Effective Channel Research Articles

African continental free trade area and greenfield investment: Likely effect and transmission channels

AbstractWe examine the likely effect of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) on African investment using data on announced greenfield investment. Departing from existing work on this subject, we add value by providing estimates based on a general equilibrium counterfactual analysis in a structural gravity framework. Results suggest that the stock of announced intra‐African greenfield investment in 2018 would have increased by 0.7 percent from a successful implementation of the AfCFTA in that year relative to the baseline scenario of no agreement, with considerable heterogeneity across source and destination countries. Moreover, the positive effect is found to increase with the depth of the negotiated agreement. Exploring possible transmission channels we find the trade elasticity of announced greenfield investment to be positive, especially for trade in intermediates in African host countries with strong governance indicators. This suggests that, by improving institutional quality and galvanising regional value chains, integration within Africa could also incentivise investment.

CMOS Scaling for the 5 nm Node and Beyond: Device, Process and Technology

After more than five decades, Moore’s Law for transistors is approaching the end of the international technology roadmap of semiconductors (ITRS). The fate of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) architecture has become increasingly unknown. In this era, 3D transistors in the form of gate-all-around (GAA) transistors are being considered as an excellent solution to scaling down beyond the 5 nm technology node, which solves the difficulties of carrier transport in the channel region which are mainly rooted in short channel effects (SCEs). In parallel to Moore, during the last two decades, transistors with a fully depleted SOI (FDSOI) design have also been processed for low-power electronics. Among all the possible designs, there are also tunneling field-effect transistors (TFETs), which offer very low power consumption and decent electrical characteristics. This review article presents new transistor designs, along with the integration of electronics and photonics, simulation methods, and continuation of CMOS process technology to the 5 nm technology node and beyond. The content highlights the innovative methods, challenges, and difficulties in device processing and design, as well as how to apply suitable metrology techniques as a tool to find out the imperfections and lattice distortions, strain status, and composition in the device structures.

A study of political party affiliation as a means to enhance gender equality and women’s political participation in Kazakhstan

PurposeThe article aims to identify the main mechanisms for promoting more Kazakhstani women participation in the legislative authorities based on a study of the competition of political parties in 2023.Design/methodology/approachUtilizing the structural-biographical method, the article investigates the ways of increasing women’s participation in the political life of Kazakhstan. This empirical study comprises a total of 18 biographies of women deputies / candidates on party lists who were elected to the legislative body. Content analysis was also conducted to investigate the pre-election programs of the political parties.FindingsThis study has identified that political party is the main resource for promoting gender equality and involving women in the decision-making process. All 18 women deputies of the Mazhilis, the lower house of parliament, are members of political parties. The findings show that women candidates without party affiliation were unable to get into representative body. The results of the election campaign of 2023 provided evidence for determining the gender order in the Kazakhstani political space. The party has become an effective channel for promoting women participations in the parliament of the country. By comparison, in single-mandate constituencies no woman was able to pass to the elected body.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the literature of gender equality and women’s political participation in Kazakhstan and may be relevant for other countries. It also has practical significance and policy implications for the government and political parties.

Experimental study on the pseudo threshold pressure gradient of supported fractures in shale reservoirs

AbstractPseudo threshold pressure gradient (PTPG) exists in the propped fractured reservoir, but its nonlinear flow law remains unclear. The effects of the mineral composition of shale and microstructure of fracturing fluid on PTPG were analyzed by X-ray diffraction and liquid nitrogen quick-freezing method. The results demonstrate that a proppant with a large particle size is more likely to form an effective flow channel and reduce liquid flow resistance, thus decreasing PTPG and increasing conductivity. The polymer fracturing fluid with rectangular microstructures significantly increased the PTPG supporting the fractured core. Experimental results show that the PTPG of the resin-coated sand-supported core in the fracturing fluid with a concentration of 1.2% is 245 times higher than that in the fracturing fluid with a concentration of 0.1% when the confining pressure is 5 MPa. Wetting hysteresis and the Jamin effect are responsible for the rise of PTPG in two-phase flow. The equivalent fracture width shows a good power function relationship with the PTPG. Thus, this study further explains the nonlinear flow behavior of reservoirs with fully propped fractures.

