Situation Of Stagnation Research Articles

An External Selection Mechanism for Differential Evolution Algorithm.

The procedures of differential evolution algorithm can be summarized as population initialization, mutation, crossover, and selection. However, successful solutions generated by each iteration have not been fully utilized to our best knowledge. In this study, an external selection mechanism (ESM) is presented to improve differential evolution (DE) algorithm performance. The proposed method stores successful solutions of each iteration into an archive. When the individual is in a state of stagnation, the parents for mutation operation are selected from the archive to restore the algorithm's search. Most significant of all, a crowding entropy diversity measurement in fitness landscape is proposed, cooperated with fitness rank, to preserve the diversity and superiority of the archive. The ESM can be integrated into existing algorithms to improve the algorithm's ability to escape the situation of stagnation. CEC2017 benchmark functions are used for verification of the proposed mechanism's performance. Experimental results show that the ESM is universal, which can improve the accuracy of DE and its variant algorithms simultaneously.

ВЗАИМООТНОШЕНИЯ ФРГ СО СТРАНАМИ ЛАТИНСКОЙ АМЕРИКИ: ПОЛИТИКО-ВОЕННЫЕ АСПЕКТЫ

The article analyses the state of German bilateral relations with South America’ states in defense and security field. The decline in the dialogue between Germany and Latin America’ countries during the COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be more significant than in other regional areas . The key reason is the difficulties in strengthening German strategic positions on the continent in the second half of the 2010. The paper stresses the functional and geographical narrowness of German political and diplomatic opportunities. In the military sphere the cooperation was mainly reduced to the export of weapons produced in Germany. In its attempts to create strategic positions in South America official Berlin has traditionally focused on strengthening relations with Brazil. The factor of non-diversification of Germany’s regional contacts has been fully manifested in the situation of stagnation and degradation of German-Brazilian relations in the second half of the 2010-s. The reasons of it are not only the specificities of president J. Bolsonaro`s foreign policy, but also the fact that transition to the declared new levels of cooperation (strategic partnership since 2008, the launch of interstate consultations format in 2015) was not supported by a corresponding increase of the volumes of practical cooperation in the field of security and defense. In this context the author focuses on relaunching German-Brazilian bilateral relations as well as the FRG attempts to make dialogue with Argentine, Chile and Mexico more active. At the same time Berlin tries to increase efforts for ensuring peace in Columbia and for settlement of the situation around Venezuela. Failures in creating its own vaccine against COVID-19 did not allow Germany to use a potential «window of opportunity» in strengthening its strategic positions in Latin America.

Progress in recommender systems research: Crisis? What crisis?

AbstractScholars in algorithmic recommender systems research have developed a largely standardized scientific method, where progress is claimed by showing that a new algorithm outperforms existing ones on or more accuracy measures. In theory, reproducing and thereby verifying such improvements is easy, as it merely involves the execution of the experiment code on the same data. However, as recent work shows, the reported progress is often only virtual, because of a number of issues related to (i) a lack of reproducibility, (ii) technical and theoretical flaws, and (iii) scholarship practices that are strongly prone to researcher biases. As a result, several recent works could show that the latest published algorithms actually do not outperform existing methods when evaluated independently. Despite these issues, we currently see no signs of a crisis, where researchers re‐think their scientific method, but rather a situation of stagnation, where researchers continue to focus on the same topics. In this paper, we discuss these issues, analyze their potential underlying reasons, and outline a set of guidelines to ensure progress in recommender systems research.

COVID-19 Pandemic in Democratic Republic of the Congo: An Opportunity for Economic Recovery

The world is facing an unprecedented health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The DR Congo with its 90 million inhabitants and more than 500,000 refugees from neighboring countries recorded the first confirmed case in Kinshasa on March 10, 2020. Currently, the country is counting 16,039 cases of infection, 566 cases of death and 13,536 cases of recovery according to the Technical Secretariat Response Team COVID-DRC, (December 23, 2020). After reporting the first case, Congolese government has taken protective health measures whereby it is in a worrying economic situation that was immediately noticeable by the increase in the rate of the foreign currency (the dollar) compared to the local currency. From an extroverted economy, the Covid-19 pandemic has put it in a situation of stagnation, which could lead country into an economic recession if this scourge persists.

