Water Crisis in Vietnam

• Immediately after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Vietnam experienced economic turmoil and famine as the roots of industrialization began to grip the nation. • In 1986, the government declared a rapid transition from a planned to a market economy would take hold. The ensuing change caused further increased industrial development and a subsequent growth of the emerging market economy. 1 • To this day, Vietnam’s GDP is rising yearly at a rapid rate. • For this reason, much of Vietnam has been developed in a relatively short amount of time (since the end of the war) but much of it has lagged behind, including the infrastructure including water pipes and water sanitation plants. This lag has caused limited access to sanitized water in both rural and urban areas. • Despite an overall adequate water access for Vietnamese citizens, the sanitation of supplied water has not improved as markedly as the country as a whole. • Sanitation has increased from 37% in 1990 to 75% in 2011 as defined by the JMP’s sanitation standards. Here, sanitation is defined as the distance between a water supply and human excretion.2 • Although Vietnam’s water has been made safer over the past few decades, it is largely undrinkable. • A 2009 study done by scientists at the Vietnam Institute of Biotechnology concluded that ammonia levels in Vietnam’s waters range from an average of 6-18 times higher than an acceptable level. 3 Furthermore, arsenic levels range from 2-3 times higher than an acceptable level.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/cwicposters/1025/thumbnail.jp

Sticky Wages, Incomplete Pass-Through and Inflation Targeting: What is the Right Index to Target?

This paper studies strict monetary policy rules in a small open economy with Inflation Targeting, incomplete pass-through and rigid nominal wages. The paper shows that, when nominal wages are fully flexible and pass-through is low to moderate, the monetary authority should target the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rather than the Domestic Price Index (DPI). When pass-through is high, an economy with high degrees of nominal wage rigidity and wage indexation should either target the CPI or fully stabilise nominal wages. These results suggest that, by committing to a common monetary policy in a common-currency area, some countries may not be following the right monetary policy rules.Monetary policy rules; Inflation targeting ; Exchange rate pass-through; Nominal wage rigidity; Open economy.

Bounds on Slow Roll at the Boundary of the Landscape

We present strong evidence that the tree level slow roll bounds of arXiv:1807.05193 and arXiv:1810.05506 are valid, even when the tachyon has overlap with the volume of the cycle wrapped by the orientifold. This extends our previous results in the volume-dilaton subspace to a semi-universal modulus. Emboldened by this and other observations, we investigate what it means to have a bound on (generalized) slow roll in a multi-field landscape. We argue that for $any$ point $\phi_0$ in an $N$-dimensional field space with $V(\phi_0) > 0$, there exists a path of monotonically decreasing potential energy to a point $\phi_1$ within a path length $\lesssim {\cal O}(1)$, such that $\sqrt{N}\ln \frac{V(\phi_1)}{V(\phi_0)} \lesssim - {\cal O} (1)$. The previous de Sitter swampland bounds are specific ways to realize this stringent non-local constraint on field space, but we show that it also incorporates (for example) the scenario where both slow roll parameters are intermediate-valued and the Universe undergoes a small number of e-folds, as in the Type IIA set up of arXiv:1310.8300. Our observations are in the context of tree level constructions, so we take the conservative viewpoint that it is a characterization of the classical "boundary" of the string landscape. To emphasize this, we argue that these bounds can be viewed as a type of Dine-Seiberg statement.Comment: v4: one more referenc

Assessing framing assumptions in quantitative health impact assessments: a housing intervention example.

Health impact assessment (HIA) is often used to determine ex ante the health impact of an environmental policy or an environmental intervention. Underpinning any HIA is the framing assumption, which defines the causal pathways mapping environmental exposures to health outcomes. The sensitivity of the HIA to the framing assumptions is often ignored. A novel method based on fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) is developed to quantify the framing assumptions in the assessment stage of a HIA, and is then applied to a housing intervention (tightening insulation) as a case-study. Framing assumptions of the case-study were identified through a literature search of Ovid Medline (1948-2011). The FCM approach was used to identify the key variables that have the most influence in a HIA. Changes in air-tightness, ventilation, indoor air quality and mould/humidity have been identified as having the most influence on health. The FCM approach is widely applicable and can be used to inform the formulation of the framing assumptions in any quantitative HIA of environmental interventions. We argue that it is necessary to explore and quantify framing assumptions prior to conducting a detailed quantitative HIA during the assessment stage

Invariances and Data Augmentation for Supervised Music Transcription

This paper explores a variety of models for frame-based music transcription, with an emphasis on the methods needed to reach state-of-the-art on human recordings. The translation-invariant network discussed in this paper, which combines a traditional filterbank with a convolutional neural network, was the top-performing model in the 2017 MIREX Multiple Fundamental Frequency Estimation evaluation. This class of models shares parameters in the log-frequency domain, which exploits the frequency invariance of music to reduce the number of model parameters and avoid overfitting to the training data. All models in this paper were trained with supervision by labeled data from the MusicNet dataset, augmented by random label-preserving pitch-shift transformations.Comment: 6 page