Advantageous Position Research Articles

YUMUŞAK GÜÇ, KAMU DİPLOMASİSİ VE KAMU DİPLOMASİSİ TEKNİKLERİ: KAVRAMSAL BİR DEĞERLENDİRME

For many years, the traditional diplomacy model was accepted as the most important actor in building relations around the world. Traditional diplomacy involved negotiations between two or more government officials that resulted in consensus or conflict. Countries with especially high military and economic power in international relations always had an advantageous position against their counterparts. For many years, traditional diplomacy has been the dominant paradigm of international relations. However, in the 21st century, a new foreign policy method has emerged that deeply affects international relations and causes a kind of paradigm shift. The subject of this method, known as public diplomacy, is people rather than governments. Public diplomacy, which can be seen as a strategic communication model, has meanings such as influencing the people of other countries and becoming a center of attraction for them. In this study, a detailed evaluation of public diplomacy and its techniques has been made, starting from the concept of soft power integrated with public diplomacy. In the study, public diplomacy techniques were exemplified and tried to be presented to the reader in a practical way.

중국 디지털 위안화 추진 현황 및 국경간 거래에 대한 고찰

After the COVID-19 pandemic, a cashless society is rapidly emerging into reality. With the prolonged COVID-19 in 2020, discussions on the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) issued by each country’s central banks are growing. In addition, consumers prefer payment methods for mobile first and fully digital. In particular, China is leading the way in issuing digital currency. Since 2014, the People’s Bank of China has established a research organization dedicated to digital currency and has been promoting pilot tests step by step. Starting with the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the scope of pilot tests is being expanded to enable regional transactions in intra-regional transactions with the aim of commercializing digital RMB. In addition, China is conducting pilot tests with the aim of increasing the efficiency of the international payment and settlement system with the digital RMB having an institutional and system advantage in cross-border transactions. The digital renminbi cross-border payment system test is still in its early stages of exploration. In the short term, it will take a lot of time for digital RMB technology to be properly established. However, each country’s digital currency development is also in its early stages, so it is important to make it compatible with other countries’ digital currencies. Korea also needs to take an advantageous position in establishing a global digital currency payment system by leading the establishment of global norms and systems related to CBDC. As such, it is an important task to establish specific international standards through international discussions and cooperation on digital currency that can be traded across borders.

THE USURY CRIME UNDER ART. 304 OF THE PENAL CODE IN THE CONTEXT OF BREACHES OF SAFE TRADE RULES OF ECONOMIC TURNOVER

This paper presents the issues that determine the security of business transactions, whose proper functioning is endangered by so-called usurers. It discusses crimes under Art. 304 § 1–3 of the Penal Code. The offense of usury, regulated in Art. 304 § 1 of the P.C., provides for the criminal liability of persons who, by taking advantage of the compulsory position of another natural person, legal entity, or organizational unit without legal personality, conclude a contract with it, imposing an obligation on it to perform disproportionate to the consideration. Article 304 § 2 and 3 of the P.C. regulate new types of usury, introduced into the legal system by the amendment of May 14, 2020, which penalizes behavior directed against consumers, consisting in demanding excessive interest or non-interest costs for providing a benefit with the obligation to return.

İstanbul İli Şile İlçesinde Arıcılık Faaliyetlerinde Kimyasal Kullanımının Değerlendirilmesi

The province of Istanbul, Şile District has a very advantageous position for beekeeping in terms of its geographical structure and vegetation. The main purpose of this research is to reveal some general characteristics of the beekeeping producers in the Şile District of Istanbul, to evaluate the use of chemicals, and to determine the problems in the production stages. In this evaluation on beekeeping activities, the data obtained through the questionnaire applied to 69 beekeepers in 36 villages in Şile Region were used. With the questions asked in this survey study, detailed data were obtained on many subjects such as the education status of the producers, their experiences, bee colony assets, honey yields, and diseases and pests control. The issues in beekeeping activities are discussed as education, queen production or supply, diseases and pests control. It has been found that the winter colony losses are quite high and the productivity is quite low in the region.