Study on the hydrodynamics of structured packing: Liquid holdup and pressure drop of a novel 3D printed packing

SpiroPak is a patented innovative structured packing and can be used in process industries for chemical separation purposes. The core of its design is to ensure an uninterrupted flow path for both liquids and gases, leading to remarkably low-pressure drops but with substantial surface areas for efficient mass transfer. Experimental studies using the wire-mesh sensor technique have showcased SpiroPak's ability to eliminate the channelling effect that is observed in commercial packings. Furthermore, its wide-ranging liquid holdup capability encompasses the functionalities of conventional packings, offering clients the feasibility of diverse applications. In this study, the pressure-drop correlations for SpiroPak in this work are based on Stichlmair empirical formulas, with the coefficients of C1, C2 and C3 tuned through the curve fitting method. The primary objective of this study was to establish packing selection criteria based on the key hydraulic performance metrics, such as pressure drop and liquid holdup. By swiftly identifying suitable packing solutions, the method accelerates the pre-selection process, significantly reducing computational complexity and time expenditures at the early stages of research and development.

Editorial

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful Waqf: A Key Islamic Social Finance Instrument Waqf is a key tool of Islamic social finance that has been practised since Islam’s inception as part of Muslims’ religious obligations and benevolence to assist the needy and gain the pleasure of Allah (SWT). In the early years, Islamic social finance was not formally institutionalised within the Islamic economic system, except to a limited extent in a few Muslim-majority countries, which for instance, managed some Islamic social finance tools such as zakat and waqf at the state level. In the early 2000s, there were increasing discussions about the social responsibility of Islamic finance, questioning whether profit should be the sole business objective of Islamic financial institutions or whether they should also be attributed social roles in view of the Islamic philosophical foundations that underpin their establishments. As businesses’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) grew in importance in mainstream discussions, many Islamic financial institutions engaged in CSR-based activities on an ad-hoc basis, as a philanthropic exercise, as they became more profitable, viable and sustainable. This started the trend of mixing the practice of Islamic commercial finance with Islamic social finance. As Islamic finance evolved further, there was an increased realisation that the effectiveness and applications of Islam’s social and philanthropic instruments could be further strengthened by integrating Islamic social finance within mainstream Islamic commercial finance. Thus, there were unified efforts to establish cooperation between charitable instruments and the different sectors of the Islamic finance industry. The commercialisation objective of Islamic social finance instruments has been particularly visible in the waqf sector. Waqf has historically been limited to pursuing only the social interests of the donor, who sought reward in both this world and the afterlife by helping the poor and the needy. In the modern practice of waqf, the social objective is integrated with the profit motive so that the initial waqf capital generates more returns for the beneficiaries. Prominent developments in the modern practice of waqf include the following: · The modern concept of waqf is not limited to immovable assets (e.g., land, orchards, wells) and movable assets (e.g., jewellery, Qur’an, books, equipment) which are donated for charitable purposes. Innovative strategies are adopted today to develop waqf as an alternative asset class by using contemporary forms of wealth such as cash and financial securities. Latest waqf instruments include cash waqf, temporary cash waqf, waqf-banks, waqf-shares, waqf-unit trusts, waqf-venture capital funds, waqf-ṣukūk, and waqf-Islamic real estate investment trusts. Modern structures of waqf introduced professional management of waqf funds that ensures the sustainability of waqf assets and generates better returns to beneficiaries. Innovative and effective channels of investments through Islamic banks, the Islamic capital market and the takāful sector have been used to develop dynamic and progressive waqf projects. An example is the case of myWakaf in Malaysia which leverages on the synergy between the State Islamic Religious Councils (SIRCs) and a consortium of Malaysian Islamic banks to manage waqf investments and channel the investment returns into waqf projects. Utilisation of waqf proceeds are extended beyond the traditional sectors (e.g., mosques, cemeteries, Islamic schools) to provide a wider range of welfare services relevant to current societal needs (e.g., waqf qurban, waqf for funding impactful SMEs, reviving dormant or abandoned waqf assets into productive properties). Modern waqf management introduces good governance that increases transparency and accountability of waqf institutions. Application of technology in the management of waqf has widened the base of waqf donors/investors, thus expanding public participation and increasing the supply of waqf funding.

