An assessment of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) using the Bayesian corruption indicator

Author(s):  
Paul Fenton Villar

Abstract Advocated across the international community for more than 15 years, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is now widely recognised as a hallmark anti-corruption scheme in the extractive sector. This study presents an assessment of the relationship between EITI membership and countries’ progress in tackling corruption. It provides the first study that looks at this issue using a ‘state-of-the-art’ indicator called the Bayesian Corruption Indicator. It also introduces an innovative estimation strategy combining entropy balancing with a difference-in-difference framework to address the baseline inequalities that exist between member and non-member countries. Contrary to the findings of many leading studies, this analysis finds corruption scores have improved significantly among EITI member countries. In particular, the evidence is strongest when we examine a sub-group of EITI members designated fully compliant with the initiative's transparency standards.

2021 ◽  
Vol IV (2) ◽  
pp. 84-97
Author(s):  
Alina Popa ◽  

With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the world we knew changed significantly. The buying behavior shifted as well and is reflected by a growing transition to online interaction, higher media consumption and massive turn to online shopping. Companies that aim to remain top of mind to customers should ensure that their way of interacting with user is both relevant and highly adaptive. Companies should invest in state-of-the-art technologies that help manage and optimize the relationship with the client based on both online and offline data. One of the most popular applications that companies use to develop the client relationship is a Recommender System. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation as a static procedure and focus either on a specific type of recommendation or on some limited data. In this paper, it is proposed a novel Reinforcement Learning-based recommender system that has an integrative view over data and recommendation landscape, as well as it is highly adaptive to changes in customer behavior, the Holistic Adaptive Recommender System (HARS). From system design to detailed activities, it was attempted to present a comprehensive way of designing and developing a HARS system for an e-commerce company use-case as well as giving a suite of metrics that could be used for its evaluation.


Author(s):  
James Cave ◽  
Ben Eyes

It might be suggested that composition and sonic information design are fundamentally different. However, some academic commentators and composers have explored the intersection between these disciplines. The authors presented one such work, Eonsounds: Fiamignano Gorge, at International Community of Auditory Display 2017. We argue that analysis of the aesthetic and informational choices in such hybrid works is essential to the development of sonic information design, with implications for the emergence of sonic information design as a subtype of human factors design. By acknowledging the relationship between aesthetics and information presentation, sound designers may develop designs that are safer and more user-friendly.


2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 259
Author(s):  
Yuting Yang ◽  
Kenneth Kin-Man Lam ◽  
Xin Sun ◽  
Junyu Dong ◽  
Redouane Lguensat

Marine hydrological elements are of vital importance in marine surveys. The evolution of these elements can have a profound effect on the relationship between human activities and marine hydrology. Therefore, the detection and explanation of the evolution laws of marine hydrological elements are urgently needed. In this paper, a novel method, named Evolution Trend Recognition (ETR), is proposed to recognize the trend of ocean fronts, being the most important information in the ocean dynamic process. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the task of ocean-front trend classification. A novel classification algorithm is first proposed for recognizing the ocean-front trend, in terms of the ocean-front scale and strength. Then, the GoogLeNet Inception network is trained to classify the ocean-front trend, i.e., enhancing or attenuating. The ocean-front trend is classified using the deep neural network, as well as a physics-informed classification algorithm. The two classification results are combined to make the final decision on the trend classification. Furthermore, two novel databases were created for this research, and their generation method is described, to foster research in this direction. These two databases are called the Ocean-Front Tracking Dataset (OFTraD) and the Ocean-Front Trend Dataset (OFTreD). Moreover, experiment results show that our proposed method on OFTreD achieves a higher classification accuracy, which is 97.5%, than state-of-the-art networks. This demonstrates that the proposed ETR algorithm is highly promising for trend classification.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10(5)) ◽  
pp. 1655-1669
Author(s):  
Edinah Tendani ◽  
Magdalena Petronella (Nellie) Swart ◽  
Cine Van Zyl

Restaurants in Zimbabwe have various gastronomic opportunities as Zimbabwean cuisine as it is represented by different ethnic groups, presenting an array of traditional cuisine. At the same time, gastronomic tourism needs to be innovative to survive the harsh travel restrictions and economic downturn caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. As Zimbabwe’s culinary tourism is still in its infancy it will require a post-pandemic recovery strategy. As aspect of this is the attitudes of diners. Thus, the purpose of this study is an examination of the relationship between the Culinary Tourist Value Scorecard (CTVSC) and the behavioural involvement of culinary tourists after visiting Zimbabwean ethnic restaurants. A cross-sectional survey, using a seven-point Likert scale, was employed to generate the data from 500 culinary tourists through convenience sampling. The scores between CTVSC and Culinary Tourist Behavioural Involvement (CTBI) were statistically significant (r = .80, n = 500, p<.001). Thus, hospitality managers must monitor and improve their culinary products while also meeting the needs of first-time and returning diners. It is recommended that state-of-the-art ethnic cuisine menus and refined the service offerings are adopted.


