Reconstruction of various navigational scenarios of the «Ever Given» ship, including grounding in the Suez Canal using the bridge simulator with up-to-date electronic navigation charts

The Suez Canal is the largest maritime shipping traffic thoroughfare in the world. The global cargo turnover accounts for 10-12%. Theaccident occurred on March 23, 2021 with the container ship “Ever Given”, blocking the Suez Canal. It fully paralyzed shipping traffic in the region and caused enormous damage to the economy. Reconstruction of various navigational scenarios of the containership, including grounding based on the bridge simulator, allowed examination of navigation and developing recommendations to prevent similar accidents in the future. Within the limits of the research, the authors used electronic navigation charts S-57 with up-to-date information on the accident time, a similar model of containership and hydro-meteorologic conditions in the bridge simulator’s session.An assessment of the risk of grounding a container ship has been carried out using the method of Bayesian trust networks.

Comparative Nicaraguan Migrant and Non-Migrant Experiences in the Early Twenty-First Century

This paper examines the circumstances in which Nicaraguan migrants to Costa Rica found themselves and the situations of families in Nicaragua who had household members who had moved to Costa Rica from the late 1990s to 2012. Through surveys and interviews conducted in both Nicaragua and Costa Rica, this paper peers into the immigrant experience of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica and explores such issues as does time in Costa Rica improve the immigrant situation, how competitive were immigrants’ wages compared to those of their home country of Nicaragua, and what percentage of immigrants would send remittances home. The background literature written on the topics of central American migration, chain migration, push and pull factors, and remittances help contextualize the findings of this study. This paper also includes a consideration of how social or trust networks may relate to migrants’ tendency to send remittances. The analysis of the data collected yielded findings such as a small correlation between an immigrant’s salary and the amount of time the immigrant stayed at his or her job, a six times greater wage earned by Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica than the average Nicaraguan wage, and a lower percentage of immigrants sending remittances back to Nicaragua than one might expect, from responses of both Nicaraguan migrants and non-migrants.

State, Society and Markets in North Korea

Under Kim Jong-un, North Korea has experienced growing economic markets, an emerging 'nouveau riche,' and modest levels of urban development. To what extent is North Korean politics and society changing? How has the growth of markets transformed state-society relations? This Element evaluates the shifting relationship between state, society, and markets in a deeply authoritarian context. If the regime implements controlled economic measures, extracts rent, and subsumes the market economy into its ideology, the state will likely retain strong authoritarian control. Conversely, if it fails to incorporate markets into its legitimating message, as private actors build informal trust networks, share information, and collude with state bureaucrats, more fundamental changes in state-society relations are in order. By opening the 'black box' of North Korea, this Element reveals how the country manages to teeter forward, and where its domestic future may lie.

DO ENTREPRENEURIAL DYNAMICS AND EMPLOYMENT INFLUENCE ECONOMIC GROWTH? EVIDENCE FOR ROMANIA

The literature on the relationship between entrepreneurship, firm formation and economic development often describes entrepreneurship as a complex phenomenon, led by individuals, embedded in a broad economic and societal context, which, in regional terms, influences the quality and results of the entrepreneurial process. From a micro-economic perspective, the region is shaped by the myriad of laborious and innovative actions of entrepreneurs, looking for opportunities, taking risks, starting businesses and generating economic and social associations. Competition, trust, networks, mentalities, the education system, public policies, all are ingredients that can provide opportunities for many actors at the local level (institutions, businesses, population, etc.) and thus, for the region as a whole to thrive. Often these elements can offer the opportunities of economic convergence between regions and countries. On the other hand, we found that the potential of entrepreneurship to generate benefits and an impetus for the economic growth of regions were not fully researched and understood, despite suggestive empirical evidence and a rich literature in regional studies. In this article we analysed, at the level of the 8 development regions of Romania, the relation between the firm’s formation and the evolution of the Gross Domestic Product, respectively the relation between employment/active population and the evolution of the Gross Domestic Product. We did not find clear evidence that the pace of setting up new businesses has a certain effect on economic growth or employment, but we found that in some regions, better equipped in terms of infrastructure, qualification and diversity of human capital, entrepreneurial dynamics could moderately influence the positive evolution of these macroeconomic indicators.

