Asleep at the wheel: the real interest rate experience in Australia

A re-thinking and clear understanding of the factors underlying a country's balance of trade position is needed as the global trade regime becomes more liberalized. The relationship between the overall trade balance and its determinants as propounded in the standard models may not necessarily be the same with the bilateral trade balances. This study has developed a model of bilateral trade balance that captures the effects of all factors influencing trade balance as suggested by elasticity, absorption, and monetary approaches and the popular Gravity Model with some extensions. Specifically, the present paper postulates that the relative factors determine the trading pattern, and hence the trade balance of a country in bilateral trade with partners while in the earlier models absolute factors determine the trade balance,. Using standard panel data techniques the model is empirically tested and the results show significant effects of all the relative factors on the bilateral trade balance of Bangladesh in trading with her partners. The robustness check of the model ensures the validity of the specification.Trade Balance, Panel Data

Electrical-field activated sintering and forming of micro-components

As the demand for miniature products has increased significantly, so also has the need for these products to be produced in a rapid, flexible and cost efficient manner. The application of electroplasticity shows significant potential to produce the components by using powder materials. Nevertheless, previous research has shown that there are still significant challenges to be met in order to achieve increased relative densification of product samples and simplification of the processes. The process concept in this study comprises the combination of electrical-field activated sintering and forming processes. Therefore, the aims of the research were to develop the process concept for the manufacture of micro-components and to design the die sets along with other tooling for machine setup to enable the forming of micro-components from powder materials. A comprehensive literature review on micro-manufacturing, size effects, powder metallurgy and the electroplasticity process has been conducted. The development of the die sets for the process has been described, followed by a series of experiments. The FE thermal-electrical analysis was also carried out to study the heating flows of the die sets development during the process. In this research, titanium (Ti) and titanium tin alloy (90Ti10Sn) have been selected for the main powder materials tested for both vacuum and open-air process environment by using a Gleeble® 3800 testing system and Projection Welding machine respectively. Meanwhile, for the additional experiment, copper (Cu) has been selected to be tested in the open-air process environment by using a Projection Welding machine with die sets prepared by the Micro-FAST project. Based on the data collected, this efficient process has the potential to produce components with a high relative density of around 98%. Changes of the particles concerning deformation and breaking are crucial in the course of achieving the densification which differs from a conventional sintering process

COLT: Cyclic Overlapping Lottery Tickets for Faster Pruning of Convolutional Neural Networks

Pruning refers to the elimination of trivial weights from neural networks. The sub-networks within an overparameterized model produced after pruning are often called Lottery tickets. This research aims to generate winning lottery tickets from a set of lottery tickets that can achieve similar accuracy to the original unpruned network. We introduce a novel winning ticket called Cyclic Overlapping Lottery Ticket (COLT) by data splitting and cyclic retraining of the pruned network from scratch. We apply a cyclic pruning algorithm that keeps only the overlapping weights of different pruned models trained on different data segments. Our results demonstrate that COLT can achieve similar accuracies (obtained by the unpruned model) while maintaining high sparsities. We show that the accuracy of COLT is on par with the winning tickets of Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and, at times, is better. Moreover, COLTs can be generated using fewer iterations than tickets generated by the popular Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP) method. In addition, we also notice COLTs generated on large datasets can be transferred to small ones without compromising performance, demonstrating its generalizing capability. We conduct all our experiments on Cifar-10, Cifar-100 & TinyImageNet datasets and report superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods

Redox and Reactive Oxygen Species Network in Acclimation for Salinity Tolerance in Sugar Beet

