Extreme Imbalances Research Articles

Spatiotemporal Analysis of the Interactions between Ecosystem Services in Arid Areas and Their Responses to Urbanization and Various Driving Factors

In recent years, rapid urban expansion and increasing ecological sensitivity in arid zones have led to extreme imbalances in ecosystem development. Therefore, there is an urgent need to balance the dual goals of synergistic development of ecosystem services (ESs) and increased urbanization. Previous studies have analyzed the impacts of urbanization on ESs but have selected a limited number of indicators and have not focused on the impacts of urbanization on ES pair interactions. In this study, six key ESs (water yield, habitat quality, soil conservation, carbon storage, carbon sequestration and oxygen production, and food production) and total ecosystem services (TESs) were selected, and trends in the temporal and spatial relationship between trade-offs and synergies were analyzed over 20 years. This study refined the living standards urbanization indicator and evaluated the impact of urbanization and multiple drivers on ESs and ES pair interrelationships based on geo-detectors and segmented linear regression. The results show that there is heterogeneity in the overall and regional ES trade-offs and synergistic relationships, and water yield (WY)-related ES pairs generally exhibit synergistic relationships at the overall level. Spatially, however, the trade-off ratio exceeds the synergy ratio. Segmented linear regression results show that the relationship between all the urbanization indicators and TESs demonstrates an upward trend followed by a downward trend. Measures such as the increase in man-made oases in the early stages of urbanization did have some positive effects on TESs. However, as urbanization increased, these positive effects were quickly offset by the negative effects of overdevelopment and environmental degradation, leading to an overall decline in TESs. Urbanization of construction land (CL) had the most direct impact on ecosystem services. In summary, due to special climatic constraints, arid zones are more sensitive than other ecosystems, and urban development is strictly limited by oasis capacity. As cities expand, attention needs to be focused on protecting ecological land and limiting the expansion of CL to promote the synergistic development of urbanization and ecosystem services in arid zones.

IPR POLICY VS REGULATORY POLICY

Dear Reader, Let us get ready to face the global healthcare challenges with positive attributes and approaches to regulatory pathways. Resisting evergreening and extreme imbalances in Intellectual Property and patient practices may be a good option to continue from the Uruguay Round, TRIPs and the Doha Declaration perspective.

ADT-Det: Adaptive Dynamic Refined Single-Stage Transformer Detector for Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection in Satellite Optical Imagery

The detection of arbitrary-oriented and multi-scale objects in satellite optical imagery is an important task in remote sensing and computer vision. Despite significant research efforts, such detection remains largely unsolved due to the diversity of patterns in orientation, scale, aspect ratio, and visual appearance; the dense distribution of objects; and extreme imbalances in categories. In this paper, we propose an adaptive dynamic refined single-stage transformer detector to address the aforementioned challenges, aiming to achieve high recall and speed. Our detector realizes rotated object detection with RetinaNet as the baseline. Firstly, we propose a feature pyramid transformer (FPT) to enhance feature extraction of the rotated object detection framework through a feature interaction mechanism. This is beneficial for the detection of objects with diverse patterns in terms of scale, aspect ratio, visual appearance, and dense distributions. Secondly, we design two special post-processing steps for rotated objects with arbitrary orientations, large aspect ratios and dense distributions. The output features of FPT are fed into post-processing steps. In the first step, it performs the preliminary regression of locations and angle anchors for the refinement step. In the refinement step, it performs adaptive feature refinement first and then gives the final object detection result precisely. The main architecture of the refinement step is dynamic feature refinement (DFR), which is proposed to adaptively adjust the feature map and reconstruct a new feature map for arbitrary-oriented object detection to alleviate the mismatches between rotated bounding boxes and axis-aligned receptive fields. Thirdly, the focus loss is adopted to deal with the category imbalance problem. Experiments on two challenging satellite optical imagery public datasets, DOTA and HRSC2016, demonstrate that the proposed ADT-Det detector achieves a state-of-the-art detection accuracy (79.95% mAP for DOTA and 93.47% mAP for HRSC2016) while running very fast (14.6 fps with a 600 × 600 input image size).