Author(s):  
Thomas Barfield

This chapter looks at the first decade of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan. As the twentieth century ended, ever-larger numbers of Afghans had become caught up in political and military struggles from which they had been previously isolated. Whether as fighters, refugees, or just victims of war and disorder, few escaped the turmoil that roiled the country. Ethnic and regional groups in Afghanistan had become politically and militarily empowered, reversing the process of centralization that had been imposed by Amir Abdur Rahman. Yet when the international community set about creating the new Afghan constitution, it did not start afresh but attempted to restore the institutions of old. This brought to the surface long-simmering disputes about the relationship of the national government to local communities, the legitimacy of governments and rulers, and the relationship that Afghanistan should have with the outside world.


Author(s):  
Francesca Sgobbi

After a brief survey of the international literature on skill-related issues that may either support or threaten the further development of ICT-based applications this article provides a picture of the state-of-the-art of the professional skills supplied by ICT specialists in 11 EU countries based on data from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills. The first part of the empirical analysis focuses on the skills profile of ICT personnel from EU countries and examines to what extent the higher skills displayed by ICT specialists depend on a different distribution of demographic characteristics and job characteristics compared to the rest of the workforce. The second part of the empirical analysis focuses on the relationship between skills and wages and tests whether employers recognize an occupation-specific wage premium to ICT specialists. The results of the proposed empirical analyses confirm the existence of significant differences between skill profiles and earnings determinants of ICT specialists compared to other workers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 5650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Ejsmont ◽  
Bartlomiej Gladysz ◽  
Aldona Kluczek

Nowadays, sustainability and Industry 4.0 (I4.0) are trending concepts used in the literature on industrial processes. Industry 4.0 has been mainly addressed by the current literature from a technological perspective, overlooking sustainability challenges regarding this recent paradigm. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the state of the art of relations between sustainability and I4.0. The goal will be met by (1) mapping and summarizing existing research efforts, (2) identifying research agendas, (3) examining gaps and opportunities for further research. Web of Science, Scopus, and a set of specific keywords were used to select peer-reviewed papers presenting evidence on the relationship between sustainability and I4.0. To achieve this goal, it was decided to use a dynamic methodology called “systematic literature network analysis”. This methodology combines a systematic literature review approach with the analysis of bibliographic networks. Selected papers were used to build a reference framework formed by I4.0 technologies and sustainability issues. The paper contributes to the Sustainable Industry 4.0 reference framework with application procedures. It aims to show how I4.0 can support ideas of sustainability. The results showed that apart from a huge contribution to both concepts, many papers do not provide an insight into realization of initiatives to introduce Sustainable Industry 4.0.


Author(s):  
Mirko Luca Lobina ◽  
Luigi Atzori ◽  
Davide Mula

Many audio watermarking techniques presented in the last years make use of masking and psychological models derived from signal processing. Such a basic idea is winning because it guarantees a high level of robustness and bandwidth of the watermark as well as fidelity of the watermarked signal. This chapter first describes the relationship between digital right management, intellectual property, and use of watermarking techniques. Then, the crossing use of watermarking and masking models is detailed, providing schemes, examples, and references. Finally, the authors present two strategies that make use of a masking model, applied to a classic watermarking technique. The joint use of classic frameworks and masking models seems to be one of the trends for the future of research in watermarking. Several tests on the proposed strategies with the state of the art are also offered to give an idea of how to assess the effectiveness of a watermarking technique.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9563-9570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuailiang Zhang ◽  
Hai Zhao ◽  
Yuwei Wu ◽  
Zhuosheng Zhang ◽  
Xi Zhou ◽  
...  

Multi-choice reading comprehension is a challenging task to select an answer from a set of candidate options when given passage and question. Previous approaches usually only calculate question-aware passage representation and ignore passage-aware question representation when modeling the relationship between passage and question, which cannot effectively capture the relationship between passage and question. In this work, we propose dual co-matching network (DCMN) which models the relationship among passage, question and answer options bidirectionally. Besides, inspired by how humans solve multi-choice questions, we integrate two reading strategies into our model: (i) passage sentence selection that finds the most salient supporting sentences to answer the question, (ii) answer option interaction that encodes the comparison information between answer options. DCMN equipped with the two strategies (DCMN+) obtains state-of-the-art results on five multi-choice reading comprehension datasets from different domains: RACE, SemEval-2018 Task 11, ROCStories, COIN, MCTest.


2019 ◽  
Vol 217 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony S. David

Academic interest in the concept of insight in psychosis has increased markedly over the past 30 years, prompting this selective appraisal of the current state of the art. Considerable progress has been made in terms of measurement and confirming a number of clinical associations. More recently, the relationship between insight and involuntary treatment has been scrutinised more closely alongside the link between decision-making capacity and insight. Advances in the clinical and cognitive neurosciences have influenced conceptual development, particularly the field of ‘metacognition’. New therapies, including those that are psychologically and neurophysiologically based, are being tested as ways to enhance insight.


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