Data for decision-making: how spatial data is shaping the African urbanisation story

Ahead of the 17th Urban Age Conference and the first to be held in Africa, Sebastian Kriticos and Astrid Haas discuss the need for better data to tackle some of Africa’s biggest urbanisation challenges

Considerations for land value capture reform in the Greater Amman Municipality

This report discusses several policy options for improving the calculation and collection of specific land value capture instruments. Namely: Land Value Increment Taxes; Betterment Levies; Development Impact Fees and Exactions. The report focuses on the city of Amman, however, several of the policy challenges and solutions that emerge are common to many developing cities. Specifically, the researchers detail potential avenues for reform to improve assessment and calculation, issuance, and collection of land value capture instruments. Improving clarity around different value capture tools used by cities – in terms of who pays, when they pay, and for what reason – is a first step for improved performance. Clarity must then be supported by greater transparency over how charges are calculated as well as clear communication to demonstrate how tax money is effectively used. The researchers detail several incremental steps that could improve land value capture, ultimately helping city governments to raise finances and support urban sustainable growth through targeted public investments

2-Undecanone : a new attractant for anthropophilic mosquitoes

Stechmücken der Art Stegomyia aegypti (ehemals Aedes aegypti, REINERT et al. 2004) sind die wichtigsten Überträger von Gelbfieber- und Dengueviren. Diverse Arten der Gattung Anopheles verbreiten die Erreger der Malaria. Bei Versuchen, Malaria, Gelbfieber und Dengue einzudämmen, wurden in den letzten Jahrzehnten wiederholt Kampagnen gegen Stechmücken geführt. Dabei wurden Insektizide vielfach flächendeckend ausgebracht. Dies führte kurzfristig zu geringeren Mückendichten, allerdings entwickelten sich auch vielerorts gegen diese Gifte resistente Mückenpopulationen. Anstelle des flächendeckenden Gifteinsatzes wird heute versucht, die Insektizide örtlich und zeitlich effektiv einzusetzen, um so die Gefahr weiterer Resistenzbildung zu minimieren und sowohl die Kosten als auch die Belastung für Umwelt und Bevölkerung möglichst gering zu halten. Um Insektizide zur richtigen Zeit gezielt ausbringen zu können, ist ein Monitoring der Mücken erforderlich. Mückenfallen, die durch optische Effekte und Duftstoffe gezielt anthropophile Stechmückenarten anlocken, sind für ein derartiges Bestandsmonitoring besonders geeignet. Auf der Suche nach attraktiven Duftstoffen, welche die Effektivität solcher Fallen erhöhen, wurde unter anderem auch 2-Undecanon getestet. In Verhaltensversuchen mit den anthropophilen Mückenarten Stegomyia aegypti und Anopheles stephensi konnte die Attraktivität dieser Substanz sowohl als Einzelreiz als auch in Kombination mit anderen Attraktanzien gezeigt und quantifiziert werden.The attractiveness of 2-undecanone to host-seeking female Stegomyia aegpyti (former Aedes aegypti) and female Anopheles stephensi (Diptera: Culicidae) mosquitoes was tested in a Y-tube bioassay under laboratory conditions. -Undecanone alone in a concentration of 40 ppm was significantly more attractive to S. aegypti mosquitoes than pure air. In combination with other kairomones such as caproic acid, lactic acid and ammonia doses of 2-undecanone from 4 ppm up to 130 ppm augmented significantly the attractiveness of these kairomones. The synergism of 2-undecanone with other attractants is comparable to that one described for lactic acid. The combination of 2-undecanone with lactic acid, however, was more attractive than the two compounds as single stimuli. Interestingly 2-undecanone is neither known as an human skin compound nor as a volatile in human breath. First field experiments near Regensburg in Germany with BG-Sentinel® mosquito traps could not confirm the attractive effect of 2-undecanone (ROSE et al. 2006) for Culex species. A possible explanation could be that the tested dose of 2-undecanone was not in the optimum range or that the studied species do not respond to this compound

Tensor-based Subspace Factorization for StyleGAN

In this paper, we propose $\tau$GAN a tensor-based method for modeling the latent space of generative models. The objective is to identify semantic directions in latent space. To this end, we propose to fit a multilinear tensor model on a structured facial expression database, which is initially embedded into latent space. We validate our approach on StyleGAN trained on FFHQ using BU-3DFE as a structured facial expression database. We show how the parameters of the multilinear tensor model can be approximated by Alternating Least Squares. Further, we introduce a tacked style-separated tensor model, defined as an ensemble of style-specific models to integrate our approach with the extended latent space of StyleGAN. We show that taking the individual styles of the extended latent space into account leads to higher model flexibility and lower reconstruction error. Finally, we do several experiments comparing our approach to former work on both GANs and multilinear models. Concretely, we analyze the expression subspace and find that the expression trajectories meet at an apathetic face that is consistent with earlier work. We also show that by changing the pose of a person, the generated image from our approach is closer to the ground truth than results from two competing approaches.Comment: Accepted for FG202

Impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in Uganda

President Yoweri Museveni would like Uganda to be a middle-income country by 2020. As the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and Uganda’s own National Development plans, make clear, however, income per capita is only one criterion by which an advanced economy should be judged

Multiversioning hardware transactional memory for fail-operational multithreaded applications

Modern safety-critical embedded applications like autonomous driving need to be fail-operational, while high performance and low power consumption are demanded simultaneously. The prevalent fault tolerance mechanisms suffer from disadvantages: Some (e.g. triple modular redundancy) require a substantial amount of duplication, resulting in high hardware costs and power consumption. Others, like lockstep, require supplementary checkpointing mechanisms to recover from errors. Further approaches (e.g. software-based process-level redundancy) cannot handle the indeterminism caused by multithreaded execution. This paper presents a novel approach for fail-operational systems using hardware transactional memory for embedded systems. The hardware transactional memory is extended to support multiple versions, enabling redundant atomic operations and recovery in case of an error. In our FPGA-based evaluation, we executed the PARSEC benchmark suite with fault tolerance on 12 cores. The evaluation shows that multiversioning can successfully recover from all transient errors with an overhead comparable to fault tolerance mechanisms without recovery

First Results of the PixelGEM Central Tracking System for COMPASS

For its physics program with a high-intensity hadron beam of up to 2e7 particles/s, the COMPASS experiment at CERN requires tracking of charged particles scattered by very small angles with respect to the incident beam direction. While good resolution in time and space is mandatory, the challenge is imposed by the high beam intensity, requiring radiation-hard detectors which add very little material to the beam path in order to minimize secondary interactions. To this end, a set of triple-GEM detectors with a hybrid readout structure consisting of pixels in the beam region and 2-D strips in the periphery was designed and built. Successful prototype tests proved the performance of this new detector type, showing both extraordinary high rate capability and detection efficiency. The amplitude information allowed to achieve spatial resolutions about a factor of 10 smaller than the pitch and a time resolution close to the theoretical limit imposed by the layout. The PixelGEM central tracking system consisting of five detectors, slightly improved with respect to the prototype, was completely installed in the COMPASS spectrometer in spring 2008

Board experience and value creation in cross-border acquisitions:The role of acquirer and target country institutions

Our study investigates the effects of board acquisition experience on value creation in cross-border acquisitions and the dependence of this relationship on acquirer and target country institutions. We draw on cross-border acquisition research and institution-based corporate governance research to argue that the effect of board acquisition experience depends on the institutional characteristics of the acquirer and target countries and on cultural differences between these two countries. Based on 1775 cross-border acquisitions of U.S. and European acquirers, we show a positive effect of board acquisition experience on the announcement returns of cross-border acquisitions, which is even stronger when the target country’s takeover regulations are less friendly and when the target and acquirer countries are culturally more distant

Can Africa learn from the Chinese urbanisation story?

This paper provides a framework to understand the similarities and differences between Africa’s current urbanisation pathway and the path China has taken over the last 30 years. A major difference is that Africa’s urbanisation to date has not been associated with anywhere near the same gains in productivity and poverty reduction that have been seen in China. Instead, the growth of Africa’s cities has more often been associated with development challenges such as the rise of slums, unemployment, and political instability. However, with well-implemented and far-sighted public policy, this trend could be reversed and urbanisation could unlock a process of sustained and inclusive development in Africa

Collecting Survey and Smartphone Sensor Data With an App: Opportunities and Challenges Around Privacy and Informed Consent

The new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes enhanced requirements on digital data collection. This article reports from a 2018 German nationwide population-based probability app study in which participants were asked through a GDPR compliant consent process to share a series of digital trace data, including geolocation, accelerometer data, phone and text messaging logs, app usage, and access to their address books. With about 4,300 invitees and about 650 participants, we demonstrate (1) people were just as willing to share such extensive digital trace data as they were in studies with far more limited requests; (2) despite being provided more decision-related information, participants hardly differentiated between the different data requests made; and (3) once participants gave consent, they did not tend to revoke it. We also show (4) evidence for a widely-held belief that explanations regarding data collection and data usage are often not read carefully, at least not within the app itself, indicating the need for research and user experience improvement to adequately inform and protect participants. We close with suggestions to the field for creating a seal of approval from professional organizations to help the research community promote the safe use of data