Overcoming the limitations of patch-based learning to detect cancer in whole slide images

Whole slide images (WSIs) pose unique challenges when training deep learning models. They are very large which makes it necessary to break each image down into smaller patches for analysis, image features have to be extracted at multiple scales in order to capture both detail and context, and extreme class imbalances may exist. Significant progress has been made in the analysis of these images, thanks largely due to the availability of public annotated datasets. We postulate, however, that even if a method scores well on a challenge task, this success may not translate to good performance in a more clinically relevant workflow. Many datasets consist of image patches which may suffer from data curation bias; other datasets are only labelled at the whole slide level and the lack of annotations across an image may mask erroneous local predictions so long as the final decision is correct. In this paper, we outline the differences between patch or slide-level classification versus methods that need to localize or segment cancer accurately across the whole slide, and we experimentally verify that best practices differ in both cases. We apply a binary cancer detection network on post neoadjuvant therapy breast cancer WSIs to find the tumor bed outlining the extent of cancer, a task which requires sensitivity and precision across the whole slide. We extensively study multiple design choices and their effects on the outcome, including architectures and augmentations. We propose a negative data sampling strategy, which drastically reduces the false positive rate (25% of false positives versus 62.5%) and improves each metric pertinent to our problem, with a 53% reduction in the error of tumor extent. Our results indicate classification performances of image patches versus WSIs are inversely related when the same negative data sampling strategy is used. Specifically, injection of negatives into training data for image patch classification degrades the performance, whereas the performance is improved for slide and pixel-level WSI classification tasks. Furthermore, we find applying extensive augmentations helps more in WSI-based tasks compared to patch-level image classification.

Efficacy in Action: Mobilising Community Participation for Inclusive Urban Development

The idea of inclusive development rides high on the international agenda, following publication of the Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015 and the Habitat III New Urban Agenda in 2016. The commitment to ‘leave no one behind’ in tackling the linked challenges of economic, social and environmental development provides an encompassing statement of intent. However, it also raises a number of important questions about how ideas of inclusivity are translated into practice, in contexts where there are extreme imbalances in resource and power and where established structures of governance marginalise the involvement of the poor in the delivery of development. Drawing on a case study of a SDI affiliate organisations in Harare, Zimbabwe, this paper examines the creation of efficacy among low-income community members as a foundation for inclusive urban development. The case study is used to discuss the importance of building efficacy as a necessary condition for communities to engage in development.

Load balancing for chemically reacting flows

Purpose A common observation made when computing chemically reacting flows is how central processing unit (CPU)-intensive these are in comparison to cold flow cases. The update of tens or hundreds of species with hundreds or thousands of reactions can easily consume more than 95% of the total CPU time. In many cases, the region where reactions (combustion) are actually taking place comprises only a very small percentage of the volume. Typical examples are flame fronts propagating through a domain. In such cases, only a small fraction of points/cells needs a full chemistry update. This leads to extreme load imbalances on parallel machines. The purpose of the present work is to develop a methodology to balance the work in an optimal way. Design/methodology/approach Points that require a full chemistry update are identified, gathered and distributed across the network, so that work is evenly distributed. Once the chemistry has been updated, the unknowns are gathered back. Findings The procedure has been found to work extremely well, leading to optimal load balance with insignificant communication overheads. Research limitations/implications In many production runs, the procedure leads to a reduction in CPU requirements of more than an order of magnitude. This allows much larger and longer runs, improving accuracy and statistics. Practical implications The procedure has allowed the calculation of chemically reacting flow cases that were hitherto not possible. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, this type of load balancing has not been published before.

GLOBALIZATION VERSUS LOCALIZATION – ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES

Economic globalization leads to extreme development imbalances and represents a cause for the growing inequality between the centre and the periphery on the global economic map. It is in collision with the social protection system, a public good that can be provided for by political process only. The capital is untying the national boundaries and starts serving its own purposes, entailing transformation of the territorial (national) state into a market corporate state. By opening the financial channels for credit indebtedness, the speculative capital is enthroned on the top of the capitalist order and takes dominant role in the new era of global mega capitalism, with a purpose of cleaning the road to its full domination, preparing the world for the new Kondratieff technological cycle. Information, knowledge and technological innovations are driving forces to the global-local networking and the future of the economic development is the sustainable cooperation and synergies between central and local governments and between global and local businesses with an aim of redirecting the economic systems from unsustainable to self-functional. The contemporary determinants to the economic sustainability are based on the creation and use of knowledge in the economic processes. Keywords: economic globalization, megacapitalism, economic localization, technology, innovations, Knowlegd Based Economy

Imbalances in the German public health system - numbers of state-certified occupational physicians and relation to socioeconomic data.

