Explicit Restrictions Research Articles

Beliefs, taboos, usages, health perceptions, and practices toward wildlife among different ethnicities in Tak and Mae Hong Son Provinces, Thailand

This concurrent qualitative study was carried out with the main objective to determine wildlife beliefs, taboos, usages, health perceptions, and practices among ten ethnic groups in four communities in Tak and Mae Hong Son provinces of Thailand from November 2020 to January 2021. We also gathered comprehensive information on study respondents’ knowledge related to potential risk behaviors that could lead to zoonotic disease transmission and infection. Furthermore, we intended to use the study’s findings to develop communication strategies and health literacy improvement interventions for mitigating risky behaviors, with a focus on ethnic groups and particular individuals who live in close proximity to forests and wildlife, to prevent future pandemics. Sixty-five respondents were purposively selected based on their extensive knowledge, active participation in local cultural contexts, beliefs, and exposure to wildlife contact or consuming game animals. Twenty (30.8%) participated in in-depth interviews (IDIs), while 45 (69.2%) participated in eight focused group discussions (FGDs). The results revealed that the characteristics of wildlife contact are similar and distinct based on their beliefs and taboos among various ethnic groups and study locations, which are influenced by cultural backgrounds and traditions. Although some ethnic groups do not have explicit restrictions on the consumption of wildlife, others adhere to specific beliefs and taboos that forbid the consumption or killing of specific wild animals. These beliefs frequently correspond with conservation initiatives, thereby facilitating the preservation of threatened species. The study also revealed a lack of appropriate health knowledge, perceptions, and practices regarding wildlife contact and consumption. As a result, it is recommended that public health officials and local governments develop and execute communication and education initiatives. These campaigns should aim to increase health literacy and promote safe handling, preparation, and cooking practices to reduce the risk of zoonotic disease transmission and infection effectively. Moreover, it is necessary to design and implement wildlife conservation education and outreach activities. The programs should promote environmental stewardship while considering the cultural contexts, beliefs, and practices of various ethnic groups. The activities should involve diverse stakeholders, including local leaders, religious influencers, community members, schoolteachers, students, health professionals, village health volunteers, and civil society organizations.

Servicification in Global Value Chains in Emerging and Developing Asian Economies

Servicification in global value chains (GVCs) in emerging and developing Asian economies has become a trend recently. However, there have been no scientific studies to elucidate the mechanism of servicification in GVCs. To fill this gap, this study aims to investigate the involvement of service sectors in GVCs in Asian economies in terms of the quantitative interactions between service inputs and manufacturing exports and inputs and between service inputs and service exports. For this purpose, a panel vector-autoregressive model and the Trade in Value Added database of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) were used for the empirical analysis during 1995–2018. The estimation results find that, first, there exist reciprocal interactions between the business services and manufacturing sectors; foreign business service inputs are induced by manufacturing exports, whereas manufacturing inputs are induced by business service exports. Second, foreign manufacturing inputs facilitate foreign business service inputs. Third, business service inputs are promoted by business service exports. These trends in the involvement of business services’ involvement in GVCs have accelerated since the mid-2000s. To enhance the role of services in GVCs, Asian economies should facilitate the removal of explicit restrictions in service trade and address regulatory divergence across countries.

Improving Enforcement Measures and Establishing Clear Criteria: A Content Analysis of Tobacco-Brand-Owned Instagram Accounts.

This study examines limitations of the current regulatory framework for tobacco advertising on Instagram. We first investigate compliance with Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warning label requirements for posts by tobacco-owned accounts. Next, we examine the prevalence of content that has been restricted in broadcast or print for its youth appeal, followed by content meeting more expansive criteria for youth appeal set forth in the FDA's guidance document. Posts by tobacco-brand-owned accounts between January 1, 2021, and February 14, 2022, were sampled from Mintel's Comperemedia Omni database. Instagram posts from 15 accounts were examined for violations of FDA warning label requirements and content that has been restricted on other mediums, including cartoons, sports branding, unauthorized claims, and young models (N = 1243). Finally, a subsample of n = 453 unambiguously branded posts was coded for themes that met the FDA's criteria of resonating with younger audiences, particularly that "adolescents rely on external information as they seek to shape their own identities." Only 12.8% of posts had fully compliant warning labels. Content that has been in some way regulated on other mediums, such as cartoons (1.6%), unauthorized health claims (<1%), sports branding (<1%), and young models (4.4%) were infrequent. However, a conservative analysis focusing only on branded posts found that posts frequently highlighted tech elements (45%), device customizability (24.5%), vaper identity (17.7%), stylized product photography (33.6%), social media engagement (32.2%), and memes (5.7%). Enforcement of existing regulations on Instagram is minimal. Explicit content restrictions applying evidence-based guidance on youth-appealing advertising are needed. This research has important implications for enforcing and expanding advertising regulations on social media. First, Instagram's self-imposed regulations are ineffective, permitting tobacco companies to post ads from brand-owned accounts despite claiming to restrict tobacco promotion on the platform. Second, policymakers should seek to apply FDA guidance on youth-appealing advertising informed by decades of research to create explicit enforceable content restrictions that extend beyond cartoons, sports figures, and young models to include content likely to situate tobacco use within the developing self-concept of vulnerable youth such as presenting e-cigarettes as hi-tech devices, highlighting vaper identity, or infiltrating online social media culture. Finally, greater resources for enforcement are needed given the only applicable regulation, warning labels, remains largely ignored.

