcogenides for consumer and automotive memory applications

The phase change technology behind rewritable optical disks and the latest generation of electronic memories has provided clear commercial and technological advances for the field of data storage, by virtue of the many well known attributes, in particular scaling, cycling endurance and speed, that chalcogenide materials offer. While the switching power and current consumption of established germanium antimony telluride based memory cells are a major factor in chip design in real world applications, often the thermal stability of the device can be a major obstacle in the path to the full commercialisation. In this work we describe our research in material discovery and characterization for the purpose of identifying more thermally stable chalcogenides for applications in PCRAM