Exploring the Nexus between Trade, Visitor Arrivals, Remittances and Income in the Pacific: a Study of Vanuatu

We explore the contributions of trade openness, remittance inflows and expansion in tourism towards improving income in Vanuatu over the periods 1983-2009 using the augmented Solow approach and the ARDL bounds test. The results show trade openness and remittances have a positive and statistically significant effect on the long run growth of the economy while tourism expansion is not statistically significant. For a broad-based development policy we propose: remittance inflows need to be encouraged and additional remittance markets to be explored; trade negotiations with specific focus on temporary movement of natural persons need to be prioritized; and ensuring access to financial services and technology to rural and outer islands in Vanuatu. To confine to diversity of the economy, there is a further need to develop tourism infrastructure besides putting policies in place to ensure that tourism sector operations benefit trickle down to the grassroots level of the society

Informal settlements and social inequality in Fiji: evidence of serious policy gaps

The proliferation of iriformal or squatter settlements in Fiji reveals several issues that relate to social inequality. Issues such as economic, social and environmental conditions are inextricably linked to one another and they manifest inequalities that exist within, and between residents of the 200 informal settlements and other socia-economic groups in Fiji. Market oriented policies have increased the difficulties faced by low income earners. This paper seeks to highlight a number of social inequalities which have given rise to such settlements and their prevalence. Most prominent among the social inequalities that exist is the lack of access by residents of informal settlements to security of land tenure and adequate housing. Using a Rights based approach, the paper will examine income inequalities between households; land tenure inequality; spiraling property prices; and inequality in access to infrastructure, utilities and services (roads, electricity, and water supply, and health and education). The post-2006 government's policies relating to squatter upgrade and relocation will be considered

Coverage of extreme weather events and natural hazards in Pacific Island Countries: The need for media capacity-building: The need for media capacity-building

There would be little disagreement over the media’s crucial role in reporting extreme weather events and natural hazards, which have become more commonplace in Pacific Island Countries (PICs). However, for various reasons explored in this article, the media have generally failed to satisfactorily cover the unfolding of natural hazards and disasters. Using Fiji as an example, this article discusses media coverage of various cyclones, and the gaps in the reporting. The article argues that more training and capacity building for media personnel should be undertaken to ensure that people are well informed and prepared as they face the brunt of more frequent and intense extreme weather events

Are Chatbots Ready for Privacy-Sensitive Applications? An Investigation into Input Regurgitation and Prompt-Induced Sanitization

LLM-powered chatbots are becoming widely adopted in applications such as healthcare, personal assistants, industry hiring decisions, etc. In many of these cases, chatbots are fed sensitive, personal information in their prompts, as samples for in-context learning, retrieved records from a database, or as part of the conversation. The information provided in the prompt could directly appear in the output, which might have privacy ramifications if there is sensitive information there. As such, in this paper, we aim to understand the input copying and regurgitation capabilities of these models during inference and how they can be directly instructed to limit this copying by complying with regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR, based on their internal knowledge of them. More specifically, we find that when ChatGPT is prompted to summarize cover letters of a 100 candidates, it would retain personally identifiable information (PII) verbatim in 57.4% of cases, and we find this retention to be non-uniform between different subgroups of people, based on attributes such as gender identity. We then probe ChatGPT's perception of privacy-related policies and privatization mechanisms by directly instructing it to provide compliant outputs and observe a significant omission of PII from output.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, and 4 table

Efficacy of topical phenytoin in healing diabetic foot ulcer

Background: India is fast becoming world diabetes capital. Complications are a cause of hospitalization in patients with diabetes mellitus especially foot complications. Gauze moistened with saline has been the standard method.Methods: The study was done from June 2015 to June 2016. The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy of topical phenytoin compared to standard and conventional methods of wound care in improving the healing process. In this randomised control trial, the data from 70 patients with diabetic ulcers was collected, 35 patients underwent topical phenytoin dressing while remaining 35 underwent conventional wound care. Histopathological and Clinical examination were done and the following parameters were calculated: Granulation tissue formation in 2 weeks and Mean duration of hospital stay.Results: In this study, Mean hospital stay in days was 33.4 in Phenytoin treated group and in other group with use conventional materials, the mean hospital stay in days was 39.7 days. Granulation tissue formation was faster as compared to conventional materials of Dressings.Conclusions: In this study we conclude Topical phenytoin helps in faster healing of Diabetic Foot Ulcers and it also reduces the mean hospital stay of the patients

NPM Falters in Fiji

New Public Management (NPM) has virtually replaced traditional public administration as the model for the delivery of public value since 1979 and 1980 when the UK and US adopted a radically different approach to management in the public sector. NPM assumes that the market is preferable to government as a coordinator of social relations and public service delivery. This reliance on the market as an automatic “adjuster” raises a number of issues in the use of NPM in traditional settings. NPM also has a number of inherent contradictions and weaknesses. This paper analyses critically some of the common features of the NPM “model” and questions its suitability especially in traditional contexts like Fiji. It concludes that the gaps in prescribing the means to achieving its well-articulated and accepted ends, coupled with its contextual assumptions, renders NPM a model of questionable appropriateness for public enterprise restructuring

Transmission analysis of a large tuberculosis outbreak in London:a mathematical modelling study using genomic data

Outbreaks of tuberculosis (TB) - such as the large isoniazid-resistant outbreak centred on London, UK, which originated in 1995 - provide excellent opportunities to model transmission of this devastating disease. Transmission chains for TB are notoriously difficult to ascertain, but mathematical modelling approaches, combined with whole-genome sequencing data, have strong potential to contribute to transmission analyses. Using such data, we aimed to reconstruct transmission histories for the outbreak using a Bayesian approach, and to use machine-learning techniques with patient-level data to identify the key covariates associated with transmission. By using our transmission reconstruction method that accounts for phylogenetic uncertainty, we are able to identify 21 transmission events with reasonable confidence, 9 of which have zero SNP distance, and a maximum distance of 3. Patient age, alcohol abuse and history of homelessness were found to be the most important predictors of being credible TB transmitters