542 research outputs found
Financial Development, Tourism and Economic Growth Nexus: An Empirical Evidence from Pakistan
This study explores the connection between tourism and economic growth keeping in view the importance of financial development in Pakistan. The outcomes of the study revealed that tourism and economic growth are co-integrated. Moreover, the results highlighted that tourism upsurges economic growth both in the short and long term in Pakistan. Similarly, the financial liberalization by and large has also the same impact on economic growth like tourism. Nonetheless, the coefficient of financial liberalization is having correct sign, but not that much overwhelming effect in the short run
Is there any relationship between producer price index and consumer price index in the Czech Republic?
This article tests the expenditure-switching model in the Czech
Republic to inspect the causal link between the Producer Price
Index (P.P.I.) and Consumer Price Index (C.P.I.). The results of the
co-movement between the P.P.I. and C.P.I. in the period indicate
a positive relationship across the chosen period. We notice that in
the frequency domain, the two variables have a relationship in
higher spectrums (short-term). The results also show that comovements
exist during structural reforms and financial crises,
which in turn supports the expenditure-switching model. The
C.P.I. and P.P.I. are sensitive to variations in exchange rates, which
pass through prices at the domestic level. Exchange rate shocks
lead to inflationary pressure; therefore, long-term oriented intervention
policies of the central banks will be more efficient. This
article provides substantial information to exporters about price
adjustments to exchange rate fluctuation
Qualitative Detection of Hepatitis C Virus in the Patients Going Through Eye Surgery
Purpose: This study was carried out to analyze the prevalence of hepatitis C Virus in patient going through eye surgery. Material and Method: This was a prospective observational study conducted at the Sindh Institute of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences (SIOVS) Hyderabad from July 2013 to June 2015. In this study, evaluation of 5600 patients of various ages undergoing eye surgeries and being unaware of hepatitis C infection were included. Each patient was serologically screened by immunochromatography (ICT method) for qualitative detection of antibodies for Hepatitis C before surgery. Result: Two thousand two hundred sixty four (40.43%) patients were male and 3336 (59.57%) were female. Large numbers of patients were in 4th and 5th decade of life in both the sexes. Of these 5600 patients, 713 (12.73%) were serologically positive for hepatitis C antibodies. Majority of them were female (58.44%). Conclusion: The prevalence of hepatitis C antibodies positive is higher in our population. Therefore, it is mandatory to screen every patient for hepatitis C and B before any surgical procedure. The surgeon and health care professional should take protective measures. The used infected materials should be destroyed properly.
Do house prices squeeze marriages in China?
This study reviews the threshold effect of house prices (HPs) on
marriage (MR) in China by utilizing a panel threshold regression.
The findings indicate that HPs have a positive impact on MR
when the price is below the threshold value. Homeownership is
an extremely important factor in MR in China, and MR without
housing is considered incomplete. However, HPs have a negative
effect on MR when the price is higher than the threshold value.
Unemployment and female education have a negative effect on
MR, while GDP per capita has a positive effect. These results are
supported by the duration model, which shows that as HPs
increase, the rate of MR decreases. The study makes a contribution
on the asymmetric impact of high HPs on MR in China in the
two regimes. The paper offers insight into the economic outlook
on HPs and MR driven by societal and institutional changes, such
as privatization and state ownership of enterprises, that have
changed marriage behavior. Increasing HPs slow MR and may
have a more serious impact on China than on other countries.