Motor Imagery Classification Using Effective Channel Selection of Multichannel EEG

Electroencephalography (EEG) is effectively employed to describe cognitive patterns corresponding to different tasks of motor functions for brain–computer interface (BCI) implementation. Explicit information processing is necessary to reduce the computational complexity of practical BCI systems. This paper presents an entropy-based approach to select effective EEG channels for motor imagery (MI) classification in brain–computer interface (BCI) systems. The method identifies channels with higher entropy scores, which is an indication of greater information content. It discards redundant or noisy channels leading to reduced computational complexity and improved classification accuracy. High entropy means a more disordered pattern, whereas low entropy means a less disordered pattern with less information. The entropy of each channel for individual trials is calculated. The weight of each channel is represented by the mean entropy of the channel over all the trials. A set of channels with higher mean entropy are selected as effective channels for MI classification. A limited number of sub-band signals are created by decomposing the selected channels. To extract the spatial features, the common spatial pattern (CSP) is applied to each sub-band space of EEG signals. The CSP-based features are used to classify the right-hand and right-foot MI tasks using a support vector machine (SVM). The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated using two publicly available EEG datasets, known as BCI competition III–IV(A) and BCI competition IV–I. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach surpasses cutting-edge techniques.

Electron acceleration influenced by sinh-Gaussian laser pulses in a prepared ion channel

The acceleration of electron in a produced ion channel is studied theoretically using a sinh-Gaussian (shG) laser pulse with radial polarization. Compared to Gaussian laser pulses, shG laser pulses propagate differently, presenting as a bright ring encircling a dark hollow core that inhibits early focusing and promotes self-defocusing. They can therefore be used to accelerate electrons to extremely high energies. The electron energy gain is influenced by the laser pulse decentred parameter linked to the shG function, however, the ion stream’s electric field prevents the transverse oscillations from pushing electrons out of the interaction zone. With a decentred parameter of ∼2.15 and a laser pulse intensity value of ∼1020 Wcm −2 incident on density of ∼ 1022 m −3, where the incident pulse phase is ψ 0 = 0, the combined effect of ion channelling and radially polarized (RP) shG laser pulses leads to a significant enhancement of electron energy gain within the ion density channel to the GeV level.

Engineering Interconnected Nanofluidic Channel in a Hydrogel Supernetwork toward K+ Ion Accelerating Transport and Efficient Sensing.

Ion transportation via the mixed mechanisms of hydrogels underpins ultrafast biological signal transmission in nature, and its application to the rapid and sensitive sensing detection of human specific ions is of great interest for the field of medical science. However, current research efforts are still unable to achieve transmission results that are comparable to those of bioelectric signals. Herein, 3D interconnected nanochannels based on poly(pyrrole-co-dopamine)/poly(vinyl alcohol) (P(Py-co-DA)/PVA) supernetwork conductive hydrogels are designed and fabricated as stimuli-responsive structures for K+ ions. Distinct from conventional configurations, which exhibit rapid electron transfer and permeability to biosubstrates, interconnected nanofluidic nanochannels collaborated with the P(Py-co-DA) conductive polymer in the supernetwork conductive hydrogel significantly improve conductivity (88.3 mS/cm), ion transport time (0.1 s), and ion sensitivity (74.6 mV/dec). The faster ion response time is attributed to the synergism of excellent conductivity originating from the P(Py-co-DA) polymer and the electronic effect in the interconnected nanofluidic channels. Furthermore, the supernetwork conductive hydrogel demonstrates K+ ion selectivity relative to other cations in biofluids such as Na+, Mg2+, and Ca2+. The DFT calculation indicates that the small solvation energy and low chemical transfer resistance are the main reasons for the excellent K+ ion selectivity. Finite element analysis (FEA) simulations further support these experimental results. Consequently, the P(Py-co-DA)/PVA supernetwork conductive hydrogels enriched with the 3D interconnected nanofluidic channels developed in this work possess excellent sensing of K+ ions. This strategy provides great insight into efficient ion sensing in traditional biomedical sensing that has not been explored by previous researchers.

