Business Competitiveness in Bahrain: A Synopsis

Unbridled freedom to private business sector is a harbinger of business collapse and eventually the economic landscapes of nations. We have had ample examples very recently. Hence, suitable rules and regulations are essential in conditioning favourable business environment. The ease of doing business can be understood by the availability of a cross section of factors such as clarity of property rights, low cost of resolving disputes, predictability of economic policies and situation, protection to investments, impartial redressal mechanism, the freedom and low cost retrenchment policy and exit, ease of resource mobilisation etc. This report reviews two annual reports on Doing Business pertaining to Kingdom of Bahrain vis-a-vis major counterparts in the Middle East and other noted economies.Business competitiveness, Doing business, Business environment, Kingdom of Bahrain

Learning Articulated Motions From Visual Demonstration

Many functional elements of human homes and workplaces consist of rigid components which are connected through one or more sliding or rotating linkages. Examples include doors and drawers of cabinets and appliances; laptops; and swivel office chairs. A robotic mobile manipulator would benefit from the ability to acquire kinematic models of such objects from observation. This paper describes a method by which a robot can acquire an object model by capturing depth imagery of the object as a human moves it through its range of motion. We envision that in future, a machine newly introduced to an environment could be shown by its human user the articulated objects particular to that environment, inferring from these "visual demonstrations" enough information to actuate each object independently of the user. Our method employs sparse (markerless) feature tracking, motion segmentation, component pose estimation, and articulation learning; it does not require prior object models. Using the method, a robot can observe an object being exercised, infer a kinematic model incorporating rigid, prismatic and revolute joints, then use the model to predict the object's motion from a novel vantage point. We evaluate the method's performance, and compare it to that of a previously published technique, for a variety of household objects.Comment: Published in Robotics: Science and Systems X, Berkeley, CA. ISBN: 978-0-9923747-0-

H2S paper strip method - A bacteriological test for faecal coliforms in drinking water at various temperatures

Epidemics arising from waterborne diseases are a global health problem. Faecal contamination of drinking water is the main cause of these outbreaks. According to WHO (1996) for drinking water to be safe, a 100 ml sample should not contain any coliform bacteria. The standard methods currently used for routine testing have many limitations especially when applied in remote areas. The H2S method has been developed as an on-site, inexpensive and easy to use method to test drinking water for remote and rural areas. The present work analyses the reliability of the H2S method for detecting faecal contamination in drinking water. The minimum level of faecal coliforms that could be detected and the incubation period required at various levels of contamination were studied. The range of temperatures at which the method was effective and the incubation period required at various temperatures were also determined. The H2S method was found to be able to detect contamination down to a level of 1 CFU/100 ml of coliform bacteria. Although the H2S method could be used at a temperature range of 20 to 44oC, temperatures between 28 to 37oC gave faster results. An incubation period of only 24 hours was required at 37oC, which was found to be the most suitable incubation temperature. The incubation period increased with a decrease or increase in temperature

Individual and organizational factors affecting the implementation of Green IT: a case study of an Indian business school

Green Information Technology (Green IT) emerged as a critical research agenda for reducing organizations' carbon footprints to achieve environmental sustainability. This paper aims to understand the factors that affect the adoption of Green Information Technology in the context of a developing country. Studies that have focused on both individual and organizational level factors (multi‐level approach) remain limited. The Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), and Technology‐Organization‐Environment (TOE) framework was used as a theoretical lens to address the gap in the literature. The theoretical background and participatory case study (qualitative) as the methodology was used to investigate the factors at multiple levels that could affect Green IT implementation in the developing country context (Indian business school). The findings reveal that three key dimensions affect the implementation of Green IT‐ Need, Scope, and the Inclination to adopt Green IT. Each dimension includes a mix of factors at the individual and organizational levels. This paper contributes to the theory by proposing a framework for multi‐level Green IT adoption. It also provides guidelines to the practitioners for considering the intervention factors at the individual and organizational levels

Artemether resistance in vitro is linked to mutations in PfATP6 that also interact with mutations in PfMDR1 in travellers returning with Plasmodium falciparum infections.

BACKGROUND: Monitoring resistance phenotypes for Plasmodium falciparum, using in vitro growth assays, and relating findings to parasite genotype has proved particularly challenging for the study of resistance to artemisinins. METHODS: Plasmodium falciparum isolates cultured from 28 returning travellers diagnosed with malaria were assessed for sensitivity to artemisinin, artemether, dihydroartemisinin and artesunate and findings related to mutations in pfatp6 and pfmdr1. RESULTS: Resistance to artemether in vitro was significantly associated with a pfatp6 haplotype encoding two amino acid substitutions (pfatp6 A623E and S769N; (mean IC50 (95% CI) values of 8.2 (5.7 - 10.7) for A623/S769 versus 623E/769 N 13.5 (9.8 - 17.3) nM with a mean increase of 65%; p = 0.012). Increased copy number of pfmdr1 was not itself associated with increased IC50 values for artemether, but when interactions between the pfatp6 haplotype and increased copy number of pfmdr1 were examined together, a highly significant association was noted with IC50 values for artemether (mean IC50 (95% CI) values of 8.7 (5.9 - 11.6) versus 16.3 (10.7 - 21.8) nM with a mean increase of 87%; p = 0.0068). Previously described SNPs in pfmdr1 are also associated with differences in sensitivity to some artemisinins. CONCLUSIONS: These findings were further explored in molecular modelling experiments that suggest mutations in pfatp6 are unlikely to affect differential binding of artemisinins at their proposed site, whereas there may be differences in such binding associated with mutations in pfmdr1. Implications for a hypothesis that artemisinin resistance may be exacerbated by interactions between PfATP6 and PfMDR1 and for epidemiological studies to monitor emerging resistance are discussed

Accelerating Asymptotically Exact MCMC for Computationally Intensive Models via Local Approximations

We construct a new framework for accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo in posterior sampling problems where standard methods are limited by the computational cost of the likelihood, or of numerical models embedded therein. Our approach introduces local approximations of these models into the Metropolis-Hastings kernel, borrowing ideas from deterministic approximation theory, optimization, and experimental design. Previous efforts at integrating approximate models into inference typically sacrifice either the sampler's exactness or efficiency; our work seeks to address these limitations by exploiting useful convergence characteristics of local approximations. We prove the ergodicity of our approximate Markov chain, showing that it samples asymptotically from the \emph{exact} posterior distribution of interest. We describe variations of the algorithm that employ either local polynomial approximations or local Gaussian process regressors. Our theoretical results reinforce the key observation underlying this paper: when the likelihood has some \emph{local} regularity, the number of model evaluations per MCMC step can be greatly reduced without biasing the Monte Carlo average. Numerical experiments demonstrate multiple order-of-magnitude reductions in the number of forward model evaluations used in representative ODE and PDE inference problems, with both synthetic and real data.Comment: A major update of the theory and example