Bonpo Tantrics in Kokonor Area

Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines Number 15, November 200

An exploratory value chain analysis for Burmese pickled tea (LAPHET) : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of AgriCommerce in Agribusiness, Institute of Agriculture and Environment, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Laphet (pickled tea) is a well-known traditional cuisine of Myanmar consisting of tea leaves fermented into a pickle. It has a unique taste different from tea used for drinking and has health benefits. Despite the fact that pickled tea is a popular food in Myanmar, no research has been done to analyse its value chain and evaluate its potential in the global market. This study is an exploratory research and aims to examine the value chain of pickled tea from production to the final consumer and to evaluate how to improve the quality in the value chain. In addition, the improvements to the integrity to the pickled tea value chain are addressed. The value chain analysis revealed the major actors in the pickled tea value chain and described the process as tea leaves pass through several intermediaries with value being added at each stage before reaching the end consumer. The chain is governed by wholesalers and manufacturers who have capital advantage over the other chain actors. Therefore, farmers get the lower share of the price margin. This study shows the domestic pickled tea value chain and it describes the upgrades to the chain if it is to be upgraded. Pickled tea is a profitable industry and has high potential in the global market. However, there are considerable weaknesses and challenges to developing a sustainable pickled tea industry from both farm and market perspective. Supply issues such as availability of tea leaves, quality and consistency of the pickled tea, and effective grading along the value chain were addressed. Food safety and traceability is also a key area of concern. The study recommends that value chain upgrading can help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the chain. Generally, the findings suggest that strategies aiming to strengthen the linkages within the value chain, collective marketing, and improved processing technologies can enhance the development of the pickled tea value chain in Myanmar. Therefore, policy aiming at increasing farmers’ access to modern technology and inputs, developing infrastructure, cooperative development, and improving extension systems are recommended to accelerate the chain’s development

Basic Concepts of the Sets and Functions

This paper expresses the basic concepts of sets and single-valued functions. Moreover,inverses and multi-valued functions are introduced. Then transforming equations are discussed

Smart hospital emergency system via mobile-based requesting services

In recent years, the UK’s emergency call and response has shown elements of great strain as of today. The strain on emergency call systems estimated by a 9 million calls (including both landline and mobile) made in 2014 alone. Coupled with an increasing population and cuts in government funding, this has resulted in lower percentages of emergency response vehicles at hand and longer response times. In this paper, we highlight the main challenges of emergency services and overview of previous solutions. In addition, we propose a new system call Smart Hospital Emergency System (SHES). The main aim of SHES is to save lives through improving communications between patient and emergency services. Utilising the latest of technologies and algorithms within SHES is aiming to increase emergency communication throughput, while reducing emergency call systems issues and making the process of emergency response more efficient. Utilising health data held within a personal smartphone, and internal tracked data (GPU, Accelerometer, Gyroscope etc.), SHES aims to process the mentioned data efficiently, and securely, through automatic communications with emergency services, ultimately reducing communication bottlenecks. Live video-streaming through real-time video communication protocols is also a focus of SHES to improve initial communications between emergency services and patients. A prototype of this system has been developed. The system has been evaluated by a preliminary usability, reliability, and communication performance study

Therapeutic potential of anti-VEGF receptor 2 therapy targeting for M2-tumor-associated macrophages in colorectal cancer

博士（医学）福島県立医科大

Child health and education in developing countries

Thesis(Doctoral) -- KDI School: Ph.D in Development Policy, 2020This dissertation studies the effect of livelihoods skills upgrading program, community nutrition projects, education law on child’s educational attainment and nutritional status in developing countries such as Myanmar, Ghana and Viet Nam. Chapter one studies the livelihoods skills upgrading program which was implemented in 2012 across three agri-ecological zones of rural areas Myanmar and data collected in 2011, 2013 and 2015. In this study, we estimate the impacts of livelihoods skills upgrading program on child schooling (middle school, high school and university school), household poverty and monthly income in the program villages relative to the control villages. We find that the program strongly increases the probability of middle school level attended by 14.2 percent and high school level attended by 19.8 percent. And, no evidence of its impact on university school level attended across 2013 and 2015. However, the program has no impact on household poverty and their monthly income across 2011 and 2013, and 2011 and 2015 respectively. Chapter two examines the effects of community nutrition projects-Spring Ghana on malnutrition in Ghana. The project objective was to reduce chronic malnutrition (stunting) within 1,000 days of a child, from conception to 2 years after birth by 20 percent. Using the 2011 and 2017 Ghana Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (GMIC) dataset and employing the difference-in-difference strategy, we show a strong positive association of the project effect on the probability of stunting and underweight by 9 percentage points. However, we find no evidence of the project effect on acute malnutrition. Our results show the effectiveness of community nutrition projects on child health in Ghana. Chapter three analyzes the impact of mother education on child health, child mortality and infant mortality by exploiting an exogeneous variation the law on primary school completion in 1991 in Viet Nam. Estimating the impact of maternal education on child health nutritional outcomes is employing the simple comparison of mother year of birth in 1979 and 1980, and mother birth cohorts 1980 and above till 1985, which is exploited from the Law on Universal Primary Education (LUPE). Our results show that primary school completion of mothers have no significant impact on child health outcomes: low height for age (stunting), low weight for age (underweight) and low weight for height (acute malnutrition), child mortality and infant mortality rates. In the simple comparison of mother birth cohorts in 1979 and 1980, primary school completion of mothers has an insignificant negative relationship with stunting and underweight while others have an insignificant positive relationship. Overall, it finds a negative relationship on child health outcomes. Specifically, competing primary schooling level (grade 2) of mother who were born in 1983 have significantly reduction on low height for age by 6.5 percentage points.Chapter 1: The Impacts of Livelihoods Skill Upgrading Program on Child's Schooling and Poverty: The Case of LIFT (Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund) Program in Rural Myanmar Chapter 2: Impact of Community Nutrition Project on Child Health: A Case Study of SPRING-Ghana Project - A 1,000-Day Household Approach Chapter 3: Intergenerational Impacts of Education on Childhood Nutrition: Evidence from VietnamdoctoralpublishedSalai Thar Kei My

Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Cognitive computing meets the internet of things

Abstract: This paper discusses the blend of cognitive computing with the Internet-of-Things that should result into developing cognitive things. Today’s things are confined into a data-supplier role, which deprives them from being the technology of choice for smart applications development. Cognitive computing is about reasoning, learning, explaining, acting, etc. In this paper, cognitive things’ features include functional and non-functional restrictions along with a 3 stage operation cycle that takes into account these restrictions during reasoning, adaptation, and learning. Some implementation details about cognitive things are included in this paper based on a water pipe case-study