AN ANALYSIS OF INDIAN SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

"Social media marketing" is the process by which a company promotes its website or goods using different social media sites. Marketers in India are moving quickly to seize the "new normal" opportunity. Social media has given companies a new channel to communicate with their target audience, allowing them to bypass traditional advertising middlemen and achieve unprecedented levels of success. To this day, most Indian marketers rank expanding their consumer base as their number one objective. Social media, email, and search engine marketing were the three most effective online investment channels in 2011, according to well-known Indian marketers. Half of all successful marketers think it's critical to mix social media with email marketing. This is why nearly every business on the planet is investigating social media marketing tactics. More important than "sending the message out" is the slogan "start engaging with customers" that now dominates contemporary advertising. Within consumer internet communities, "listening posts" and "dialogue hubs" are replacing the old "batch and blast" marketing role. Marketers are shifting from discrete, pure-play platforms to more integrated multi-channel strategies in order to fulfill the demands of modern customers across all devices and channels. Marketing professionals in India are making extensive use of a wide variety of platforms and technologies, including email, SMS, and social media. With the help of data on consumers' attitudes toward brand management on social media, this article will take a look at the present and future of social media marketing in India, as well as discuss its possibilities. Keywords:- Social Media , Marketing ,

Research on building extraction from remote sensing imagery using efficient lightweight residual network

Automatic building extraction from very high-resolution remote sensing images is of great significance in several application domains, such as emergency information analysis and intelligent city construction. In recent years, with the development of deep learning technology, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made considerable progress in improving the accuracy of building extraction from remote sensing imagery. However, most existing methods require numerous parameters and large amounts of computing and storage resources. This affects their efficiency and limits their practical application. In this study, to balance the accuracy and amount of computation required for building extraction, a novel efficient lightweight residual network (ELRNet) with an encoder-decoder structure is proposed for building extraction. ELRNet consists of a series of downsampling blocks and lightweight feature extraction modules (LFEMs) for the encoder and an appropriate combination of LFEMs and upsampling blocks for the decoder. The key to the proposed ELRNet is the LFEM which has depthwise-factorised convolution incorporated in its design. In addition, the effective channel attention (ECA) added to LFEM, performs local cross-channel interactions, thereby fully extracting the relevant information between channels. The performance of ELRNet was evaluated on the public WHU Building dataset, achieving 88.24% IoU with 2.92 GFLOPs and 0.23 million parameters. The proposed ELRNet was compared with six state-of-the-art baseline networks (SegNet, U-Net, ENet, EDANet, ESFNet, and ERFNet). The results show that ELRNet offers a better tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency in the automatic extraction of buildings in very highresolution remote sensing images. This code is publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/GaoAi/ELRNet).

Study of drain induced channel effects in vertical GaN junction field-effect transistors

Study of drain induced channel effects in vertical GaN junction field-effect transistors

Labor Mobility Networks and Green Total Factor Productivity

Population migration continues to reshape the spatial pattern of China’s population and regional economic development. During this internal migration process, production and consumption patterns often change, ultimately leading to changes in green total factor productivity. This paper, based on the Chinese population census data and 1% sampling survey data from 2005 to 2015, utilizes social network analysis methods to measure the labor mobility network indicators of 284 prefecture-level cities. Further, this paper analyzes the impact and mechanisms of regional network status on green total factor productivity using a panel fixed effects model. We find that as network density increases, the interpersonal connections between regions become closer, and the network exhibits a clear pattern of “concentrated inflows” and “dispersed outflows”, with the trend of forming strong alliances becoming increasingly apparent. Regions positioned centrally either in terms of network in-degree or out-degree exhibit higher green total factor productivity. Among these, the labor mobility network plays a crucial role in enhancing green total factor productivity through the channel of technology diffusion effects, which improve investment efficiency via knowledge exchange and material capital accumulation. The promotive effect of labor network status on green total factor productivity is more pronounced in the eastern regions, where talent quality is higher, and in areas with fewer restrictions from the household registration system.

