Relative price changes and the growth of the public sector

Policy recommendations to reduce the growth of public spending are haunted by the inevitability of two factors. First Wagner's law, the hypothesis that with economic development an increasing share of GDP is devoted to public spending, and secondly, Baumol's effect, that as economies develop, public sector prices rise faster than prices in the general economy. Neither of these hypotheses has adequately been tested, largely because consistent public sector prices are unavailable for most developing countries. This paper proposes that the unavailability of consistent public sector price deflators can be overcome by econometrically estimating these series with the help of data on public spending and the widely available GDP deflator. This paper presents an anaylsis of time series data from 71 countries. The paper finds that although data support Wagner's law in the majority of developing countries, the degree of support varies with the level of development. Similarly, the average income elasticity of public spending drops from the low income economies through to the industrial economies. In the long run, the size of the public sector tapers off as the economies develop.Inequality,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Achieving Shared Growth,National Governance

Religiosity Effects on Employees in SMEs: An Islamic Country Perspective

This study aims to investigate the adaptation of internalization factors and employees’ competitive behavior in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The empirical findings suggest that the integration of religious orientation brings better results along with the other determinants (subjective norm, attitude, behavior control and intention) of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Further, this study indicates the significant direct relationship between religious orientation, attitude, perceived control and intention with employee behavior, except for subjective norms and intention, which shows an insignificant relationship. This empirical findings suggest that owners and managers of SMEs should place some efforts in providing support to increase religious orientation in SMEs, as this would likely to enhance all other factors. This study reports unique empirical findings to support the generalizability of the theory while also adding a new facet to the TPB by using SMEs as a social lab and data from a developing country

From Fate to Faith and Soil to Cell: Estimation of Phosphate (Pi) Uptake Rate, Pi-Uptake Kinetics and Relative Growth Rate are Important Parameters to Scavenge Pi by Brassica Cultivars under P-Starved Environment

As a rule, ion uptake by plant cells and roots has features of saturation kinetics. This is in accordance with the assumption of control, as for example by the number of binding sites of ions (carriers, permeases), or the capacity of the proton efflux pumps, in the plasma membrane and tonoplast. Solute transport across membranes is carrier mediated transport. Protein macromolecules integrated into the membrane matrix seems to be the carriers. The carrier-mediated process is subject to kinetics assumig that the number of carriers (binding sites) in the membranes is limited. Kinetics of ion transport through a membrane is considered equivalent to relationship between an enzyme and its substrate. To obtain plants of different P status, two genetically diverse Brassica cultivars (P-tolerant 'Con-1' and P-sensitive 'Gold Rush') were grown for several weeks in nutrient solution culture media. P-uptake kinetics of the roots with intact plants in short-term experiments by monitoring P depletion in culture media revealed that P-tolerant 'Con-1' cultivar had favorable characteristics for P-uptake because of high I(max) or V(max) and low K(m) or 1/2 I(max) value than P-sensitive 'Gold Rush' cultivar. By plotting relative growth rate (RGR) and internal P-concentration (PNC) among P-tolerant (group I; Brown Raya, Con-1, Rainbow, Dunkled and Peela Raya) and P-sensitive (group II; Toria, Sultan Raya, B.S.A, Toria Selection and Gold Rush) cultivars revealed that group I cultivars showed large metabolic fraction and small structural fraction than group II cultivars which provided basis for P-stress tolerance

Shortcut Detection with Variational Autoencoders

For real-world applications of machine learning (ML), it is essential that models make predictions based on well-generalizing features rather than spurious correlations in the data. The identification of such spurious correlations, also known as shortcuts, is a challenging problem and has so far been scarcely addressed. In this work, we present a novel approach to detect shortcuts in image and audio datasets by leveraging variational autoencoders (VAEs). The disentanglement of features in the latent space of VAEs allows us to discover feature-target correlations in datasets and semi-automatically evaluate them for ML shortcuts. We demonstrate the applicability of our method on several real-world datasets and identify shortcuts that have not been discovered before.Comment: Accepted at the ICML 2023 Workshop on Spurious Correlations, Invariance and Stabilit

Analyses of the Genetic Parameters (Variability, Heritability, Genetic Advance, Relationship of Yield and Yield Contributing Characters) for some Plant Traits among Brassica Cultivars under Phosphorus Starved Environmental Cues

The potential of a crop favorably respond to breeding/selection and bioengineering programs depends upon the nature and magnitude of genetic variability. For effective selection, information on nature and magnitude of variation in population, association of character with dry matter yield and among themselves and the extent of environmental influence on the expression of these characters are necessary. The estimates of genetic parameters help in understanding the role of various plant traits in establishing the growth behavior of cultivars under a given set of environmental conditions. Genetic analysis leads us to a clear understanding of different morphological, physiological and genetic characters and also the type and extent of their contribution to dry matter yield. Six Brassica cultivars were grown in a P-deficient sandy loam soil for 49 days after sowing. Significant variations were observed for all the characters in all the cultivars used in the experiment. All the characters showed high　heritability coupled with high genetic advance. Heritability (h(2)) is an approximate measure of the expression of a character. The highest estimates of broad sense heritability (h(2)= 0.90) and relative expected genetic advance (85.72%) were noted for root dry matter (RDM), while the estimate of expected genetic advance at 10% selection intensity was quite high (ΔG = 85.30c㎡) for leaf area per plant. The estimates of coheritability were positive and relatively higher for rootshoot ratio (RSR) in combination with shoot dry matter (SDM) (coh(2) = 2.002) and phosphorus use efficiency (PUE) (coh(2) = 1.875), whereas coheritability estimates were negative between leaf area per plant and RSR (coh(2) = -0.2010) indicating lack of association between these traits. High heritability with high genetic advance was exhibited by all the studied plant traits of cultivars evidencing that the traits could be further improved through individual plant selection. The innate variations within the Brassica gene-pool impel to drive a concentrated effort to understand the basis of adaptability. Access to the relevant genetic traits and information will provide necessary tools to select the optimal combinations of alleles adapted to local and changing growing environments especially nutrient stress conditions such as phosphorus (P) starvation