Contextualised resistance: The mediating power of paradigmatic frameworks

AbstractAn examination of resistance to the neoliberal dominance over public welfare organisations' operation reveals a situation of stagnation, with the call for critical resistance translated into either sporadic minor practices of isolated professionals or theoretical manifestos that demand major change, but have inadequate effect on policy. Drawing from Sanford Schram's framework of radical incrementalism as a possible challenge to neoliberal hegemony, this study traces the implementation of the Poverty‐Aware Social Work paradigm in the Israeli welfare system. Building on 16 interviews with senior agents at the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs and Social Services, this study demonstrates the significance of this critical framework in allowing different agents to challenge the hegemonic standpoint of the Ministry. Thus, it offers a preliminary conceptualisation of contextualised resistance, which operates in the mediated sphere of power exertion, granting minor practices sufficient presence to pave the way for new opportunities for major policy change.

Shared Reflection to Maximize Resources and Minimize Costs: The Reflecting Team Applied to a Hospital Environment.

Severe mental illness entails multiple hospital admissions and a large use of public resources. The Reflecting Team (RT), together with other dialogue strategies, place in a single therapeutic space, the patient, his family and a team of professionals to find together a solution to a situation of stagnation. The aim of this study was to evaluate feasibility and cost-effectiveness of a RT intervention in psychiatric inpatients in a public hospital. Six RT were performed, and clinical variables were collected retrospectively for six months pre-RT and post-RT. Both number of hospital admissions and total time spent in the psychiatric acute unit show a significant decrease. All computed cost showed statistically significant reduction. The results suggest RT might be a good strategy to introduce a positive change in the treatment of those psychiatric cases in which the patient and family find themselves caught in a system that seems to offer stale and ineffective help to problems that have become chronic.

Development of the dairy industry in the region

The article considers the modern situation of the dairy industry in Russia and its regions. The domestic dairy industry is one of the leading branches of agricultural products processing. It gives such an important product for human nutrition as milk. In recent years, this industry is in a situation of stagnation. The situation of the dairy industry can be judged as a whole about the situation of agriculture in the region. In the Siberian region, as well as in the whole country, there was a decrease in the number of cattle, and as a consequence there was a decrease in milk yield. Recently, despite new technologies and increased livestock productivity, milk production has not been sufficient to meet the needs of the population. The way out of this situation is proposed measures of state support in the dairy industry at the regional level.

The Impact of the Engineering and Management Alzakat Finance on Money Turnover Speed

The research aimed at finding some solution for current and future economic problems and crises by being careful about the expenditures of Alzakat without the violation of the rights of deserving people. Through the issuance of papers by the Alzakat house in case of inflation or stagflation in order to decrease the speed of money turnover affecting them and decrease the periods of spending monetary expenditures in the situation of stagnation and stagflation in order to increasing the speed of money turnover affecting them. The researcher found that inthe case of economic inflation, the Alzakat house can issue papers which the Alzakat deserving people can deal with. In this way, the speed of money turnover which directly affects inflation is decreased and its severances are lessened. In the case of economic stagnation, the Alzakat house can decrease the periods of money payment to the people who deserve it in a way that increases the speed of money turnover decreasing stagnation.In the case of stagflation the Alzakat house can combine between the issuance of papers and monetary distribution of the Alzakat amount in order to limit the stagflation and bring back economy to the state of balance.