Impact of Hardware Impairment on the Joint Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface and Robust Transceiver Design in MU-MIMO System

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a revolutionary passive radio technique to facilitate capacity enhancement beyond the current massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission. However, the potential hardware impairment (HWI) of the RIS usually causes inevitable performance degradation and the amplification of imperfect CSI. These impacts still lack full investigation in the RIS-assisted wireless network. This paper developed a robust joint RIS and transceiver design algorithm to minimize the worst-case mean square error (MSE) of the received signal under the HWI effect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) in the RIS-assisted multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) wireless network. Specifically, since the proposed robust joint RIS and transceiver design problem yields non-convex characteristics under severe HWI, an iterative three-step convex algorithm is developed to approach the optimality by relaxation and convex transformation. Compared with the state-of-the-art baselines that ignore the HWI, the proposed robust algorithm inhibits the destruction of HWI while raising the worst-case MSE effectively in several numerical simulations. Moreover, due to the properties of the HWI, the performance loss is notable under the magnification of the number of reflected elements in the RIS-assisted MU-MIMO wireless network.

Design insights into a junctionless nanosheet FET (JL-NSFET) for switching and Analog/RF applications: Device to circuit level assessment

- The advent in semiconductor technology paved the way for electronic industry to place in front row. The nanosheet (NS) device is a type gate all around (GAA) architecture provides an excellent gate electrostatic to suppress the short channel effects (SCEs) and scale it further below sub-7nm technology node. This paper provides a complete design insight from device to circuit of a two sheet NSFET with geometrical variations. All digital and analog/RF parameters are extracted and analyzed based on gate length (), sheet thickness (), sheet width (), and spacer material variations. As is varied from 8 nm to 12 nm, is enhanced from 0.249 × 108 to 2.86 × 108 due to improved gate control over the channel region which is also reflected in DIBL to 40.82 % whereas, at lower analog/RF metrics are better. The play a vital role in device characteristics, as decreases the chance of interaction of electric field from source to drain decreases owing to full volume conduction and thereby ameliorated performance of JL NSFET. As is varied from 7 nm to 5 nm, all electrical characteristics are improved and analog/RF parameters , , , TFP and GTFP are improved to 10.3 %, 18.4 %, 12.1 % 18.5 % and 54.04 %, respectively. Increase in from 10 nm to 20 nm results into increased effective width of a device, it leads to higher current which further impacts on electrical and analog/RF parameters. The DIBL, , , GFP, TFP and GTFP are enhanced to 63.7 %, 37.9 %, 34.9 %, 9.7 %, 33.5 %, 9.1 %, respectively. The spacer materials are varying from Al2O3 (k = 18), HfO2 (k = 22), ZrO2 (k = 25) to TiO2 (k = 44), the electrical characteristics are better at higher-k whereas analog/RF performances are superior at lower-k. Further, digital circuit elements NOT, NAND and NOR gates are designed, simulated and the delays are examined as 4.25ps, 6.45ps and 5.12ps, respectively. The and of NOT gate are noticed as 295 mV and 280 mV at 0.7 V of supply voltage. Furthermore, a common source (CS) amplifier is also simulated and gain of 3.3 is noticed. The aforementioned analysis revels the JL NSFET is best suitable candidate for future nanoscale applications.

Emotion recognition with reduced channels using CWT based EEG feature representation and a CNN classifier

Objective. Although emotion recognition has been studied for decades, a more accurate classification method that requires less computing is still needed. At present, in many studies, EEG features are extracted from all channels to recognize emotional states, however, there is a lack of an efficient feature domain that improves classification performance and reduces the number of EEG channels. Approach. In this study, a continuous wavelet transform (CWT)-based feature representation of multi-channel EEG data is proposed for automatic emotion recognition. In the proposed feature, the time-frequency domain information is preserved by using CWT coefficients. For a particular EEG channel, each CWT coefficient is mapped into a strength-to-entropy component ratio to obtain a 2D representation. Finally, a 2D feature matrix, namely CEF2D, is created by concatenating these representations from different channels and fed into a deep convolutional neural network architecture. Based on the CWT domain energy-to-entropy ratio, effective channel and CWT scale selection schemes are also proposed to reduce computational complexity. Main results. Compared with previous studies, the results of this study show that valence and arousal classification accuracy has improved in both 3-class and 2-class cases. For the 2-class problem, the average accuracies obtained for valence and arousal dimensions are 98.83% and 98.95%, respectively, and for the 3-class, the accuracies are 98.25% and 98.68%, respectively. Significance. Our findings show that the entropy-based feature of EEG data in the CWT domain is effective for emotion recognition. Utilizing the proposed feature domain, an effective channel selection method can reduce computational complexity.