'Tailoring the Plant to Fit the Soil' in Stead of 'Tailoring the Soil to Fit the Plant' is an Alternate Environmental Sound Strategy to Acclimate Orthophosphate (Pi) Deprivation via Highly Coordinated Classical Pi-Starvation Induced Mechanisms

Acclimation to orthophosphate (Pi) deprivation via highly coordinated Pi-starvation induced (PSI) classical mechanisms such as copious quantities of H(+) and carboxylates (OAs) exudation, remodeling and modification of root architecture by increasing structural and functional plasticity, enhanced uptake rate and increased synthesis of Pi transporters would reduce or eliminate our current overreliance on expensive, polluting, and nonrenewable Pi-fertilizers. These complicated but elegant morphological, physiological, biochemical and molecular adjustments of Pi-starved plants provide an excellent example of how the unique flexibility of plant metabolism and energy transduction helps them to cope in a typically stressful environment. Pi-starved roots possess enhanced H(+)-ATPase and PEPCase which could result in increasing H(+) efflux and OAs exudations in the root vicinity. This would lead to the rhizosphere acidification, which thereby contribute to the solublization and assimilation of mineral Pi from environment. To visualize the dissolution of sparingly soluble Ca-phosphate and rhizospheric pH changes (in situ), genetically diverse Brassica cultivars were grown on agar media. Newly formed Ca-phosphate was suspended in agar containing other essential nutriens. With NH(4)(+) applied as the N source, the precipitate dissolved in the root vicinity and this was ascribed to acidification. No dissolution was occurred with No(3)(-)-nutrition. In order to observe the pH changes at the media-root interface (rhizosphere), an image analysis was carried out after embedding the roots in agar containing bromocresol purple as pH indicator. Efficient cultivar 'Brown Raya' showed greater decrease in pH than P-inefficient 'B.S.A' in the culture media. Hydroponically grown cultivars were compared with respect to P-utilization efficiency (PUE), P-stress factor (PSF), and Ca- and P-uptake at P-starvation. PUE, and Ca- and P-uptake correlated significantly (P<0.01) with biomass accumulation, indicating that higher P-uptake of efficient cultivars was because of their higher Ca-uptake, which in turn was related to their better P-acquisition and PUE. Remodelling of root architecture of efficient cultivars helped the cultivars to establish a better rooting system, which provided basis for tolerance under P-starvation

Latent Embedding Feedback and Discriminative Features for Zero-Shot Classification

Zero-shot learning strives to classify unseen categories for which no data is available during training. In the generalized variant, the test samples can further belong to seen or unseen categories. The state-of-the-art relies on Generative Adversarial Networks that synthesize unseen class features by leveraging class-specific semantic embeddings. During training, they generate semantically consistent features, but discard this constraint during feature synthesis and classification. We propose to enforce semantic consistency at all stages of (generalized) zero-shot learning: training, feature synthesis and classification. We first introduce a feedback loop, from a semantic embedding decoder, that iteratively refines the generated features during both the training and feature synthesis stages. The synthesized features together with their corresponding latent embeddings from the decoder are then transformed into discriminative features and utilized during classification to reduce ambiguities among categories. Experiments on (generalized) zero-shot object and action classification reveal the benefit of semantic consistency and iterative feedback, outperforming existing methods on six zero-shot learning benchmarks. Source code at https://github.com/akshitac8/tfvaegan.Comment: Accepted for publication at ECCV 202

ECCV (22) - Latent Embedding Feedback and Discriminative Features for Zero-Shot Classification

Zero-shot learning strives to classify unseen categories for which no data is available during training. In the generalized variant, the test samples can further belong to seen or unseen categories. The state-of-the-art relies on Generative Adversarial Networks that synthesize unseen class features by leveraging class-specific semantic embeddings. During training, they generate semantically consistent features, but discard this constraint during feature synthesis and classification. We propose to enforce semantic consistency at all stages of (generalized) zero-shot learning: training, feature synthesis and classification. We first introduce a feedback loop, from a semantic embedding decoder, that iteratively refines the generated features during both the training and feature synthesis stages. The synthesized features together with their corresponding latent embeddings from the decoder are then transformed into discriminative features and utilized during classification to reduce ambiguities among categories. Experiments on (generalized) zero-shot object and action classification reveal the benefit of semantic consistency and iterative feedback, outperforming existing methods on six zero-shot learning benchmarks. Source code at https://github.com/akshitac8/tfvaegan.Comment: Accepted for publication at ECCV 202

VIEWS OF NIGERIAN SCIENCE TEACHER EDUCATORS ON THE AMERICAN MINIMUM PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE STANDARDS FOR SCIENCE TEACHER EDUCATORS

Efforts were made in this study to find out the views of science teacher educators in Nigerian Universities and Colleges of Education on the American minimum professional knowledge standards for science teacher educators. Ninety-three teacher educators participated in the study. Thirty three came from the Universities while 60 were from the Colleges of Education. The instrument was a questionnaire, comprising 27 statements. Findings from the study showed that respondents agreed with the inclusion of the cognitive aspects, and skills on moderation of higher degree science teacher education programme to be imparted to science teacher educators. Specific recommendations were made to address the implications of the views of the science teacher educators