Doha Development Agenda: Asian Challenges and Prospects after the Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong, China.

The Doha Development Agenda is the first "round" of multilateral trade negotiations under the World Trade Organization and is also the first time that multilateral trade talks have explicitly sought to focus on the interests of developing countries. Developing Asia therefore has much at stake in the talks and has a strong interest in a positive and ambitious outcome. The key areas of market access negotiations are in industrial products, agriculture, and services. Each area raises distinct issues and nuances for various groups of developed and developing countries. In addition, the Doha Agenda includes the rules governing contingent forms of protection and regional trade agreements. Finally, "aid for trade" and trade facilitation are part of the agenda. Asia has a vital interest in multilateral liberalization prospering in the Doha talks.

Hadamard Wirtinger Flow for Sparse Phase Retrieval

We consider the problem of reconstructing an $n$-dimensional $k$-sparse signal from a set of noiseless magnitude-only measurements. Formulating the problem as an unregularized empirical risk minimization task, we study the sample complexity performance of gradient descent with Hadamard parametrization, which we call Hadamard Wirtinger flow (HWF). Provided knowledge of the signal sparsity $k$, we prove that a single step of HWF is able to recover the support from $k(x^*_{max})^{-2}$ (modulo logarithmic term) samples, where $x^*_{max}$ is the largest component of the signal in magnitude. This support recovery procedure can be used to initialize existing reconstruction methods and yields algorithms with total runtime proportional to the cost of reading the data and improved sample complexity, which is linear in $k$ when the signal contains at least one large component. We numerically investigate the performance of HWF at convergence and show that, while not requiring any explicit form of regularization nor knowledge of $k$, HWF adapts to the signal sparsity and reconstructs sparse signals with fewer measurements than existing gradient based methods

Novel critical phenomena in compressible polar active fluids: A functional renormalization group approach

Active matter is not only relevant to living matter and diverse nonequilibrium systems, but also constitutes a fertile ground for novel physics. Indeed, dynamic renormalization group (DRG) analyses have uncovered many new universality classes (UCs) in polar active fluids - an archetype of active matter systems. However, due to the inherent technical difficulties in the DRG methodology, almost all previous studies have been restricted to polar active fluids in the incompressible or infinitely compressible (i.e., Malthusian) limits, and, when the $\epsilon$-expansion was used in conjunction, to the one-loop level. Here, we use functional renormalization group methods to bypass some of these difficulties and unveil for the first time novel critical behavior in compressible polar active fluids, and calculate the corresponding critical exponents beyond the one-loop level. Specifically, focusing on a multicritical region of the system, we find three novel UCs and quantify their associate scaling behavior near the upper critical dimension $d_c = 6$.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Simultaneous Critical Order-Disorder and Critical Phase Separation in Compressible Polar Active Fluids: Dynamic and Functional Renormalization Group Analyses

The collective phenomenon of swarming behavior can, in the hydrodynamic limit, be described as a polar active fluid (PAF) - the same theory that governs the behavior of a collection of self-propelling particles with alignment interactions. Although a PAF is fundamentally out of equilibrium at the microscopic level, it is unclear whether the macroscopic behavior reflects this fact, e.g., through the violation of the fluctuation-dissipation relation valid in equilibrium systems. In this work, we investigate the multicritical point (MCP) of compressible PAFs, where the critical order-disorder transition coincides with critical phase separation. We first study the critical phenomenon using a dynamic renormalization group analysis and find that it is insufficient since two-loop effects are important to obtain a nontrivial correction to the scaling exponents. We then remedy this defect by using a functional renormalization group analysis. We find three novel universality classes and obtain their critical exponents, which we then use to show that at least two of these universality classes are out of equilibrium because they violate the fluctuation-dissipation relation.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2205.0161

Can exact scaling exponents be obtained using the renormalization group? Affirmative evidence from incompressible polar active fluids

