The Effect of Short-term Irrigation of TWW on the State of Soils, Groundwater and Vegetation in the Cebala Borj-Touil area (Tunisia)

Author(s):  
M. Dahmouni ◽  
G. Hoermann ◽  
M. Hachicha
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Claudius Härpfer

In recent times we find many plebiscitary acts that seek to democratically legitimize political processes in any direction. They have in common that they interrupt the normal routine of representative democracies to a certain degree and create an extra-daily state of affairs, which entails not only direct but also indirect consequences. The text attempts to systematize some of these mechanisms from a Weberian perspective using Brexit as an example. After a brief overview of Weber’s short-term politically inspired statements on plebiscitary democracy, the text systematizes Weber’s understanding of the state as a bureaucratic apparatus that requires any kind of leader to be controlled. Subsequently, the text discusses the relationship between domination, legality, and rationality in order to finally point out the danger of erosion of truth and legality through the emergence of competing consensus communities in the face of competing conceptions of order.


Significance Many areas of the Caribbean have trade, investment and family connections with communities in Florida. As the state now plays a pivotal role in US electoral politics, crises in the region can take on added political importance for parts of Florida’s electorate. Impacts Forecasts of short-term economic recovery for Florida remain highly uncertain given the continuing impact of the pandemic. Clashing interests across the Caribbean may demand greater coordination of US policy than the government can currently offer. Healthcare and disaster relief capabilities within the state are severely overstretched and could be overwhelmed by a new crisis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (06) ◽  
pp. 10352-10360
Author(s):  
Jing Bi ◽  
Vikas Dhiman ◽  
Tianyou Xiao ◽  
Chenliang Xu

Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) via Behavior Cloning (BC) works well on multiple complex tasks. However, a limitation of the typical LfD approach is that it requires expert demonstrations for all scenarios, including those in which the algorithm is already well-trained. The recently proposed Learning from Interventions (LfI) overcomes this limitation by using an expert overseer. The expert overseer only intervenes when it suspects that an unsafe action is about to be taken. Although LfI significantly improves over LfD, the state-of-the-art LfI fails to account for delay caused by the expert's reaction time and only learns short-term behavior. We address these limitations by 1) interpolating the expert's interventions back in time, and 2) by splitting the policy into two hierarchical levels, one that generates sub-goals for the future and another that generates actions to reach those desired sub-goals. This sub-goal prediction forces the algorithm to learn long-term behavior while also being robust to the expert's reaction time. Our experiments show that LfI using sub-goals in a hierarchical policy framework trains faster and achieves better asymptotic performance than typical LfD.


2022 ◽  
pp. 124-144
Author(s):  
Nima Norouzi

This chapter investigates the effects of COVID-19 on electricity consumption in some countries, especially in Iran. The effect of COVID-19 in the electricity industry and the amount of electricity consumption in Iran and in the countries that have been most affected have been studied. A study of COVID-19's impact on the world shows a reduction of about 15% in electricity demand during the short term of the COVID-19 outbreak. This amount varies from country to country. Studies show that the countries under study have experienced a relative decline in electricity demand in the short term, but with the continued prevalence of COVID-19 and the removal of some restrictions, the state of electricity consumption has more or less returned to pre-COVID-19 levels. It is worth noting that at the time of writing this chapter, the COVID-19 pandemic continues.


Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-338
Author(s):  
Mario Krämer

AbstractThis article examines two closely related themes: the triangle of tradition, capital and the state; and resistance to neotraditional leadership and local activism for democracy. I investigate an uprising in the Topnaar Traditional Authority in the Erongo region of Namibia by young community activists who aimed to promote democracy in their community in a context of manifold accusations of self-enrichment and corruption against the neotraditional leadership. The article demonstrates that the corporatization of tradition is a double-edged sword: neotraditional leaders expand their local power towards their subjects in the short term, but it often produces severe conflict that may result in the delegitimization of neotraditional authority in the long run. However, the Topnaar youth uprising and quest for democracy was less about challenging neotraditional authority per se and more about replacing the incumbents as well as obtaining a fair share of political power. It resulted from the perception that the neotraditional-cum-corporate ventures no longer served the cause of a common good; this, in turn, contradicted the general ideal of equality among the Topnaar. The corporatization of tradition thus generated local grievances and stimulated demands for democratic participation. Since the uprising gained at least some of its momentum from my research on neotraditional authority, I also reflect on my role.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-306
Author(s):  
Ankuj Arora ◽  
Humbert Fiorino ◽  
Damien Pellier ◽  
Sylvie Pesty

Abstract In order to be acceptable and able to “camouflage” into their physio-social context in the long run, robots need to be not just functional, but autonomously psycho-affective as well. This motivates a long term necessity of introducing behavioral autonomy in robots, so they can autonomously communicate with humans without the need of “wizard” intervention. This paper proposes a technique to learn robot speech models from human-robot dialog exchanges. It views the entire exchange in the Automated Planning (AP) paradigm, representing the dialog sequences (speech acts) in the form of action sequences that modify the state of the world upon execution, gradually propelling the state to a desired goal. We then exploit intra-action and inter-action dependencies, encoding them in the form of constraints. We attempt to satisfy these constraints using aweighted maximum satisfiability model known as MAX-SAT, and convert the solution into a speech model. This model could have many uses, such as planning of fresh dialogs. In this study, the learnt model is used to predict speech acts in the dialog sequences using the sequence labeling (predicting future acts based on previously seen ones) capabilities of the LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) class of recurrent neural networks. Encouraging empirical results demonstrate the utility of this learnt model and its long term potential to facilitate autonomous behavioral planning of robots, an aspect to be explored in future works.


Author(s):  
Romain Duval ◽  
Davide Furceri ◽  
Joao Jalles

Abstract This paper explores the short-term employment effect of deregulating job protection for regular workers and how it varies with prevailing business cycle conditions. We apply the local projection method to a newly constructed dataset of major regular job protection reforms covering 26 advanced economies over the past four decades. The analysis relies on country-sector-level data, using as identifying assumption the fact that stringent dismissal regulations are more binding in sectors that are characterized by a higher ‘natural’ propensity to make regular adjustments to the workforce. We find that the response of sectoral employment to deregulation depends crucially on the state of the economy at the time of reform—deregulation increases employment if implemented during an economic expansion, but reduces employment if carried out in a recession. These findings are consistent with theory and are robust to a battery of sensitivity checks.


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