National cultural capital as out of reach for transnationally mobile Israeli professional families – making a ‘return home’ fraught

ABSTRACT The potentiality of converting capitals in new national fields following migration has been the focus of a number of studies. Another, much smaller, literature examines experiences of return migration. In this paper, we follow 15 Israeli families (where both mothers and children have been interviewed) who have been globally mobile for professional reasons. We examine cultural capital accumulation strategies for the children and how these facilitate the occupation of advantageous social positions while abroad. Having returned to Israel, partly due to the COVID pandemic, the national cultural capital the families have so actively cultivated in their children is evaluated as not authentic enough. Meanwhile, the cosmopolitan cultural capital that has been so valorised abroad, is not recognised as something the children can draw on to position themselves either. The paper contributes to the study of return migration, with a unique focus on globally mobile families returning ‘home’. We also examine how national cultural capital is conceived and differentially assessed as families move from a more transnational space to that of their home country.

Malaysian Perceptions of China Following the Asian Financial Crisis

This paper examines Malaysia's perception of China following the Asian Financial Crisis. The Asian Financial Crisis, which occurred in 1997, resulted in a contraction in Malaysia's GDP, which resulted in increased unemployment in Malaysia. China is a rising economy. Several bilateral visits and trade missions meet both states to achieve an advantageous economic position. Malaysia's decision to rely on China despite historical events that had sparked tensions between the two countries. Despite Malaysia's economic downturn, the country is taking swift action to address the issue. During the crisis, Malaysia viewed Western countries as irresponsible and allowed the situation to deteriorate, which later became the reason for Malaysia's relationship with China. The crisis, however, has influenced Malaysian Chinese businesses to improve their foreign policy and bilateral relations. This paper contends that Malaysia recognizes the importance of its bilateral relationship with China in stabilizing its economic development and social activity following the crisis.

DOCUMENT OF 1686 AND PATRIARCHAL EPISTLES, RELATED TO IT

It should be noted that certain principles of the 1686 document have persistently not been upheld by the Patriarchate of Moscow. Undoubtedly, the Patriarchate of Moscow has been exercising its right of ordination (cheirotonia) since 1686 as it kept performing ordinations of metropolitans, however it has not been adhering to the following two important principles – one concerning the commemoration of the patriarch of Constantinople by the metropolitan of Kyiv, and the other concerning the appointment of the metropolitan. Specifically, according to this document, the Patriarchate of Moscow had no right of appointing the candidate for metropolitan. Instead, the right of choosing the candidate for metropolitan was reserved for the local clergy and the faithful public of the metropolis of Kyiv. The last metropolitan who was lawfully chosen by the local clergy and the faithful of the metropolis of Kyiv was Joasaph, deceased in 1718. Therefore, we can conclude that the Patriarchate of Moscow illegally annexed the metropolis of Kyiv in the 1720s. In relation to the above, an important event took place in March 2019 when the official document confirming the annexation of the metropolis of Kyiv by the Patriarchate of Moscow was returned to Ukraine from Germany. The aforementioned document was issued by Peter I, tsar of Russia and it constitutes an important official source based on which the following can be deduced: 1. The Patriarchate of Moscow has annexed the metropolis of Kyiv. 2. The annexation happened in the 1720s. The question then arises as to why this breach of law was neglected by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. As it is widely known, since the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the Orthodox Church of Constantinople had to continue existing and serving its mission in a profoundly hostile environment. The 18th and 19th centuries were particularly difficult periods for the Patriarchate of Constantinople as it is also evidenced by the martyrdom of Patriarch Gregorius V (1746-1821) who was martyred by the Ottomans. During this period, even the physical existence of the Patriarchate itself came under threat. The Church of Russia was therefore able to take advantage of the weak position of the Patriarchate of Constantinople at that time and annexed the metropolis of Kyiv