TAX REGULATION OF DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL PRODUCTION

Introduction. Functioning of taxes provides for the implementation of their regulatory function. In a situation of stagnation of the national economy, taxes can serve not only as a source of budget revenues, but also an important tool for tax regulation. Purpose. The purpose of the article is to justify the approach to the formation of fiscal policy aimed at tax incentives for the development of national production. Method (methodology). To determine the methodological principles of fiscal management in the implementation of fiscal policy used techniques of abstract logical research method, namely: analysis, synthesis, analogy, comparison, abstraction and induction. Results. The results of the study showed a lack of a systematic approach to using tax elements as tax regulations. The analysis of the influence on the development of the national economy of domestic taxes and taxes levied upon importation is carried out. Based on the rationale for the low efficiency of the national economy alternative taxation proposals formed to provide time-limited preferences for innovation.

Multiobjective differential evolution using homeostasis based mutation for application in software cost estimation

The problem in software cost estimation revolves around accuracy. To improve the accuracy, heuristic/meta-heuristic algorithms have been known to yield better results when it is applied in the domain of software cost estimation. For the sake of accuracy in results, we are still modifying these algorithms. Here we have proposed a new meta-heuristic algorithm based on Differential Evolution (DE) by Homeostasis mutation operator. Software development requires high prediction and low Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and mean magnitude relative error(MMRE). The problem in software cost estimation relates to accurate prediction and minimization of RMSE and MMRE, which are used to solve multiobjective optimization. Many versions of DE were proposed, however multi-objective versions where the concept of Pareto optimality is used, are most popular. Pareto-Based Differential Evolution (PBDE) is one of them. Although the performance of this algorithm is very good, its convergence rate can be further improved by minimizing the time complexity of nondominated sorting, and by improving the diversity of solutions. This has been implemented by using efficient nondominated algorithm whose time complexity is better than the previous one and a new mutation scheme is implemented in DE which can provide more diversity among solutions. The proposed variant multiplies the Homeostasis value with one more vector, named the Homeostasis mutation vector, in the existing mutation vector to provide more bandwidth for selecting effective mutant solutions. The proposed approach provides more promising solutions to guide the evolution and helps DE escape the situation of stagnation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on twelve benchmark test functions (bi-objective and tri-objective) on the Pareto-optimal front. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms on five multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). The result verifies that our proposed Homeostasis mutation strategy performs better than other state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, application of MODE-HBM is applied to solve in terms of Pareto front, representing the trade-off between development RMSE, MMRE, and prediction for COCOMO model.

Homeostasis mutation based differential evolution algorithm

The differential evolution, one of the most powerful nature inspired algorithm is used to solve the real world problems. This algorithm takes minimum number of function evaluations to reach near to global optimum solution. Although its performance is very good, yet it suffers from the problem of st agnation. In this paper, some new mutation strategies are proposed to improve the performance of differential evolution (DE). The proposed method adds one more vector named as Homeostasis mutation vector in the existing mutation vectors to provide more bandwidth for selecting effective mutant solutions. The proposed approach provides more promising solutions to guide the evolution and helps DE escaping the situation of stagnation. Performance of proposed algorithm is compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms on COCO (Comparing Continuous Optimizers) framework. The result verifies that our proposed Homeostasis mutation strategy outperform most of the state-of-the-art DE variants and other state-of-the-art population based optimization algorithms.

Differential evolution with guiding archive for global numerical optimization

Differential evolution (DE) is a simple, yet efficient, population-based global evolutionary algorithm. DE may suffer from stagnation. This study presents a DE framework with guiding archive (GAR-DE) to help DE escape from the situation of stagnation. The proposed framework constructs a guiding archive and executes stagnation detection at each iteration. Guiding archive is composed of a certain number of relatively high-quality solutions. These solutions are collected in terms of fitness as well as diversity. If a stagnated individual is detected, the proposed framework selects a solution from guiding archive to replace the base vector in mutation operator. In this way, more promising solutions are provided to guide the evolution and effectively help DE escape from the situation of stagnation. The proposed framework is applied to six original DE algorithms, as well as two advanced DE variants. Experimental results on 28 benchmark functions and 8 real-world application problems show that the proposed framework can enhance the performance of most DE algorithms studied.