Hossain MS, El Sayed AI, Moore M, Dietz K-J. Redox and Reactive Oxygen Species Network in Acclimation for Salinity Tolerance in Sugar Beet. Journal of Experimental Botany. 2017;68(5):1283-1298.Fine-tuned and coordinated regulation of transport, metabolism and redox homeostasis allows plants to acclimate to osmotic and ionic stress caused by high salinity. Sugar beet is a highly salt tolerant crop plant and is therefore an interesting model to study sodium chloride (NaCl) acclimation in crops. Sugar beet plants were subjected to a final level of 300 mM NaCl for up to 14 d in hydroponics. Plants acclimated to NaCl stress by maintaining its growth rate and adjusting its cellular redox and reactive oxygen species (ROS) network. In order to understand the unusual suppression of ROS accumulation under severe salinity, the regulation of elements of the redox and ROS network was investigated at the transcript level. First, the gene families of superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxiredoxins (Prx), alternative oxidase (AOX), plastid terminal oxidase (PTOX) and NADPH oxidase (RBOH) were identified in the sugar beet genome. Salinity induced the accumulation of Cu-Zn-SOD, Mn-SOD, Fe-SOD3, all AOX isoforms, 2-Cys-PrxB, PrxQ, and PrxIIF. In contrast, Fe-SOD1, 1-Cys-Prx, PrxIIB and PrxIIE levels decreased in response to salinity. Most importantly, RBOH transcripts of all isoforms decreased. This pattern offers a straightforward explanation for the low ROS levels under salinity. Promoters of stress responsive antioxidant genes were analyzed in silico for the enrichment of cis-elements, in order to gain insights into gene regulation. The results indicate that special cis-elements in the promoters of the antioxidant genes in sugar beet participate in adjusting the redox and ROS network and are fundamental to high salinity tolerance of sugar beet. The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology

Regeneration potential of seedling explants of chilli (Capsicum annuum)

A study was conducted with hypocotyl, cotyledon and shoot tip of chilli as explants for regeneration on MS medium supplemented with different concentrations and combinations of auxins and cytokinins. Regeneration potential was determined by two ways. One is regeneration of shoot via callus formation from hypocotyls and cotyledon explants; another was direct shoot regeneration from shoot tip explant. The highest callus was induced from hypocotyl in a combination of BAP (5.0 mgL-1) with NAA (0.1 mgL-1) and cotyledon in a combination of BAP (5.0 mgL-1) with IAA ((1.0 mgL-1). The callus induction as well as shoot initiation was higher in hypocotyls than cotyledon. Shoot tips regenerated into plantlets directly with sporadic small callus at the base. Shoot elongation was accelerated by using additional supplementation of GA3 and AgNO3. Regenerated shoots rooted best on the MS medium supplemented with 0.1 mg L-1 NAA + 0.05 mg L-1 IBA

Role of Accumulated Calcium in Alleviating Aluminum Injury in Wheat Plants

Aluminum (Al) sensitive wheat cultivar kalyansona was grown for 14 d in a range of Ca solution (125, 625, and 2500 μM) plus other nutrients without Al. At 14 d after Ca treatment, half of these plants were harvested (H1), and the rest of the plants were exposed to 100 μM Al for additional 6 d and harvested (H2). Severe Al injury was found only in the plants with the lowest supply of Ca before Al treatment. Aluminum concentration in the apoplastic fluid was very high at 125 μM Ca probably because the plasma membrane of some of the cells was destroyed due to the attack of 100 μM Al. Aluminum content in roots decreased with increasing supply of Ca before Al treatment. Calcium content decreased drastically at harvest (H2) in the plants with 100 μM Al. Under Al stress conditions, the plant responded to Al in different ways due to not only the different Ca supply but also the variation of Ca content in the plant tissues. Actually, the plants having the largest Ca content in the roots before Al treatment can receive less Al injury during Al treatment. To substantiate this idea, a companion study was conducted to investigate the effects of 2500 μM Ca supply during, before, and after 100 μM Al treatment on root growth. The results indicated clearly that exogenous Ca supply before Al treatment is able to alleviate Al injury but less effective than Ca supply during Al treatment

Macro model for Bangladesh

IDRC# 117792 is also #3 of the series (both are different documents

Introduction of Medical Imaging Modalities

The diagnosis and treatment of various diseases had been expedited with the help of medical imaging. Different medical imaging modalities, including X-ray, Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Nuclear Imaging, Ultrasound, Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), and Emerging Technologies for in vivo imaging modalities is presented in this chapter, in addition to these modalities, some advanced techniques such as contrast-enhanced MRI, MR approaches for osteoarthritis, Cardiovascular Imaging, and Medical Imaging data mining and search. Despite its important role and potential effectiveness as a diagnostic tool, reading and interpreting medical images by radiologists is often tedious and difficult due to the large heterogeneity of diseases and the limitation of image quality or resolution. Besides the introduction and discussion of the basic principles, typical clinical applications, advantages, and limitations of each modality used in current clinical practice, this chapter also highlights the importance of emerging technologies in medical imaging and the role of data mining and search aiming to support translational clinical research, improve patient care, and increase the efficiency of the healthcare system.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, 1 table; Acceptance of the chapter for the Springer book "Data-driven approaches to medical imaging