The government should balance housing supply and demand by
enhancing antimonopoly supervision in the private market. The
government should establish policy measures to meet housing
demand and create incentives to wed, which can relieve competition
in marriage markets. Diversified investment, in turn, can control
HPs
Understanding Malaysian Malays communication characteristics in reducing psychological impact on flood victims
Culture has a very important function in the daily lives of Malaysians. In spite of its importance, less attention has been paid to identifying Malaysian ethnic values from their own perspective. Most of previous studies have focused on a universal approach to identify the values of Malaysians. By addressing the gap, this paper hopes to identify a more comprehensive list of values related to Malaysian communication characteristics in flood disaster management context. Over the past decade, flood has become Malaysia’s most common natural disaster. Sustainable flood mitigation and relief management is important as it reflects the ruling government for dealing with crisis. The psychological support on victims’ wellbeing, during and after the disaster is substantial from the humanitarian perspective. Hence, this paper discusses the communication practices from indigenous perspective to help reduce the psychological impact of flooding. This paper presents qualitative data, based on in-depth interviews with 13 flood victims. The findings indicate that local values are important characteristics of effective communication surplus to the aids that bound to reduce the psychological impact of a disaster. This research intends to contribute in terms of the identification of the local code of conduct in communication in an attempt to obtain insights about flood disaster management. Besides, the outcome of the study could help to develop policies for aid agencies, information resources and community organisations in relation to the competency in communication to advocate the betterment and well-being of flood disaster victims
Cross-attention-based saliency inference for predicting cancer metastasis on whole slide images
Although multiple instance learning (MIL) methods are widely used for
automatic tumor detection on whole slide images (WSI), they suffer from the
extreme class imbalance within the small tumor WSIs. This occurs when the tumor
comprises only a few isolated cells. For early detection, it is of utmost
importance that MIL algorithms can identify small tumors, even when they are
less than 1% of the size of the WSI. Existing studies have attempted to address
this issue using attention-based architectures and instance selection-based
methodologies, but have not yielded significant improvements. This paper
proposes cross-attention-based salient instance inference MIL (CASiiMIL), which
involves a novel saliency-informed attention mechanism, to identify breast
cancer lymph node micro-metastasis on WSIs without the need for any
annotations. Apart from this new attention mechanism, we introduce a negative
representation learning algorithm to facilitate the learning of
saliency-informed attention weights for improved sensitivity on tumor WSIs. The
proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art MIL methods on two popular
tumor metastasis detection datasets, and demonstrates great cross-center
generalizability. In addition, it exhibits excellent accuracy in classifying
WSIs with small tumor lesions. Moreover, we show that the proposed model has
excellent interpretability attributed to the saliency-informed attention
weights. We strongly believe that the proposed method will pave the way for
training algorithms for early tumor detection on large datasets where acquiring
fine-grained annotations is practically impossible
Habitat Elevation Shapes Microbial Community Composition and Alter the Metabolic Functions in Wild Sable (Martes zibellina) Guts
In recent decades, wild sable (Carnivora Mustelidae Martes zibellina) habitats, which are often natural forests, have been squeezed by anthropogenic disturbances such as clear-cutting, tilling and grazing. Sables tend to live in sloped areas with relatively harsh conditions. Here, we determine effects of environmental factors on wild sable gut microbial communities between high and low altitude habitats using Illumina Miseq sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes. Our results showed that despite wild sable gut microbial community diversity being resilient to many environmental factors, community composition was sensitive to altitude. Wild sable gut microbial communities were dominated by Firmicutes (relative abundance 38.23%), followed by Actinobacteria (30.29%), and Proteobacteria (28.15%). Altitude was negatively correlated with the abundance of Firmicutes, suggesting sable likely consume more vegetarian food in lower habitats where plant diversity, temperature and vegetation coverage were greater. In addition, our functional genes prediction and qPCR results demonstrated that energy/fat processing microorganisms and functional genes are enriched with increasing altitude, which likely enhanced metabolic functions and supported wild sables to survive in elevated habitats. Overall, our results improve the knowledge of the ecological impact of habitat change, providing insights into wild animal protection at the mountain area with hash climate conditions
Habitat Elevation Shapes Microbial Community Composition and Alter the Metabolic Functions in Wild Sable (Martes zibellina) Guts
In recent decades, wild sable (Carnivora Mustelidae Martes zibellina) habitats, which are often natural forests, have been squeezed by anthropogenic disturbances such as clear-cutting, tilling and grazing. Sables tend to live in sloped areas with relatively harsh conditions. Here, we determine effects of environmental factors on wild sable gut microbial communities between high and low altitude habitats using Illumina Miseq sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes. Our results showed that despite wild sable gut microbial community diversity being resilient to many environmental factors, community composition was sensitive to altitude. Wild sable gut microbial communities were dominated by Firmicutes (relative abundance 38.23%), followed by Actinobacteria (30.29%), and Proteobacteria (28.15%). Altitude was negatively correlated with the abundance of Firmicutes, suggesting sable likely consume more vegetarian food in lower habitats where plant diversity, temperature and vegetation coverage were greater. In addition, our functional genes prediction and qPCR results demonstrated that energy/fat processing microorganisms and functional genes are enriched with increasing altitude, which likely enhanced metabolic functions and supported wild sables to survive in elevated habitats. Overall, our results improve the knowledge of the ecological impact of habitat change, providing insights into wild animal protection at the mountain area with hash climate conditions
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