BackgroundState-certified occupational physicians who work as civil servants in the Federal Republic of Germany are key players in the German Public Health system. They control i.e. the legal compliance in occupational health and participate in the occupational disease procedures. Despite the role model function of the German Public health system for many developing countries, this area of Public health is debated to have been hampered in the past years by a disregard concerning structural developments.MethodsDifferent databases were screened for occupational health benchmarks. Obtained data were compared to socioeconomic data and indices were calculated.ResultsThe overall numbers of State-certified occupational physicians decreased in Germany between 1992 and 2012 from 136 to 86 (63 %). On the single state level, the ratios of State-certified occupational physicians per 1 Mio. working population ranged from 8 for the state of Saarland to 0.8 for the state of North Rhine Westphalia. A general difference was found for old versus new German states. Also, large differences were present for the ratios of State-certified occupational physicians per 106 employees towards public debt per capita (€) and the ratios of State-certified occupational physicians per Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the 16 German states in 2012.ConclusionsIn striking contrast to the WHO document on the Occupational safety and health (OSH) system that states in its executive summary that the human and institutional capacities of the German occupational health system are very strong in both quantity and quality, we here show extreme imbalances present at the single state levels that developed over the past 20 years. With a regard to the increasing complexity of the economic system a reversal of this trend should be demanded.

Extreme dNTP pool changes and hypermutability in dcd ndk strains

Cells lacking deoxycytidine deaminase (DCD) have been shown to have imbalances in the normal dNTP pools that lead to multiple phenotypes, including increased mutagenesis, increased sensitivity to oxidizing agents, and to a number of antibiotics. In particular, there is an increased dCTP pool, often accompanied by a decreased dTTP pool. In the work presented here, we show that double mutants of Escherichia coli lacking both DCD and NDK (nucleoside diphosphate kinase) have even more extreme imbalances of dNTPs than mutants lacking only one or the other of these enzymes. In particular, the dCTP pool rises to very high levels, exceeding even the cellular ATP level by several-fold. This increased level of dCTP, coupled with more modest changes in other dNTPs, results in exceptionally high mutation levels. The high mutation levels are attenuated by the addition of thymidine. The results corroborate the critical importance of controlling DNA precursor levels for promoting genome stability. We also show that the addition of certain exogenous nucleosides can influence replication errors in DCD-proficient strains that are deficient in mismatch repair.

Transformative Constitutionalism in South Africa: 20 Years of Democracy

This article reflects on the transformative nature of South Africa’s Constitution, looking at the past 20 years of a widely celebrated democracy. The article discusses the successful entrenchment of institutional framework and challenges facing transformative constitutionalism (TC). South Africa’s history for the better part of the 20th century reveals a variety of historical phenomena ranging from colonisation, unjust legal systems and other discriminatory practices. This bred a society of extreme imbalances and socio-economic inequalities. Post 1994, a reconstruction and development agenda became a priority, resulting in TC, a project which adopted the stance of transforming the society by redressing the injustices of the past, to create a much just society grounded in law. It has a foundational mandate to heal the wounds of the past. This entails that the societal challenges can best be addressed using the supreme law in the Constitution, as the basis for societal transformation. The 1994 dispensation has had to embrace the notion of democracy, culture of human rights according to established international norms and standards, and uphold the rule of law. While South Africa has made notable progress in many respects, the country faces new challenges that threaten the prospects of the TC. Hence, the survival of TC depends largely on the political will to address these challenges. It is also indispensable to propagate for citizenry education to foster active participation and understanding of democratic system for the sustenance of transformation ideals of the Constitution. Further that the success of TC depends on government’s absolute support for chapter 9 institutions and preserving judicial independence. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n27p887

Using the Capability Approach to improve female teacher deployment to rural schools in Nigeria

This study focuses on the socio-cultural and institutional factors that affect female teacher deployment in rural primary schools in Nigeria. In Kwara State, there are extreme imbalances in teacher distribution between rural and urban areas due to female teachers’ active avoidance and/or attrition from rural posts. Given these problems, this article discusses an innovative use of the Capability Approach that informed a rural teacher deployment policy that addressed a number of issues that were specifically identified through female teachers’ values and lived experiences. This research not only had the positive analytical and political effects of prioritising the knowledge, participation and empowerment of female teachers; but it also provided a more fine-grained and holistic understanding of issues hindering effective deployment and retention of female Nigerian teachers, which informed the development of comprehensive and relevant strategies to address these.

