Unemployment in Asia

The rate of economic change in East Asia over the past two decades has been astounding. High levels of growth have been experienced by a number of the region's developing economies, centralized systems have developed large market sectors, Japan has suffered a prolonged downturn and the 1997 crisis plunged there region into economic turmoil. This edited volume is the first work to comprehensively examine the effects of these changes on employment in the region. Chapters are devoted to market restructuring in China and Vietnam, the Asian crisis and recovery and Japan's business doldrums. The unique case of Malaysia-one regional economy that needs to import workers-is also brought into play, as is the example of high-tech Taiwan. Underpinning these case studies is a common theoretical framework and a strong structure for understanding. With its solid research and focus on a relatively unexplored aspect of one of the world's most dynamic economic regions, Unemployment in Asia will intereststudents, academics, trade unionists, research bodies, government departments and international organizations

Have we found a solution for health misinformation? A ten-year systematic review of health misinformation literature 2013-2022

Background Health misinformation (HM) has emerged as a prominent social issue in recent years, driven by declining public trust, popularisation of digital media platforms and escalating public health crisis. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, HM has raised critical concerns due to its significant impacts on both individuals and society as a whole. A comprehensive understanding of HM and HM-related studies would be instrumental in identifying possible solutions to address HM and the associated challenges. Methods Following the PRISMA procedure, 11,739 papers published from January 2013 to December 2022 were retrieved from five electronic databases, and 813 papers matching the inclusion criteria were retained for further analysis. This article critically reviewed HM-related studies, detailing the factors facilitating HM creation and dissemination, negative impacts of HM, solutions to HM, and research methods employed in those studies. Results A growing number of studies have focused on HM since 2013. Results of this study highlight that trust plays a significant while latent role in the circuits of HM, facilitating the creation and dissemination of HM, exacerbating the negative impacts of HM and amplifying the difficulty in addressing HM. Conclusion For health authorities and governmental institutions, it is essential to systematically build public trust in order to reduce the probability of individuals acceptation of HM and to improve the effectiveness of misinformation correction. Future studies should pay more attention to the role of trust in how to address HM. Have we found a solution for health misinformation? A ten-year systematic review of health misinformation literature 2013–2022.</p

Association of organizational and patient behaviors with physician well-being: A national survey in China

This study aims to investigate the association of organizational and patient behaviors (reflecting the internal and external environment of hospital, respectively) with physician well-being. A national cross-sectional survey was conducted in 77 hospitals across seven provinces in China between July 2014 and April 2015. Physician well-being was assessed with job satisfaction, career regret and happiness. Organizational behaviors were assessed with organizational fairness, leadership attention and team interaction; patient behaviors were assessed with patient trust and unreasonable requests from patients. Of a study sample of 3,159 physicians, 1,788 were men (56.6%) and 1,371 were women (43.4%). Overall, positive organizational and patient behaviors reported by physicians were relatively low. Negative organizational behaviors and patient behaviors including lower organizational fairness, lower leadership attention, lower team interaction and lower patient trust were associated with lower job satisfaction and lower life satisfaction, and higher career regret. The association between organizational behaviors and physician well-being exhibited some gender differences, while no clear gender difference was found for the relationship between patient behaviors and physician well-being. Given the importance of physician well-being for the healthcare system, interventions for improving internal and external hospital environments (e.g., organizational fairness, leadership attention, team interaction and patient trust) may benefit physician well-being

Identifiability based sensor configuration analysis for Bayesian structural identification

When performing structural health monitoring, the design of an optimal sensor configuration aims at improving the effectiveness of structural identification (st-id) and anomaly detection while reducing costs/redundant data. Since this activity takes place when only simulated data is available, model uncertainties have a great impact on the results. This paper studies the application of a hybrid Bayesian methodology for optimal sensor configuration improvement of st-id. It exhibits a comprehensive formulation for uncertainty quantification, aided with multiple response Gaussian processes, and a reduced computational effort relatively to previous works. Information of the optimal sensor position, amount and diversity of data that should be collected, before the actual monitoring phase, can be obtained. An aluminium bridge scale model instrumented with strain gauges/thermocouples, and supported at one end with springs, whose stiffness have to be identified, is used as a case-study. The methodology is applied to a finite element model of the actual structure, and the optimal location of strain gauges is obtained. Validation is carried out by comparison of these results against a subsequent st-id of the bridge supports stiffness, when measurements are made available. Results show that: the used performance criterion is a reliable index of how accurate the identification is (identifiability); the computational effort of the method can be three times less than previous works; and even with poorly informative responses it is possible to design a reliable and cost-effective sensor configuration

Building High-fidelity Human Body Models from User-generated Data

We propose a key point-based approach, refers to as KPhub-PC, to estimate high-fidelity human body models from low quality point clouds acquired with an affordable 3D scanner and a variation KPhub-I that can achieve the same purpose based on low-resolution single images taken by smartphones. In KPhub-PC, a sparse set of key points is annotated to guide the deformation of a parametric 3D human body model SMPL and then a high-fidelity human body model that can explain the target point cloud is built. Besides building 3D human body models from point clouds, KPhub-I is designed to estimate accurate 3D human body models from single 2D images. The SMPL model is fitted to 2D joints and the boundary of the human body which are detected using CNN based methods automatically. Considering that people are in stable poses at most of the time, a stable pose prior is defined from CMU motion capture dataset for further improving accuracy. Intensive experiments demonstrate that in both types of user-generated data, the proposed approaches can build believable and animatable human body models robustly. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts in the accuracy of both human body shape and pose estimation.</p

An integrated dielectrophoresis-active hydrophoretic microchip for continuous particle filtration and separation

Microfluidic manipulation of biological objects from mixture has a significant application in sample preparation and clinical diagnosis. This work presents a dielectrophoresis-active hydrophoretic device for continuous label-free particle separation and filtration. This device comprises interdigitated electrodes and a hydrophoretic channel. According to the difference of lateral positions of polystyrene particles, the device can run at separation or filtration modes by altering the power supply voltages. With an applied voltage of 24 Vp-p, both 3 and 10 μm beads had close lateral positions and were redirected to the same outlet. Under a voltage of 36 Vp-p, beads with the diameters of 3 and 10 μm had different lateral positions and were collected from the different outlets. Separation of 5 and 10 μm particles was achieved to demonstrate the relatively small size difference of the beads. This device has great potential in a range of lab-on-a-chip applications

Software for the frontiers of quantum chemistry: An overview of developments in the Q-Chem 5 package

This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange-correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear-electronic orbital method, and several different energy decomposition analysis techniques. High-performance capabilities including multithreaded parallelism and support for calculations on graphics processing units are described. Q-Chem boasts a community of well over 100 active academic developers, and the continuing evolution of the software is supported by an "open teamware"model and an increasingly modular design