The data chase : what's out there on trade costs and nontariff barriers ?

Trade costs and nontariff barriers are at the forefront of discussions on competitiveness and expanding trade opportunities for developing countries. This paper provides a summary overview of data and indicators relevant to these issues and has been informed by work underway at the World Bank on trade facilitation over the past several years to catalogue data sets and indicators. Although there has been progress in expanding data sets and developing policy-relevant indicators on trade costs and barriers, much more is needed. In order to assess progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals, evaluating the impact of development projects, and whether meeting Aid for Trade goals will be met, for example, a dedicated and expansive new effort to collect and assess data is needed. This paper attempts to highlight gaps in data on trade costs and provides insight into the type of new data that might be developed in the future.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Law,Free Trade,Trade Policy

An Exploratory Study on the Use of Social Media for Social Marketing

Social media refers to the online media that allows multi-directional conversations and real-time interactions such as social networking sites (SNS), blogs, discussions forums, content sharing, social bookmarks, wikis etc. Over the last decade, social media marketing has become a key focus area for both marketing practitioners and researchers. This paper focuses on the impact of social media in the domain of social marketing. For this study, we consider previous academic research in the area of social media and social marketing published in eminent research journals and management. After creating a summative background of social media and social marketing, we propose a model to understand the role of social media as a catalyst in the process of social change. Finally, we present two cases where social media played a significant role as a social catalyst

Classification of Categorical Uncertain Data Using Decision Tree

Certain data is a data whose values are known precisely whereas uncertain data means whose value are not known precisely. But data is always uncertain in real life applications. In data uncertainty attribute value is represented by a set of values. There are two types of attributes in data sets namely, numerical and categorical attributes. Data uncertainty can arise in both numerical and categorical attributes. Traditional decision tree algorithms work with certain data only. The classification performance of decision tree can be improved if complete information of data is considered. Probability Density Function (PDF) is used to improve the accuracy of decision tree classifier. Existing system to handle uncertain data works on only numerical attributes means only range of values. They cannot works uncertain categorical attributes. This paper proposes a method for handling data uncertainty on categorical attributes. The decision tree algorithm is extended to handle uncertain data. The experiments show that the classification performance of this decision tree can be enhanced. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15066

Sustainability Practices as Competitive Edge on Five Star Hotels of Delhi: a Study on Manager's Perception

The study aims to conduct an analysis describing the sustainable strategy available for hotels, evaluating its potential to create competitive advantage and exploring how its implementation influences other actors in the industry specifically and the whole area development generally. For the purpose of this study, Delhi has been chosen with a focus on the Five Star and Five-star Deluxe Hotels of the city. A survey was conducted with the employees working in 15 Five stars and Five-star Deluxe Hotels in Delhi. According to the analysis, the sustainable efforts of the hotel include environmental, social and economic initiatives. The results of the survey highlighted the sustainability practices that are being adopted and the extent of their implementation by these hotels. It also showed the relationship between a hotel's sustainability practices and employees' satisfaction. Furthermore, the study has explored the ability of sustainable efforts to create a unique reputation for the hotel which may enable it to gain a competitive edge. The latter, in turn, attracts the business customers who consider the sustainable hotel as a valuable partner for their own reputation. All in all, as sustainability practices enhance profitability, it is considered a source of completive advantage

Ethnobotanical Observation on Tuberous Plants from Tribal Area of Rajasthan (India)

The present paper gives an account of 42 tuberous plants of Ethnobotanical interest from Aravalli hills of Rajasthan. Main tribes inhabiting the study area are Bhil, Meena, Garasia, Damor and Kathodi. These tribes use the tuberous plants for various purposes in their daily life. Health, vitality and longevity enjoyed by the tribals have been attributed by them to these wild tuberous plants. On account of environmental changes and lack of insight of conservation of tuberous plants, many of them have become rare, threatened and endangered. If proper attention is not given, extinction of these plant species is certain and this is beyond doubt. Therefore identification and utility of these tuberous plants and compilation of a database on local information held by the tribes is stressed. Ethnobotanical information about tuberous plants is given by mentioning their botanical name, family, local name, time of flowering and fruiting, ecology and uses

Nuclear Receptors as Therapeutic Targets for Neurodegenerative Diseases: Lost in Translation

Neurodegenerative diseases are characterized by a progressive loss of neurons that leads to a broad range of disabilities, including severe cognitive decline and motor impairment, for which there are no effective therapies. Several lines of evidence support a putative therapeutic role of nuclear receptors (NRs) in these types of disorders. NRs are ligand-activated transcription factors that regulate the expression of a wide range of genes linked to metabolism and inflammation. Although the activation of NRs in animal models of neurodegenerative disease exhibits promising results, the translation of this strategy to clinical practice has been unsuccessful. In this review we discuss the role of NRs in neurodegenerative diseases in light of preclinical and clinical studies, as well as new findings derived from the analysis of transcriptomic databases from humans and animal models. We discuss the failure in the translation of NR-based therapeutic approaches and consider alternative and novel research avenues in the development of effective therapies for neurodegenerative diseases

A two-dimensional (2D) potential distribution model for the short gate-length ion-implanted GaAs mesfets under dark and illuminated conditions

An analytical 2D model to predict the potential distribution of short-channel ionimplanted GaAs MESFETs has been presented. The 2D potential distribution in the channel of the short-channel device has been obtained by solving the 2D Poisson’s equation in conjunction with suitable boundary conditions using superposition method. The remarkable feature of the proposed model is that the implanted doping profile has been treated in completely analytical manner. A double-integrable Gaussian-like function has been assumed as the doping distribution profile in the vertical direction of the channel. The effects of excess carrier generation due to the incident optical radiation in channel region have been included in the Poisson’s equation to study the optical effects on the device. The photovoltage developed across the gate metal has also been modeled. The proposed model has been verified by comparing the theoretically predicted results with simulated data obtained by using the commercially available ATLASTM2D device simulator. When you are citing the document, use the following link http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/2785

Categorization of metabolome in bacterial systems

Analyses of biological databases such as those of genome, proteome, metabolome etc., have given insights in organization of biological systems. However, current efforts do not utilize the complete potential of available metabolome data. In this study, metabolome of bacterial systems with reliable annotations are analyzed and a simple method is developed to categorize pathways hierarchically, using rational approach. Ninety-four bacterial systems having for each ≥ 250 annotated metabolic pathways were used to identify a set of common pathways. 42 pathways were present in all bacteria which are termed as Core/Stage I pathways. This set of pathways was used along with interacting compounds to categorize pathways in the metabolome hierarchically. In each metabolome non-interacting pathways were identified including at each stage. The case study of Escherichia coli O157, having 433 annotated pathways, shows that 378 pathways interact directly or indirectly with 41 core pathways while 14 pathways are noninteracting. These 378 pathways are distributed in Stage II (289), Stage III (75), Stage IV (13) and Stage V (1) category. The approach discussed here allows understanding of the complexity of metabolic networks. It has pointed out that core pathways could be most ancient pathways and compounds that interact with maximum pathways may be compounds with high biosynthetic potential, which can be easily identified. Further, it was shown that interactions of pathways at various stages could be one to one, one to many, many to one or many to many mappings through interacting compounds. The granularity of the method discussed being high; the impact of perturbation in a pathway on the metabolome and particularly sub networks can be studied precisely. The categorizations of metabolic pathways help in identifying choke point enzymes that are useful to identify probable drug targets. The Metabolic categorizations for 94 bacteria are available at http://115.111.37.202/mpe/