Data analysis issues for allele-specific expression using Illumina's GoldenGate assay

BackgroundHigh-throughput measurement of allele-specific expression (ASE) is a relatively new and exciting application area for array-based technologies. In this paper, we explore several data sets which make use of Illumina's GoldenGate BeadArray technology to measure ASE. This platform exploits coding SNPs to obtain relative expression measurements for alleles at approximately 1500 positions in the genome.ResultsWe analyze data from a mixture experiment where genomic DNA samples from pairs of individuals of known genotypes are pooled to create allelic imbalances at varying levels for the majority of SNPs on the array. We observe that GoldenGate has less sensitivity at detecting subtle allelic imbalances (around 1.3 fold) compared to extreme imbalances, and note the benefit of applying local background correction to the data. Analysis of data from a dye-swap control experiment allowed us to quantify dye-bias, which can be reduced considerably by careful normalization. The need to filter the data before carrying out further downstream analysis to remove non-responding probes, which show either weak, or non-specific signal for each allele, was also demonstrated. Throughout this paper, we find that a linear model analysis of the data from each SNP is a flexible modelling strategy that allows for testing of allelic imbalances in each sample when replicate hybridizations are available.ConclusionsOur analysis shows that local background correction carried out by Illumina's software, together with quantile normalization of the red and green channels within each array, provides optimal performance in terms of false positive rates. In addition, we strongly encourage intensity-based filtering to remove SNPs which only measure non-specific signal. We anticipate that a similar analysis strategy will prove useful when quantifying ASE on Illumina's higher density Infinium BeadChips.

On assessing the cost of TRIPS implementation

Efforts to ensure that intellectual property rights are respected and protected world-wide have met increasing resistance by critics who see extreme imbalances in the costs and benefits of implementing stronger intellectual property protection. The WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) attracts particular criticism as an enforceable multilateral embodiment of these efforts. While few disagree that developed countries stand to benefit more in the short term from TRIPS implementation than developing countries, precisely estimating associated costs and benefits is challenging. This paper comments on an approach to estimating the ‘indirect’ costs of implementing TRIPS proposed by McCalman (2001) and argues that the approach overestimates the costs born by developing countries. Specifically, this overestimation is due primarily to an inadequate representation of the TRIPS Agreement and a counterfactual assumption that countries would not have strengthened their intellectual property policies in the absence of the TRIPS Agreement.

The european union and its future languages: questions for language policies and translation theories

Future enlargement of the European Union is destined to accentuate the problems of its translation services. Some lessons for likely scenarios can be gleaned from the addition of Finnish to the list of official languages in 1995, especially with respect to juridical syntax, new terminology, the status of a relatively ‘opaque’ language, and the social factors influencing acceptance of change. These issues are linked to the special theoretical problems ensuing from translational equivalence as an EU ‘legal fiction’ and the subsequent non-directionality of translated texts. Official equality also hides extreme imbalances in language use, perhaps promising more than limited budgets may be able to deliver. It is suggested that, in preparation for such problems, restricted training programmes should be developed, the non-bureaucratic translation market should not be abandoned, and a series of critical questions should be asked of EU experts.

The Dynamics Of Poverty, Inequality and Economic Well-being: African Economic Growth in Comparative Perspective