INDIA – A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL PLAYER LOCATED BETWEEN BRICS AND THE OCCIDENTAL POWERS

India is one of the two demograpic superpowers of the world and one of the most important regional actors with a great deal of potential for playing an important part on the world stage. From a military point of view, India is the fourth most powerful country in the world, according to Global Power, economically speaking, being the fifth most powerful contry on a global scale, with growing trends, while geographically speaking, it is the seventh largest country in terms of area, however, it occupies a very advantageous geopolitical position. India is seen as a strong voice within BRICS and the UN against proposals or actions that could harm the interests of any member. It rejected China's proposal to invite Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Mexico into BRICS because India believed that the focus should be on developing the current members rather than inviting other weaker nations and that bringing these nations would drag BRICS down as an alliance and ultimately meet the same fate as the European Union. At the same time, different issues of the regional security ecuation of Asia (South-East Asia – India) – Pacific and complications which have resulted from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the ierarchy of the most influencial international actors make India’s standing and role more impotant in decision-making on both a regional and a global level.

Embossed Template Induced Particles Assembly for Heterostructures and the Application in High‐Security Encryption

AbstractThe coassembly of primary particles into heterostructures represents a significant strategy for advanced fabrication of multi‐functional materials or devices, and templated assembly has shown remarkable advantage for deterministic placement of particles and the efficient integration with substrates. However, template induced particles coassembly, which is significant for integrating multicomponents at desired positions, is still challenging. Herein, a facile strategy of embossed templateinduced particles coassembly for diverse superstructures and precise patterns is reported. Tunable region selective assembly of particles is demonstrated by controlling the resistance force via designing the embossed edge and surface roughness of the template. Through regulating the template morphologies and particles composition, well‐controlled coassembly of “flower” shaped heterostructure and chiral superstructure arrays are realized. Furthermore, the printable nanomaterials self‐assembly template is employed to achieve totally bottom‐up fabrication of excitation responsive heterostructure arrays, in which the multi‐photons process based energy transfer is studied to show the application in high‐secure encryption. With the advantage of accurate position and compatible to different materials, this strategy is expected to provide a promising platform for fabricating micro/nanoscale advanced devices.

Clinical workflow of sonographers performing fetal anomaly ultrasound scans: deep-learning-based analysis.

Despite decades of obstetric scanning, the field of sonographer workflow remains largely unexplored. In the second trimester, sonographers use scan guidelines to guide their acquisition of standard planes and structures; however, the scan-acquisition order is not prescribed. Using deep-learning-based video analysis, the aim of this study was to develop a deeper understanding of the clinical workflow undertaken by sonographers during second-trimester anomaly scans. We collected prospectively full-length video recordings of routine second-trimester anomaly scans. Important scan events in the videos were identified by detecting automatically image freeze and image/clip save. The video immediately preceding and following the important event was extracted and labeled as one of 11 commonly acquired anatomical structures. We developed and used a purposely trained and tested deep-learning annotation model to label automatically the large number of scan events. Thus, anomaly scans were partitioned as a sequence of anatomical planes or fetal structures obtained over time. A total of 496 anomaly scans performed by 14 sonographers were available for analysis. UK guidelines specify that an image or videoclip of five different anatomical regions must be stored and these were detected in the majority of scans: head/brain was detected in 97.2% of scans, coronal face view (nose/lips) in 86.1%, abdomen in 93.1%, spine in 95.0% and femur in 92.3%. Analyzing the clinical workflow, we observed that sonographers were most likely to begin their scan by capturing the head/brain (in 24.4% of scans), spine (in 23.2%) or thorax/heart (in 22.8%). The most commonly identified two-structure transitions were: placenta/amniotic fluid to maternal anatomy, occurring in 44.5% of scans; head/brain to coronal face (nose/lips) in 42.7%; abdomen to thorax/heart in 26.1%; and three-dimensional/four-dimensional face to sagittal face (profile) in 23.7%. Transitions between three or more consecutive structures in sequence were uncommon (up to 13% of scans). None of the captured anomaly scans shared an entirely identical sequence. We present a novel evaluation of the anomaly scan acquisition process using a deep-learning-based analysis of ultrasound video. We note wide variation in the number and sequence of structures obtained during routine second-trimester anomaly scans. Overall, each anomaly scan was found to be unique in its scanning sequence, suggesting that sonographers take advantage of the fetal position and acquire the standard planes according to their visibility rather than following a strict acquisition order. © 2022 The Authors. Ultrasound in Obstetrics & Gynecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Effect of Surgery in the Steep Trendelenburg Position on Blood Pressure Stability of the Elderly Candidate for Open Radical Prostatectomy: A Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial

Background and Objectives: The stability of blood pressure and maintaining the cerebral perfusion pressure are of particular importance in anesthesia of the elderly. There is scant clinical trials on the advantages of the steep Trendelenburg position in prostatectomy. This study aims to evaluate the effect of surgery in the steep Trendelenburg position on blood pressure stability of the elderly candidate for open radical prostatectomy surgery. Methods: This randomized controlled clinical trial was conducted at Shahid Beheshti Hospital in Hamadan, Iran, in 2022. Sixty older adults candidates for elective open radical prostatectomy were selected by a convenience sampling method and randomly allocated to the steep Trendelenburg position and supine position groups. Patients in the first group were in a 15° steep Trendelenburg position before surgery. Patients in the second position group remained in the supine position during surgery. The mean systolic and diastolic blood pressures were assessed after anesthesia, after positioning, and during surgery at 30-min intervals. The data were analyzed in SPSS software, vertion 22 using independent t-test and repeated measures ANOVA. Results: The mean age of the patients was 60.9±4.2 years, and their mean body mass index was 24.7±3.5 kg/m2. There was no significant difference in the mean systolic and diastolic blood pressures between the two groups (P>0.05). The results of repeated measures ANOVA showed that the differences in the mean systolic and diastolic blood pressures were statistically significant among the evaluation times (P<0.001). Conclusion: The steep Trendelenburg position maintains the blood pressure of the elderly under open radical prostatectomy.

Turret–Runner–Penetrator Differential Game With Role Selection

A scenario is considered in which two cooperative Attackers aim to infiltrate a circular target guarded by a Turret. The engagement plays out in the two-dimensional plane; the holonomic Attackers have the same speed and move with simple motion and the Turret is stationary, located at the target circle’s center, and has a bounded turn rate. When the Turret’s look angle is aligned with an Attacker, that Attacker is neutralized. In this article, we focus on a region of the state space, wherein only one of the Attackers is able to reach the target circle—and even then, only with the help of its partner Attacker. The Runner distracts the Turret until it is neutralized, which allows the Penetrator to gain a positional advantage and guarantee success in hitting the target circle. We formulate the Turret–Runner–Penetrator scenario as a differential game over the value of the subsequent game of min/max terminal angle, which takes place between the Turret and Penetrator once the Runner has been neutralized. The solution to the game of degree, including equilibrium Turret, Runner, and Penetrator strategies, as well as the Value function is given. The case in which the Penetrator can reach the target before the Turret can neutralize the Runner is formulated and solved. Finally, the assumption of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">a priori</i> defined roles/goals is relaxed and the minimum of the solutions to the two fixed-role games is shown to be a global stackelberg equilibrium (GSE).

