Embracing Diversity and Adapting to the Shifting Landscape of Health Behavior Research: American Academy of Health Behavior Presidential Note

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Shedding New Light on Multinational Corporations and Human Rights: Promises and Limits of “Blockchainizing” the Global Supply Chain

Over the last few decades, advances in transportation and production technology, in conjunction with economic globalization and the emergence of multinational corporations, have consolidated fragmented production processes into long and complex supply chains across jurisdictions. While there are benefits to such global supply chains (“GSCs”), the prevalence of human rights violations attributable to information asymmetry, as well as rule of law gaps between different jurisdictions, has been a constant challenge. Modern slavery, child abuse, harsh working conditions, low wages, and other problems have reoccurred in the factories of upstream suppliers in the global South and have been systemically ignored by buyers in the global North. As such, how to alleviate human rights abuses along GSCs is indeed a daunting problem. Today, various public, private, and hybrid approaches have been designed and implemented at different levels by different actors to address GSC human rights challenges, such as the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“UNGPs”), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (“OECD”) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act, the United States’ Dodd-Frank Act, the Responsible Business Alliance Codes of Conduct, and the Social Accountability 8000 International Standard. However, these public, private, and hybrid governance mechanisms have grown more ineffective and inefficient due to—again—information asymmetry, and rule of law gaps. A stronger approach that is premised upon transparency and traceability in the GSC is urgently needed. To fill these gaps, the recent emergence of distributed ledger technologies (commonly referred to as blockchain) may offer a promising disintermediation step toward a “technological fix” to GSCs’ human rights challenges. To assess such a possibility from both a theoretical and a practical perspective, we first examine in Section II the characteristics, benefits, and cross-border spillover effects of GSCs, as well as human rights violations by multinational corporations and their power and responsibilities. Section III illuminates the ineffectiveness of existing governance models and regulatory measures, at both the international and national levels, and identifies information asymmetry and rule of law gaps as fundamental flaws. This finding leads us to examine the extent to which blockchain can serve as a governance tool along GSCs. Section IV discusses how the key features of blockchain—transparency, traceability, data consistency and security, authenticity, and completeness—can alleviate problems of information asymmetry, rule of law gaps, and corporate compliance along GSCs, further helping to ameliorate transnational human rights issues. Nevertheless, while “blockchainizing” GSCs seems to have the potential to overcome challenges of public and private governance, some normative and technical limits and risks remain to be addressed, such as adequate infrastructural support, scalability, cybersecurity, and the “garbage in, garbage out” conundrum

Examining Stakeholder Perspectives: Process, Performance and Progress of the Age-Friendly Taiwan Program.

Since Taiwans age-friendly city (AFC) program was launched in 2012, the central government has provided various resources to the countrys 22 local authorities, including budgetary support, policy advocacy, and consultation from a team of experts. This study examines stakeholder perspectives on the process, performance, and outcome of the AFC program. A 53-item questionnaire was developed based on the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline, including mechanisms and processes (20 items), outcome evaluations (23 items), and resource integration (10 items). There was a great difference found among scores between facilitators and experts for inter-exchange experience with local and international cities (40%) and monitor and revise indicators (37%) in mechanisms and processes, evaluate performance of indicators and action plans (37%) in outcome evaluations, and interaction between government and community (46%) and interaction between civil organization and senior society (39%) in resource integration. Clearly, facilitators showed overly optimistic assessments in AFC mechanisms and processes, outcome evaluation, and resource integration. The results showed disconnect between experts expectations versus actual practice conducted by facilitators. Implications of these findings are to integrate top down expectations with the realities of bottom up practice to design more realistic evaluations; continue to educate stakeholders about design, implementation and evaluation; and further integrate resources from government, civil organizations, and community

Seebeck Coefficients in Nanoscale Junctions: Effects of Electron-vibration Scattering and Local Heating

We report first-principles calculations of inelastic Seebeck coefficients in an aluminum monatomic junction. We compare the elastic and inelastic Seebeck coefficients with and without local heating. In the low temperature regime, the signature of normal modes in the profiles of the inelastic Seebeck effects is salient. The inelastic Seebeck effects are enhanced by the normal modes, and further magnified by local heating. In the high temperature regime, the inelastic Seebeck effects are weakly suppressed due to the quasi-ballistic transport.Comment: 3 Figure

Influence of electrode thermal conductivity on resistive switching behavior during reset process

Resistive random access memory (RRAM) is the most promising candidate for non-volatile memory (NVM) due to its extremely low operation voltage, extremely fast write/erase speed, and excellent scaling capability. However, an obstacle hindering mass production of RRAM is the non-uniform physical mechanism in its resistance switching process. This study examines the influence of different electrode thermal conductivity on switching behavior during the reset process. Electrical analysis methods and an analysis of current conduction mechanism indicate that better thermal conductivity in the electrode will require larger input power in order to induce more active oxygen ions to take part in the reset process. More active oxygen ions cause a more complete reaction during the reset process, and cause the effective switching gap (dsw) to become thicker. The effect of the electrode thermal conductivity and input power are explained by our model and clarified by electrical analysis methods. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Multi-Operator Fairness in Transparent RAN Sharing by Soft-Partition With Blocking and Dropping Mechanism

Radio access network (RAN) sharing has attracted significant attention from telecom operators as a means of accommodating data surges. However, current mechanisms for RAN sharing ignore the fairness issue among operators, and hence the RAN may be under- or over-utilized. Furthermore, the fairness among different operators cannot be guaranteed, since the RAN resources are distributed on a first come, first served basis. Accordingly, the present study proposes a “soft-partition with blocking and dropping” (SBD) mechanism that offers inter-operator fairness using a “soft-partition” approach. In particular, the operator subscribers are permitted to overuse the resources specified in the predefined service-level-agreement when the shared RAN is under-utilized, but are blocked (or even dropped) when the RAN is over-utilized. The simulation results show that SBD achieves an inter-operator fairness of 0.997, which is higher than that of both a hard-partition approach (0.98) and a no-partition approach (0.6) while maintaining a shared RAN utilization rate of 98%. Furthermore, SBD reduces the blocking rate from 35% (hard partition approach) to almost 0%, whereas controlling the dropping rate at 5%. Notably, the dropping rate can be reduced to almost 0% using a newly proposed bandwidth scale down procedure.This work was supported in part by H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL under Grant 761586, and in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan under Contract MOST 106-2218- E-009-018

Gender Determination using Fingerprint Features

Several previous studies have investigated the gender difference of the fingerprint features. However, regarding to the statistical significance of such differences, inconsistent results have been obtained. To resolve this problem and to develop a method for gender determination, this work proposes and tests three fingertip features for gender determination. Fingerprints were obtained from 115 normal healthy adults comprised of 57 male and 58 female volunteers. All persons were born in Taiwan and were of Han nationality. The age range was18-35 years. The features of this study are ridge count, ridge density, and finger size, all three of which can easily be determined by counting and calculation. Experimental results show that the tested ridge density features alone are not very effective for gender determination. However, the proposed ridge count and finger size features of left little fingers are useful, achieving a classification accuracy of 75% (P-valu