Spatial ecology of the Giant Sea Bass, Stereolepis gigas, in a southern California kelp forest as determined by acoustic telemetry.

The fisheries history of the Giant Sea Bass, Stereolepis gigas (Telostei: Polyprionidae), is closely linked to its spatial ecology. Its overharvest is directly associated with formation of spatially distinct spawning aggregations during summer, while its subsequent recovery is hypothesized to be the result of spatially explicit gear restrictions. Understanding the spatial ecology of Giant Sea Bass is a key part of efforts to assess contemporary threats such as commercial harvest and incidental catch by recreational fisheries. In this study, we used acoustic telemetry to characterize Giant Sea Bass space use in the La Jolla kelp forest using an acoustic array that encompasses two marine protected areas (MPAs) and heavily trafficked recreational fishing grounds. Five of the seven fish we tagged remained in the La Jolla array for at least 6 months. Two fish were resident across multiple years, with one fish consistently detected for 4 years. Only one fish was detected in the broader network of regional acoustic receivers, moving north approximately 8 km to Del Mar. Most tagged fish had home ranges and core use areas indicating they spend considerable time outside MPAs, particularly in areas with high recreational fishing activity. During spawning season we detected fish less frequently in the La Jolla array and recorded higher movement rates. While the current MPA network in La Jolla by no means offers complete protection to this fish, it does appear to support long-term persistence of some individuals in a region of exceptionally high recreational fishing pressure.

Стратегии цифровизации ресторанов true cost

Two key trends are currently influencing the activities of public catering enterprises in Russia: a decrease in the purchasing power of the population and the development of a digital consumption model by people. For individual formats of institutions, adaptation to these two trends can be associated with significant difficulties. These formats include restaurants with fair prices, using a separate pricing model to reduce the cost of a comprehensive restaurant service. In order to solve this problem, five strategies have been developed in this article to adapt the separate pricing model to the digital format of restaurants. The criterion of differentiation of the proposed strategies is the level of preservation of the features of the business model of a traditional (offline) restaurant of fair prices when it is transferred to a digital environment. It is noted that the fair price model relies on a system of explicit and implicit restrictions, therefore, for its successful digitalization, it is necessary to develop a system of restrictions corresponding to the specifics of online business. it is necessary to transfer to a digital environment. The main result of this study is the development of recommendations for the adaptation of restaurants with fair prices to the digital model of the organization of activities.

The dual nature of constraints on foreign worker participation in sports and physical activity in South Korea during COVID-19.

This study provides a different understanding of the constraints imposed by the pandemic and the official and unofficial restrictions that accompanied it. It is an empirical effort demonstrating that the pandemic's effects are not purely negative, but rather, also helped to produce positive and productive practices that draw upon both the inhibiting and enabling features of the constraints it triggered. Engaging with "productive power" in Foucault by considering constraints as practices that both inhibit and enable, the empirical goal of this paper is to explore how pandemic-related constraints on sports and physical activity prohibit foreign worker participation in sports and physical activity. It also examines how the constraints encourage them to pursue an active life in new and unique ways. To achieve this goal, the paper examines the South Korean context, particularly unskilled foreign workers with E-9 visas for non-professional employment in the fishing, farming, and manufacturing industries and their involvement in sports and physical activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings address three "inhibitors" that specifically prevented foreign workers from getting actively involved, then demonstrate that explicit restrictions on sports and physical activity can be transformed into four "enablers" that encouraged foreign workers to participate. The conclusion offers critical reflections on Foucault's "ethical subject," followed by the limitations and implications of the study.