In active matter systems, non-Gaussian, exact scaling exponents have been claimed in a range of systems using perturbative renormalization group (RG) methods. This is unusual compared to equilibrium systems where non-Gaussian exponents can typically only be approximated, even using the exact (or functional/nonperturbative) renormalization group (ERG). Here, we perform an ERG analysis on the ordered phase of incompressible polar active fluids and find that the exact non-Gaussian exponents obtained previously using a perturbative RG method remain valid even in this nonperturbative setting. Furthermore, our ERG analysis elucidates the RG flow of this system and enables us to identify an active Goldstone regime with nontrivial, long-ranged scaling behavior for parallel and longitudinal fluctuations.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

RVD2: an ultra-sensitive variant detection model for low-depth heterogeneous next-generation sequencing data

MOTIVATION: Next-generation sequencing technology is increasingly being used for clinical diagnostic tests. Clinical samples are often genomically heterogeneous due to low sample purity or the presence of genetic subpopulations. Therefore, a variant calling algorithm for calling low-frequency polymorphisms in heterogeneous samples is needed. RESULTS: We present a novel variant calling algorithm that uses a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate allele frequency and call variants in heterogeneous samples. We show that our algorithm improves upon current classifiers and has higher sensitivity and specificity over a wide range of median read depth and minor allele fraction. We apply our model and identify 15 mutated loci in the PAXP1 gene in a matched clinical breast ductal carcinoma tumor sample; two of which are likely loss-of-heterozygosity events

Internal and external barriers influencing LMS implementation in Iraqi higher education

Successful implementation of Learning Management System (LMS) can significantly improve the quality and quantity of education. Both the technological and people infrastructure need to be in place to achieve LMS success. Iraq is recovering from the recent wars and still faces serious security challenges. LMS could remove the time and geographic constraints of attending universities and bring education to more students, accelerating the re-skilling of the country. However, the Iraqi situation imposes specific context factors that are different from LMS implementation in developed countries. The aim of this paper is to identify the most important internal and external barriers in adopting LMS as a higher education initiative in Iraq, using the University of Al-Qadisiyah as the case organisation. The primary data collection targets are the IT staff, faculty and academic department heads because they are the key stakeholders to deliver the pedagogical and technological collaboration needed in successful LMS. There are 90 participants in the survey. The significant barriers to LMS implementation identified are: Lack of or limited teachers’ training; lack of commitment to constructivist pedagogy; lack of experience to use the technology; lack of technical support; lack of pedagogical training for teachers; and lack of appropriate educational software. Most important at this time is ICT skills development and ICT training provision for teachers. The correlation of these factors to the Iraqi context is discussed in the paper. The result is used to develop a framework on the internal and external barriers. This helps academic staff and IT staff to develop the teaching-learning style and achieve an effective adoption of LMS in all higher learning institutions in Iraq

Influence of trace erythromycin and eryhthromycin-H2O on carbon and nutrients removal and on resistance selection in sequencing batch reactors (SBRs).

Three sequencing batch reactors (SBRs) were operated in parallel to study the effects of trace erythromycin (ERY) and ERY-H2O on the treatment of a synthetic wastewater. Through monitoring (1) daily effluents and (2) concentrations of nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P) in certain batch cycles of the three reactors operated from transient to steady states, the removal of carbon, N, and P was affected negligibly by ERY (100 microg/L) or ERY-H2O (50 microg/L) when compared with the control reactor. However, through analyzing microbial communities of the three steady state SBRs on high-density microarrays (Phylo-Chip), ERY, and ERY-H2O had pronounced effects on the community composition of bacteria related to N and P removal, leading to diversity loss and abundance change. The above observations indicated that resistant bacteria were selected upon exposure to ERY or ERY-H2O. Shortterm batch experiments further proved the resistance and demonstrated that ammonium oxidation (56-95%) was inhibited more significantly than nitrite oxidation (18-61%) in the presence of ERY (100, 400, or 800 microg/L). Therefore, the presence of ERY or ERY-H2O (at microg/L levels) shifted the microbial community and selected resistant bacteria, which may account for the negligible influence of the antibiotic ERY or its derivative ERY-H2O (at microg/L levels) on carbon, N, and P removal in the SBRs