Navigating Trust and Distrust in the Refugee Community of Malta

This article considers how trust is constructed in the refugee community of Malta, against the backdrop of ongoing and recurrent unrest in Libya. As social trust is re-evaluated, social spaces have become sites of tension where divisions re-emerge along political, ideological, and economic lines. By focusing on the Libyan diaspora, the article presents an insight into the ways that conflict trauma shapes trust-building, and considers the challenges faced by civil society organisations and government bodies in their efforts to facilitate support and community-building on the island. The article is based on 14 interviews conducted in 2015 with members of the Libyan diaspora, and Maltese civil society organisations and government bodies. The interviewees discussed the multifaceted aspects of trust-building, including the legacy of 42 years of political distrust during the regime of the former Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, regional affiliations and divisions, and the continuum of trauma that unfolds in the Maltese Open Centres and in the host community. The findings of the study indicate that there are additional structural impediments that extend beyond the ongoing conflict, including the Maltese detention process, the redrawing of political boundaries around social spaces in the towns, and the role of identity, which present determining factors in the building of social trust. Collectively, these aspects hold implications for integration into the diaspora community on the island, while in the long term, individual recovery from conflict trauma is dependent on the trust-networks that are constructed, or joined, by the refugees.

Opportunistic Behavior Governance in PPP Projects: An Analysis Based on Trust Networks

Stakeholders of PPP projects may induce opportunistic behaviors in long-term cooperation. Existing studies emphasized the inhibitory effect of trust on opportunistic behaviors, but most of them simplified the trust relationship into a two-subject perspective. From the perspective of social network analysis, this research constructs a network-level trust relationship between the stakeholders of PPP projects. The index analysis of the trust network shows that the PPP project stakeholders have obvious centrality and there are structural holes in the networks. From the perspective of the stakeholder alliance, different forms of alliances differ in the degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality of the trust network. On this basis, the analysis results of different trust network indicators match the corresponding preventive measures of opportunistic behavior, and this research provides comprehensive suggestions for project management.

Relation Representation Learning Via Signed Graph Mutual Information Maximization for Trust Prediction

Trust prediction is essential to enhancing reliability and reducing risk from the unreliable node, especially for online applications in open network environments. An essential fact in trust prediction is to measure the relation of both the interacting entities accurately. However, most of the existing methods infer the trust relation between interacting entities usually rely on modeling the similarity between nodes on a graph and ignore semantic relation and the influence of negative links (e.g., distrust relation). In this paper, we proposed a relation representation learning via signed graph mutual information maximization (called SGMIM). In SGMIM, we incorporate a translation model and positive point-wise mutual information to enhance the relation representations and adopt Mutual Information Maximization to align the entity and relation semantic spaces. Moreover, we further develop a sign prediction model for making accurate trust predictions. We conduct link sign prediction in trust networks based on learned the relation representation. Extensive experimental results in four real-world datasets on trust prediction task show that SGMIM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Prediction and Assessment of the Occupational Risks in the Mining Industry Using the Bayess Theorem

The analysis of existing methods for assessing occupational risks is carried out, and the need for searchinga fundamentally new approach to the assessment and prediction of risks in the mining industry is substantiated. Based on the results of the analysis of modern methods and technologies, it is established that the development of the methodology for assessment and prediction of the occupational risks using Bayes's theorem has significant advantages: simplicity and accessibility for the occupational safety specialists, reproducibility considering many factors of working conditions, as well as the possibility of preventive measures prediction and development. The application of Bayes's theorem is promising in determining cause-and-effect relationships and predicting the occupational morbidity of the employees, which is also an advantage of this methodology for managing occupational risks in the mining industry. Bayes's approaches to modeling are characterized by high performance, intuitively clear in the form of a graph. The example is given concerning the application of Bayes's theorem to assess the risk of a fatal incident taking into account the statistics on the mining industry. Also, the simplest types of Bayes’s trust networks were developed reflecting the possibility of establishing cause-and-effect relationships (both for assessment and prediction), and are the basis for further modeling.