Underlying Factors in International Labour Migration in Asia: Population, Employment and Productivity Trends

[Excerpt] In Asia, migration pressures are likely to remain strong for many years to come because of the diverging trajectories of growth of the working age population and the vast differences in earnings between the more developed and the poorer countries of the region. While trends in education and in employment structure are bound to modify the underlying pressures for international mobility, the conclusion that migration pressures will remain strong is no longer in doubt

Medical applications of diamond magnetometry: commercial viability

The sensing of magnetic fields has important applications in medicine, particularly to the sensing of signals in the heart and brain. The fields associated with biomagnetism are exceptionally weak, being many orders of magnitude smaller than the Earth's magnetic field. To measure them requires that we use the most sensitive detection techniques, however, to be commercially viable this must be done at an affordable cost. The current state of the art uses costly SQUID magnetometers, although they will likely be superseded by less costly, but otherwise limited, alkali vapour magnetometers. Here, we discuss the application of diamond magnetometers to medical applications. Diamond magnetometers are robust, solid state devices that work in a broad range of environments, with the potential for sensitivity comparable to the leading technologies.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

Human Resources, Poverty, and Regional Development

Human development has moved to centre stage in development theory. Education makes an important contribution to economic growth, but achievement of mass education is important for a number of other reasons as well. Inequality of access to education is a serious issue everywhere, and serves to reinforce the inequality of income. Inequality is evident from the viewpoint of socio-economic background, of gender, and of regional disparities. In a poverty alleviation programme, tackling regional inequalities in education may be crucial, yet it raises many issues. Will expanding educational opportunities only result in frustration if appropriate jobs are not available? Is the key role of education in poor regions to enable educated young people to migrate elsewhere to find better jobs? In international comparisons, Pakistan appears well behind comparable countries in educational development. “Path dependency” means that the legacy of past deficiencies in expanding education will adversely affect Pakistan’s development for decades to come, and what is done now in education will affect development for half a century. A simple projection shows that even with the highly optimistic assumption that by 2030, Pakistan will reach the enrolment rates currently achieved in the United States, the proportion of the working-age population in that year with no education or only primary school education would still be as high as 35 percent. This underlines the need for a strong drive to expand educational opportunity.

Modular Autoencoders for Ensemble Feature Extraction

We introduce the concept of a Modular Autoencoder (MAE), capable of learning a set of diverse but complementary representations from unlabelled data, that can later be used for supervised tasks. The learning of the representations is controlled by a trade off parameter, and we show on six benchmark datasets the optimum lies between two extremes: a set of smaller, independent autoencoders each with low capacity, versus a single monolithic encoding, outperforming an appropriate baseline. In the present paper we explore the special case of linear MAE, and derive an SVD-based algorithm which converges several orders of magnitude faster than gradient descent.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, to appear in a special issue of The Journal Of Machine Learning Research (vol.44, Dec 2015

j_psi Suppression and the Quark-Gluon Plasma

All measured Feynman x_f distributions of the ratio, R, of j_psi production in nuclei relative to production on protons fall off with x_f. They show [2] that absorption of charmonium cannot be the only source of j_psi suppression and that energy loss of the constituents of the incident proton prior to the j_psi production, because of the exponential sqrt(s) dependence of the charmonium cross section, should not be neglected. Including the effects of initial state energy loss we find that the latest measured Pb-Pb j_psi cross sections do not provide any evidence for deconfinement.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, additional material, accepted by Physics Letter

Behavior and weight correlates of weight-control efforts in Australian women living in disadvantage : the READI study

BackgroundWith increasing obesity rates worldwide, more and more people are actively attempting to lose weight or avoid weight gain, but relatively little is known about what specific behaviors comprise these efforts and which, if any, are associated with better weight control over time.MethodsThis paper reports relationships between body weight, weight-control efforts and related behaviors over a three-year period in 1,634 Australian women. The women were purposefully recruited from 80 disadvantaged neighborhoods in Victoria, Australia. Weight loss efforts were categorized as trying to lose weight, trying to prevent weight gain and no weight-control efforts. Behavioral correlates examined included different kinds of physical activity and consumption of a number of specific foods types.Results and discussionSelf-reported body weight at baseline was higher in women trying to lose weight. Frequency of consumption of low energy density foods was positively associated with reported weight-control efforts, as was frequency of reported total and leisure-time physical activity. Longitudinal associations between changes in weight-control efforts and changes in behaviors were consistent with the cross-sectional findings. At three-year follow up, however, weight-control efforts were not associated with change in body weight. More detailed analyses of specific food choices suggested that part of the explanation of no effect of reported weight-control efforts and weight over time might be that people are not as well-informed as they should be about the energy density of some common foods. In particular, those reporting engagement in weight-control efforts reported reducing consumption of carbohydrate-containing foods such as bread and potatoes more than is justified by their energy content, while they reported increasing consumption of some high energy density foods (e.g., cheese and nuts).ConclusionIt is tentatively concluded that women living in disadvantaged neighborhoods understand messages about weight-control (more activity and foods with lower fat and lower energy density) but that some foods eaten more by women engaged in weight control may reduce the effectiveness of these efforts.<br /

Multiple Criteria Decision Making: Method Selection And Application To Three Contrasting Agricultural Case Studies

Agribusiness, farm business and agricultural-environmental decisions which varied in their characteristics were used to evaluate multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) in an agricultural context. This paper discusses differences between the case studies, strengths and weaknesses of the methods used, and the success of the MCDM process based on participants’ expectations and experiences. While MCDM can help identify the best decision, the main benefits identified in using MCDM included better understanding of their own and other’s perspectives, a means to explain the decision and a structured way to work through the decision process. Key problem areas identified included time limitations, understanding and ownership.Multiple criteria decision making, agriculture, decision making, Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance, Consumer/Household Economics, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Epitaxial growth and surface reconstruction of CrSb(0001)

Smooth CrSb(0001) films have been grown by molecular beam epitaxy on MnSb(0001) – GaAs(111) substrates. CrSb(0001) shows (2 × 2), triple domain (1 × 4) and (√3×√3)R30° reconstructed surfaces as well as a (1 × 1) phase. The dependence of reconstruction on substrate temperature and incident fluxes is very similar to MnSb(0001)