Improving Differential Evolution With a Successful-Parent-Selecting Framework

An effective and efficient successful-parent-selecting framework is proposed to improve the performance of differential evolution (DE) by providing an alternative for the selection of parents during mutation and crossover. The proposed method adapts the selection of parents by storing successful solutions into an archive, and the parents are selected from the archive when a solution is continuously not updated for an unacceptable amount of time. The proposed framework provides more promising solutions to guide the evolution and effectively helps DE escaping the situation of stagnation. The simulation results show that the proposed framework significantly improves the performance of two original DEs and six state-of-the-art algorithms in four real-world optimization problems and 30 benchmark functions.

Kosovo and Metohija: Nine centuries after

Kosovo and Metohija, the Serbian southern province, is marked by an extremely dynamic and turbulent history. It occupies the area where various nations and their rulers met and clashed over centuries (and millennia). In the early Middle Ages, the territory of Kosovo and Metohija was settled by the Slavs, who met and clashed with the natives called Albanians. Several centuries later, the territory came under the rule of the medieval Serbian rulers, who were replaced by the Ottoman conquerors some 300 years later. The reintegration of Kosovo and Metohija into Serbia, five hundred years later, was done in very specific, war conditions. For as long as nine centuries, two ethnic groups Serbs and Albanians, of different languages, civilizations and religions, have dwelled in Kosovo and Metohija. Love, harmony and understanding between them have almost never been enviable. The culmination of discord erupted to the surface at the end of the 20th century, resulting in the aggression of NATO forces against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia / Serbia, and in the violent secession of Kosovo and Metohija from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia. Occupation of Kosovo and Metohija and the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo, under immediate support and assistance of the most powerful and influential international actors, have created an extremely complex situation, intractable for Serbia. Starting exactly from the above-mentioned, the author analyzes the origins of development and the currently existing situation in Kosovo, and Serbia's relations with its southern province, trying to look at possible ways out of the situation of stagnation and decline towards the state of prosperity, peace and security in the region. .

Entrepreneurial mobility in the development of the Austrian Kurorte in the nineteenth century

In the course of the nineteenth century some hydrothermal resorts, mainly located in the Austrian Alpine area and frequented by guests with modest incomes, managed to emerge from a situation of stagnation in which they were used only by the local population and their fame was confined to only a circumscribed geographical area, to assume the role of centres of international attraction. Several of these spas and health resorts developed through stages that were in many respects similar. These Kurorte attained their most substantial growth when they managed to achieve a business synergy between local and external economic forces interested in their development. The study of some cases of success reveals that there could be several forms of collaboration between external and local business interests and with the active involvement of the local public administration, which aimed at adjusting supply to demand. On the other hand, when the aim of entrepreneurship and capital from outside was not so much development of the Kurort as the marketing of a product produced at the spa, thus, when supply sought to impose new paradigms, which were to be accepted by demand, the Kurorte did not achieve any effective economic take-off.

Evaluación y mantenimiento del donante cardíaco

Heart transplantation is currently the best treatment option to improve hope and quality of life in patients with terminal heart failure that is refractory to conventional treatment. The scarcity of donors remains a difficult problem and is the main factor limiting the number of transplants that can be performed. Given the current situation of stagnation and disparity between the number of potential organ donors, actual donors, and patients requiring transplants, we need effective strategies to reduce the differences between supply and demand and to ensure the best possible prognosis in organ recipients. These strategies should aim to ensure optimal donor selection. Likewise, it is essential to increase the number of potential donors by widening the criteria for donation and to improve our ability to take advantage of suboptimal donors. Moreover, we need to achieve acceptable physiological maintenance of donated organs. All these actions, together with the standardization of future treatments like hormone replacement therapy and genomic evaluation, will undoubtedly lead to an increase in the rate of transplants in the short and mid term, because the option of heart transplantation continues to have only slight repercussions in the high prevalence of terminal heart failure in our environment.