Two hundred and fifty million Africans (about 45% of the population) are poor. In rural areas, where most Africans live, there is, alas, a 'poor majority'. Rural poverty rates range from 37% in Madagascar and 41% in Kenya to 88% in Zambia and 94% in Ghana (Table 1). It is hard to imagine an issue in development economics that is of greater importance to humankind than the effects of economic growth on poverty and economic well-being. Yet there is remarkably little consensus on this vitally important issue, as illustrated by the following two polar positions: • New patterns of growth will need to be developed and sustained well into the 21st century to prevent ever more extreme imbalances and inequalities in the world economy. (United Nations, 1996, p. 8) • In the extreme, the inequality of income may worsen fast enough at the outset of economic growth for poverty to increase; growth would be 'immiserizing' . . . . There is no case in which the effect of growth is offset by changes in inequality (contrary to the immiserizing growth hypothesis.) In short, growth reduces poverty. [Emphasis added.] (World Bank, 1990, pp. 46-7) This paper provides a fresh look at these issues with particular reference to Africa. In so doing, the methodologies for analyzing changing income distribution in the course of economic growth are introduced. Data and methods are analyzed in much greater depth in Fields (2000), to which the interested reader is referred.

Effects of pH on contractility of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) intestinal muscle in vitro

Extreme acid-base imbalances in salmonids have been shown to impact on gastrointestinal motility. Changes in pH are known to affect cardiac and skeletal muscle in fish and mammalian intestinal smooth muscle preparations. This study was conducted to determine if the contractility of rainbow trout intestinal muscle was sensitive to pH fluctuations and to begin the investigation into the mechanisms by which pH affected contractility. Isolated duplicate or triplicate segments of rainbow trout intestine were suspended in organ baths containing modified Krebs-Henseleit solution. The pH was adjusted by varying the concentration of CO2 aerating the solution and with HCl or lactic acid. Contractility was determined as response to the administration of 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT, serotonin), KCl, and transmural stimulation within the pH range of 6.3 to 8.5. Optimum pH for proximal segments was 7.85 while the range was much wider for distal segments. Decreasing the pH with CO2 resulted in a greater inhibition of smooth muscle contractility than when the pH was decreased in 100% O2 with either HCl or lactic acid, particularly when the tissues are stimulated electrically. This effect was ameliorated as the fish attained sexual maturity, although the mechanisms involved were not clear. The Cl-/HCO 3 - exchanger appeared to be involved in recovery from acidotic stress, particularly at pH levels below 6.5. The role played by the Na+/H+ exchanger is still unclear. Although contractility was inhibited in the presence of the amiloride analog EIPA (5-(N-ethyl-N-isopropyl)amiloride), whether the inhibition was due to blockage of ion transport or to cytosolic effects is yet to be determined.

Quasi‐proletarians and a patriarchal bureaucracy: Aspects of Yugoslavia's re‐peripheralisation

THE CRISIS AND COLLAPSE of 'real socialism' in Europe should be seen in the overall perspective of increasingly unequal conditions in confrontation with a global capitalist economy undergoing profound restructuring since the beginning of the 1970s. The social and economic systems of'real socialism' showed themselves incapable of commanding or developing forms of organisation consistent with the demands of the 'third industrial revolution' (the microelectronic) on increased 'just in time' flexibility, human creativity and decentralised institutional autonomy harnessed to intensified accumulation of capital in the postmodern era. This could be seen as one of the important factors undercutting their economies, leaving them hopelessly stagnating and outdated, and forcing them into rapidly increasing dependence on Western capital, knowhow and technology. This new dependence made them slide into the quagmire of the 1970s petrodollar foreign debt trap. At the same historical juncture, the vastly expanded integration of formerly 'Third World' regions into the economic orbit of transnational capital meant that the stagnating and increasingly world-market-dependent economies of 'real socialism' were rather abruptly exposed to ferocious competition from a mushrooming of new, vastly more modern plants within the classical base industries now resituated in low-wage, low-cost Asiatic and Latin American NICs (newly industrialising countries). Yugoslavia was the 'real-socialist' country in Europe longest and most intensively confronted with a number of dilemmas relating to socialist states' (re-)integration into a global capitalist economy. During the 1960s, according to a number of social and economic criteria, Yugoslavia could be described as a country aspiring to entry into the category of'core' industrial countries. There was the problem of rather extreme regional development imbalances. All parts of Yugoslavia, however, had experienced fast industrial development during the post-war period. Living standards had continuously improved, and the country had succeeded in controlling its de-agrarianisation process to a larger degree than most other NICs. A decentralising economy in combination with the social and economic incentives represented by incipient forms of industrial and local-level democracy, as embodied in 'self-management', appeared promising as a determined attempt to transform the structure of the national accumulation scheme, and to build up a strong and internationally competitive export sector. Growing