The impact of ATP-sensitive potassium channel modulation on mitochondria in a Parkinson's disease model using SH-SY5Y cells depends on their differentiation state.

Inward rectifying potassium channels sensitive to ATP levels (KATP) have been the subject of investigation for several decades. Modulators of KATP channels are well-established treatments for metabolic as well as cardiovascular diseases. Experimental studies have also shown the potential of KATP modulation in neurodegenerative disorders. However, to date, data regarding the effects of KATP antagonists/agonists in experiments related to neurodegeneration remain inconsistent. The main source of confusion in evaluating available data seems to be the choice of experimental models. The present study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the effects of both opening and blocking KATP channels in two forms of SH-SY5Y cells. Our results offer valuable insights into the significance of metabolic differences between differentiated and non-differentiated SH-SY5Y cells, particularly in the context of glibenclamide and diazoxide effects under normal conditions and during the initiation of pathological events simulating Parkinson's disease in vitro. We emphasize the analysis of mitochondrial functions and changes in mitochondrial network morphology. The heightened protein expression of KATP channels identified in non-differentiated SH-SY5Y cells seems to be a platform for a more significant impact of KATP modulators in this cell type. The efficiency of rotenone treatment in inducing morphological changes in the mitochondrial network depends on the differentiation status of SH-SY5Y cells.

The Effect of High-Speed Train Channel on the Performance of DVB-Terrestrial Communication Systems

The Effect of High-Speed Train Channel on the Performance of DVB-Terrestrial Communication Systems

Study on a Strong Polymer Gel by the Addition of Micron Graphite Oxide Powder and Its Plugging of Fracture

It is difficult to plug the fracture water channeling of a fractured low-permeability reservoir during water flooding by using the conventional acrylamide polymer gel due to its weak mechanical properties. For this problem, micron graphite powder is added to enhance the comprehensive properties of the acrylamide polymer gel, which can improve the plugging effect of fracture water channeling. The chemical principle of this process is that the hydroxyl and carboxyl groups of the layered micron graphite powder can undergo physicochemical interactions with the amide groups of the polyacrylamide molecule chain. As a rigid structure, the graphite powder can support the flexible skeleton of the original polyacrylamide molecule chain. Through the synergy of the rigid and flexible structures, the viscoelasticity, thermal stability, tensile performance, and plugging ability of the new-type gel can be significantly enhanced. Compared with a single acrylamide gel, after adding 3000 mg/L of micrometer-sized graphite powder, the elastic modulus, the viscous modulus, the phase transition temperature, the breakthrough pressure gradient, the elongation at break, and the tensile stress of the acrylamide gel are all greatly improved. After adding the graphite powder to the polyacrylamide gel, the fracture water channeling can be effectively plugged. The characteristics of the networked water flow channel are obvious during the injected water break through the gel in the fracture. The breakthrough pressure of water flooding is high. The experimental results are an attempt to develop a new gel material for the water plugging of a fractured low-permeability reservoir.

Improving the Quality of Children's Faith Formation through Catechesis for First Communion Preparation in the Parish with a Holistic Approach

This study aims to evaluate and improve the quality of children's faith formation through catechesis preparation for First Communion in the Parish. The research method is descriptive quantitative, with data collected using surveys through Google Forms. The study population consists of parents or guardians of children preparing for First Communion, with a sample of 23 respondents. Data analysis uses descriptive statistics. The findings indicate that catechesis activities and children's experiences preparing for First Communion significantly impact the quality of children's faith formation. Most respondents reported positive experiences and perceived improvements in their children's understanding and practice of the Catholic faith. However, factors inhibiting optimal faith formation were also identified, particularly the need for increased parental involvement. The study recommends encouraging parental participation, providing necessary resources and guidance for active engagement in children's religious education. To enhance children's faith formation, collaboration between parents, churches, and catechists is recommended, along with establishing effective communication channels between these stakeholders.