Employment of international education graduates: issues of economy and resistance to change

Many emerging markets and middle-income countries use international scholarship programs as a long-established approach to human capital development. However, many graduates of international scholarship programs put great efforts to succeed in their home country and face many challenges when navigating the labour market. In fact, socio-economic factors including lack of jobs, saturated fields caused by an overly competitive domestic labour market, inflated salary expectations make it challenging for the international scholarship graduates to land a job after graduation. This paper explores the employment experiences of Kazakhstani government scholarship programs’ graduates majoring in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and sheds light on the challenges the graduates face when navigating the domestic labour market. An analysis based on 45 interviews shows that international scholarship graduates enjoy a positional advantage in the labor market and many of them have built a successful career. Despite this, their employment and career prospects are hampered by intertwining socio-economic and cultural factors, intergenerational clashes and scholarship program rules and regulations. Recommendations for minimizing the issues that graduates face when navigating the labor market are discussed. Keywords: graduate employability, international education, scholarship programs, labor market, employability challenges

Electoral colorism: Candidate skin color and list placement in Ecuador

To what extent does candidate skin color influence party list placement in proportional representation systems? While candidate skin color is increasingly understood to play an important role in politics, the extent to which it shapes electoral opportunities and outcomes remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate whether party elites in list proportional representation systems place darker-skinned candidates in lower, less advantageous list positions than their lighter-skinned copartisans. Drawing on party lists from Ecuador’s 2021 National Assembly elections and an original measure of candidate skin color, we find evidence that candidate skin color is a significant determinant of list placement. This finding indicates that party lists reinforce color-based inequalities in political representation and reveals that a candidate’s skin color shapes their chances of winning elected office.

The dynamics of coordination patterns in multiteam systems response to emergency: Case study from a pharmaceutical enterprise.

Effective coordination of multiteam systems (MTSs) can help enterprises respond quickly to complex and uncertain problems under disasters. However, it is unclear how MTS coordination patterns dynamically affect MTS performance in disasters. This study examined how MTSs responded to an emergency production incident at the Zhejiang Huisong Pharmaceutical Company in China during the COVID-19 pandemic through a qualitative and quantitative study. Based on social network theory, we found that a centralized coordination pattern impacts MTS performance by giving play to the leadership team's network centrality position advantage during the crisis outbreak period. In the post-crisis period, the decentralized coordination pattern impacts MTS performance by giving play to the advantages of horizontal coordination. Our results help managers to consider the dynamics of coordination patterns in crisis management in ways that assist them in adapting an effective coordination pattern to changing and uncertain operational conditions.

Local Mixer with Prior Position for Cars’ Type Recognition

Deep learning has attracted attention widely as the successful application of deep learning for vision tasks, such as image classification, object detection and so on. Due to the robustness and universality of deep learning, automotive manufacturing, a crucial part of national economy, needs deep learning to make production lines more intelligent and improve efficiency. However, some superior generally deep learning models, such as ViT, TNT, and Swin transformer, cannot meet automotive manufacturing requirements with high accuracy on a specific scene. As for automotive production lines, engineers usually adopt some smart designs, which can provide prior knowledge for designing deep learning models. Specifically, in an image, the position of target is usually fixed. Therefore, in order to take advantage of prior position, this paper designs a local mixer with prior position to capture local feature. Its main idea is that dividing the whole feature map into window feature maps and connecting window feature maps along channel dimension in order to make convolution kernel parameters for each window feature map are independent from others. Besides, MLP is adopted as global mixer to capture global feature and the pyramidal architecture with CNN is adopted. Comprehensive results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed model on cars’ type recognition. In particular, the proposed model achieves 97.938% accuracy on our data set, surpassing some transformer-like models.

Effectiveness and risk of initial carbon quota allocation principle under the uncertainty of the Chinese electricity market

The carbon market's effectiveness in deep decarburization and energy transition has been widely proven. However, as other industries join the carbon market in China, the uncertainty and impact of it on the power industry are still under explored. Here, we define the industry-wide scenarios which power industry might confront in the carbon market. Then, we compare its economic output, market activity and environmental impact under initial carbon quota allocation principles based on efficiency and grandfather methods by the comprehensive evaluation model of energy and carbon markets combined with inverse DEA method. Our results show that when the power industry is in an advantageous position, the efficiency method is fairer and more efficient than the grandfather method. The potential economic output rate has more than doubled compared to that of the grandfather method. Market activity and emission reduction potential are 7% and 25% more than that in the grandfather principle, respectively. Nevertheless, when the power industry is in a disadvantageous position, the efficiency method leads to an imbalance between power supply and demand in the market and power shortages in 19 regions. Then the trading activity of the power market drops by 12%, resulting in serious economic loss, especially in China's eastern region (−7.29%). The economic risk caused by the grandfather method has been significantly reduced than that of the efficiency method. And there may be greater potential risks under the efficiency method. This study identifies the potential challenges and obstacles of future carbon market and addresses the urgency of policy to tackle this issue to facilitate a carbon market that operates robustly under uncertainty.