Effective pandemic policy design through feedback does not need accurate predictions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous toll on human health and well-being and led to major social and economic disruptions. Public health interventions in response to burgeoning case numbers and hospitalizations have repeatedly bent down the epidemic curve, effectively creating a feedback control system. Worst case scenarios have been avoided in many places through this responsive feedback. We aim to formalize and illustrate how to incorporate principles of feedback control into pandemic projections and decision-making, and ultimately shift the focus from prediction to the design of interventions. Starting with an epidemiological model for COVID-19, we illustrate how feedback control can be incorporated into pandemic management using a simple design that couples recent changes in case numbers or hospital occupancy with explicit policy restrictions. We demonstrate robust ability to control a pandemic using a design that responds to hospital cases, despite simulating large uncertainty in reproduction number R0 (range: 1.04-5.18) and average time to hospital admission (range: 4-28 days). We show that shorter delays, responding to case counts versus hospital measured infections, reduce both the cumulative case count and the average level of interventions. Finally, we show that feedback is robust to changing compliance to public health directives and to systemic changes associated with variants of concern and with the introduction of a vaccination program. The negative impact of a pandemic on human health and societal disruption can be reduced by coupling models of disease propagation with models of the decision-making process. In contrast to highly varying open-loop projections, incorporating feedback explicitly in the decision-making process is more reflective of the real-world challenge facing public health decision makers. Using feedback principles, effective control strategies can be designed even if the pandemic characteristics are highly uncertain, encouraging earlier and smaller actions that reduce both case counts and the extent of interventions.

Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility in SOE Mining Sector in Indonesia: Commitment of Social-legal Awareness

Through its Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility (CSER), the company actively contributes to addressing social vulnerability issues in communities. However, given that businesses are also impacted financially, it is interesting to find out why companies, especially State-Owned Enterprises (SOE), continue to run their CSER programs, whether it is merely an obligation due to regulatory orders or whether there are other motives. This research was conducted from the perspective of the sociology of law. The result shows that the obligation of CSER in several regulations is not merely the lawgiver's own desires but comes from social awareness, given that kinship has existed for a long time. Even though there are no explicit restrictions addressing requirements or sanctions to implement CSER in the SOE Law, SOEs in the mining sector demonstrate their commitment to social awareness by continuing to carry out their CSER program in 2020 and 2021.

Lost in Context? Critical Perspectives on Individualization

People in contemporary society are increasingly being addressed as agentic individuals who are held responsible for personal aspects of their life and beyond. These personal aspects contain the design and organization of one’s life path in terms of, e.g., (lifelong) education, work and retirement planning, health care, work-life balance, and happiness; or with regard to more abstract concepts like sustainability, individual subjects become responsible for the future of the ecosystem on a planetary scale. This individualization includes on the one hand potential empowerment of the subject to actively shape one’s own life, and on the other hand, it tends to ignore relevant socio-economic processes, scope, and power relations, which unfold as implicit and explicit social restrictions and potential pressure. Subjects navigate through such contexts with a compulsion to control faith and course of life by their decision-making, behavior, and an overall urge to optimize the self. This special section on individualization contains (a) an editorial frame of individualization within contemporary developments in a neoliberal context and (b) empirical contributions around the processes of individualization in various conditions such as the housing crisis in Berlin, career trajectories, and incorporated neoliberal ideology when opting out of a corporate career, pseudo individualization in Indian television commercials, and leisure activities alongside the example of soccer and related fan-group dynamics interpreted as an escape from the pressure to singularize.

Parametric restrictions on quasi-symmetric designs

In this paper, we attach several new invariants to connected strongly regular graphs (excepting conference graphs on non-square number of vertices): one invariant called the discriminant, and a p-adic invariant corresponding to each prime number p. We prove parametric restrictions on quasi-symmetric 2-designs with a given connected block graph G and a given defect (absolute difference of the two intersection numbers) solely in terms of the defect and the parameters of G, including these new invariants. This is a natural analogue of Schutzenberger’s Theorem and the Shrikhande–Chowla–Ryser theorem. This theorem is effective when these graph invariants can be explicitly computed. We do this for complete multipartite graphs, co-triangular graphs, symplectic non-orthogonality graphs (over the field of order 2) and the Steiner graphs, yielding explicit restrictions on the parameters of quasi-symmetric 2-designs whose block graphs belong to any of these four classes.