The art of internationalisation: ‘unstrategic’ dialogical cosmopolitanism within secondary schools in England

ABSTRACT This paper explores English schools’ engagement with ‘internationalisation’ in the context of funding cuts and a highly pressured audit culture. The broader literature suggests two reasons why schools might partake in ‘internationalisation’. The first concerns the ‘strategic cosmopolitan’ – schools are complicit in facilitating cosmopolitanism amongst the pupil body so that young people may attain ‘positional advantage’ in a crowded international or global labour market. The second invokes a deeper sense of ethics and a more equal ‘exchange’ of ideas. We use ‘art’ as a lens to explore this latter conception: proposing that artistic pursuits enable a more dialogic notion of internationalisation to develop. Focussing on international exchanges between schools in the Global North and Global South that foreground specifically artistic projects (involving drama, literature, fashion, textiles, art, creative writing, film making, dance and music), we illustrate a potentially more ethical, rich and meaningful form of ‘internationalisation’, which does not obviously conform to the notion of inherent and demonstrable (capitalised) value. We propose that educational value might be understood differently: in non-strategic, intrinsic and more essential ways, and that, furthermore, internationalisation can be fun.

Agglomeration Externalities, Network Externalities and Urban High-Quality Development: A Case Study of Urban Agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River

The rapid development of the urban network has led to the fact that cities are no longer single individuals, and the network has changed the urban development environment. The interaction between cities has gradually become an important factor for the high-quality development (HQD) of cities. From the perspective of externalities, it is of great significance to explore the impact of agglomeration externalities and network externalities on the HQD of cities to promote the high-quality and sustainable development of the region. Taking the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River as an example, this study constructs a theoretical framework to empirically study the influence of agglomeration externalities and network externalities on the HQD of the city. The results show that the integrated network of the urban agglomeration from 2011 to 2020 had a high clustering coefficient and a small average path length with the characteristics of a “small world”. The centrality of urban nodes was hierarchical and had a “pyramid” structure. From 2011 to 2020, the high-quality development level (HQDL) of the urban agglomeration steadily improved and the regional “development gap” gradually narrowed. Wuhan, Changsha, and Nanchang were in a relatively advantageous position in the urban agglomeration. Furthermore, there was a spatial agglomeration effect and a spatial spillover effect in the HQD of urban agglomeration. Network externalities presented difference in different cities, and the influence of agglomeration externalities on HQD presented a u-shaped nonlinear relationship. Network externalities could significantly promote HQD, and the indirect effect of HQD was greater than its direct effect. In addition, factors such as government capacity and level of opening to the outside world also had a significant impact on the HQD of the region.

“Three altyns worth of petroleum…”: Oriental goods in Russia at the second half of the 17th and early 18th century

This article uses the records of archival monastic account books to answer a number of questions about trade relations between Russia and the eastern countries at the second half of the 17th and early 18th century. In particular, for some oriental goods, we can talk about the predominance of the import from Europe. Although contemporaries believed that Russia had an advantageous position for the Eurasian transit of oriental goods. The article also presents a newly constructed time series of prices for pepper. The data allow us to affirm that a “price revolution” was not taking place on the Russian spice market. In addition, the study shows that monasteries were one of the key consumers of oriental goods. The monastic books make it possible to describe the use of petroleum and other oriental goods in Russia.