The Complexity of Object Association in Multiple Object Tracking

Object association, i.e., the identification of which observations correspond to the same object, is a central task for the area of multiple object tracking. Two prominent models capturing this task have been introduced in the literature: the Lifted Multicut model and the more recent Lifted Paths model. Here, we carry out a detailed complexity-theoretic study of the problems arising from these two models that is aimed at complementing previous empirical work on object association. We obtain a comprehensive complexity map for both models that takes into account natural restrictions to instances such as possible bounds on the number of frames, number of tracked objects and branching degree, as well as less explicit structural restrictions such as having bounded treewidth. Our results include new fixed-parameter and XP algorithms for the problems as well as hardness proofs which altogether indicate that the Lifted Paths problem exhibits a more favorable complexity behavior than Lifted Multicut.

Road tolls, diverted traffic and local traffic calming measures: Who should be in charge?

Secondary roads often suffer from diverted traffic trying to avoid congestion on major motorways. In this paper we study the traffic problems of a small town that is located parallel to a congested motorway and suffers from such diverted traffic (high local accident risks, local congestion and other nuisances). We assume that the motorway and the secondary road through the local town are under the jurisdiction of a different authority. A local government controls local accident risks and congestion using non-price measures such as speed bumps, traffic lights and explicit access restrictions for through traffic. A ‘federal’ government can control traffic levels on the motorway using tolls. We show the following results. First, competition between the federal and local authority leads to a Nash equilibrium where the toll is too high and there is too much traffic calming compared to the second-best social optimum. Second, if the local government uses traffic calming measures, imposing a federal toll on the main road is welfare-reducing, unless congestion on the main road is severe and accident risks and other traffic nuisances in the small town are unimportant. Third, traffic diverted from the main road to the local community gives the latter strong incentives to close the local road for through traffic, even when it is socially undesirable to do so. Fourth, if the access restriction only applies to through traffic by trucks, the conflict between federal and local authorities disappears: both will agree on restricting truck access. A numerical application using a two-link network between Leuven and Brussels (the highway and an alternative road passing through local communities) illustrates the theoretical results.

Pandemic Policy Design Via Feedback: A Modelling Study

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous toll on human health and well-being and led to major social and economic disruptions. Public health interventions in response to burgeoning case numbers and hospitalizations have repeatedly bent down the epidemic curve in many jurisdictions, effectively creating a closed-loop dynamic system. We aim to formalize and illustrate how to incorporate principles of feedback control into pandemic projections and decision making.MethodsStarting with a SEEIQR epidemiological model, we illustrate how feedback control can be incorporated into pandemic management using a simple design (proportional-integral or PI control), which couples recent changes in case numbers or hospital occupancy with explicit policy restrictions. We then analyse a closed-loop system between the SEEIQR model and the designed feedback controller to illustrate the potential benefits of pandemic policy design that incorporates feedback.FindingsWe first explored a feedback design that responded to hospital measured infections, demonstrating robust ability to control a pandemic despite simulating large uncertainty in reproduction number R 0 (range: 1.04-5.18) and average time to hospital admission (range: 4-28 days). The second design compared responding to hospital occupancy to responding to case counts, showing that shorter delays reduced both the cumulative case count and the average level of interventions. Finally, we show that feedback is robust to changing public compliance to public health directives, and to systemic changes associated with new variants of concern and with the introduction of a vaccination program.InterpretationThe negative impact of a pandemic on human health and societal disruption can be reduced by coupling models of disease propagation with models of the decision-making process. This creates a closed-loop system that better represents the coupled dynamics of a disease and public health responses. Importantly, we show that feedback control is robust to delays in both measurements and responses, and to uncertainty in model parameters and the efficacy of control measures.

The brachistochrone problem with constraints on the curvature of the trajectory

Abstract The paper describes various brachistochrone problem statements. In the beginning an approach to solving the brachistochrone problem with a nonzero initial velocity using optimal control methods is presented. The substantiation of the transition to zero initial velocity is also provided. The second type of problem statement takes into account explicit restrictions on the curvature of the trajectory. The solution is obtained by using the Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle. The paper demonstrates that the optimal solution includes both regular and singular trajectory parts.

Costs and information leakages on asset-borrowing markets

I study short-sale constraints in a market with asymmetric information. I offer a novel approach endogenizing short-sale constraints by including an asset-borrowing market in my model. Short-sellers have to borrow an asset and therefore reveal information to a lender. The lender trades on her own account in addition to charging fees, which motivates the short-seller to hide the information and hinders short sales. I contribute to the literature by modeling the mechanism behind short-selling in the absence of explicit short-selling restrictions that are currently less relevant in practice. The model has new implications for profit distribution, market efficiency, and volatility.

On the Storage Cost of Private Information Retrieval

We consider the fundamental tradeoff between the storage cost and the download cost in private information retrieval systems, without any explicit structural restrictions on the storage codes, such as maximum distance separable codes or uncoded storage. Two novel outer bounds are provided, which have the following implications. When the messages are stored without any redundancy across the databases, the optimal PIR strategy is to download all the messages; on the other hand, for PIR capacity-achieving codes, each database can reduce the storage cost, from storing all the messages, by no more than one message on average. We then focus on the two-message two-database case, and show that a stronger outer bound can be derived through a novel pseudo-message technique. This stronger outer bound suggests that a precise characterization of the storage-download tradeoff may require non-Shannon type inequalities, or at least more sophisticated bounding techniques.

Religion &amp; Democracy: Interactions, Tensions, Possibilities

Religion &amp; Democracy: Interactions, Tensions, Possibilities

Likelihood ratio testing in linear state space models: An application to dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models

This paper considers the problem of hypothesis testing in linear Gaussian state space models. We consider two hypotheses of interest: a simple null and a hypothesis of explicit parameter restrictions. We derive the asymptotic distributions of the corresponding likelihood ratio test statistics and compute the Bartlett adjustments. The results are non-trivial because the unrestricted state space model is not (even locally) identified. We apply our analysis to test the validity of the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models. A Monte Carlo exercise illustrates our findings and confirms the importance of Bartlett corrections at sample sizes typically encountered in macroeconomics.

Health Insurance Coverage of Permanent Hair Removal in Transgender and Gender-Minority Patients

Hair removal can be an essential component of the gender affirmation process for gender-minority (GM) patients whose outward appearance does not align with their gender identity. To examine the health insurance policies in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace and Medicaid policies for coverage of permanent hair removal for transgender and GM patients and to correlate the policies in each state with statewide protections of coverage for gender-affirming care. Private health insurance policies available on the ACA marketplace and statewide Medicaid policies were examined in a cross-sectional study from September 1 to October 31, 2019, and January 17 to 30, 2020. Policies were assessed for coverage of permanent hair removal. Language concerning hair removal was found in each policy's medical or clinical coverage guidelines and separated into general categories. Logistic regression analyses were performed to compare Medicaid policies and ACA policies in states with and without transgender protections. A total of 174 policies were analyzed, including 123 private insurance policies and 51 statewide Medicaid policies. Of these policies, 8 (4.6%) permitted the coverage of permanent hair removal without explicit restrictions. The remaining 166 policies (95.4%) broadly excluded or did not mention gender-affirming care; prohibited coverage of hair removal or did not mention it; or only permitted coverage of hair removal preoperatively for genital surgery. The ACA marketplace policies in states without transgender care protections were less likely to cover hair removal without restrictions than ACA policies in states with protections (2 of 85 policies [2.4%] in states without transgender care protections vs 5 of 38 policies [13.2%] in states with transgender care protections), and Medicaid policies were less likely to cover preoperative or nonsurgical hair removal compared with ACA policies (6 of 51 Medicaid policies [11.8%] vs 47 of 123 ACA policies [38.2%]). Despite adoption of statewide restrictions on GM health care exclusions by several states, most Medicaid and ACA policies examined in this study did not cover permanent hair removal for transgender patients. Many GM patients seeking hair removal may be required to pay out-of-pocket costs, which could be a barrier for gender-affirming care.

Does a Limited Defining Vocabulary Make Definitions Syntactically More Complex?

Abstract Definitions in learners’ dictionaries are usually written within a limited defining vocabulary (DV), that is, a set of lexical units specified prior to defining. Some researchers claim that this approach to vocabulary control may lead to definitions being syntactically complex, convoluted, and wordy. This paper aims to examine whether the introduction of a limited DV in OALD5 made its definitions more difficult to read for learners as compared to the definitions in OALD4, which were written with no explicit restrictions on the definition vocabulary. The study examines a selection of construction patterns that are potentially difficult for less advanced learners, using quantitative and qualitative methods. The examination shows that the introduction of the limited DV had no effect on most parameters studied. However, it led to significant increases in the length of definitions and the number of nominal constructions with a postmodifying past participle (e.g., performance given, spice ground, phrase used).