The impact of national culture on COVID-19 pandemic outcomes

PurposeThis study aims to uncover the extent to which cultural traits may explain the puzzling international divergence in COVID-19 outcomes, and how those traits interact with state action to produce compliance with pandemic health policy.Design/methodology/approachA theoretical framework illustrates the surprising possibility that culture and state action may not reinforce each other but rather act as substitutes in eliciting anti-pandemic behavior. This possibility is tested empirically in two specifications: a cross-sectional regression that includes several novel COVID-related measures, and a panel model that controls for contemporaneous disease burden. Across these models, we use the measures of national culture developed by Hofstede (1984) and a newer metric developed by Schwartz (1990).FindingsIndividualism and egalitarianism have a positive effect on disease prevalence, while cultural heterogeneity was associated with a more robust public health response. Consistent with our model, we find that culture and state action served as substitutes in motivating compliance with COVID-19 policy.Practical implicationsThe results of this study imply that culture and state interact in determining the effectiveness of public health measures aimed at combating COVID-19; these results recommend culturally aware state intervention when combating pandemics.Originality/valueThis study offers several new contributions. First, it proposes a model to help contextualize the empirical analysis. Second, it examines a wider range of traits than previous studies, including cultural homogeneity and the Schwartz variables. Third, it employs a richer econometric specification that explores the interaction between state and culture in a panel context.

Seismic Shifts: The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Gendered Fault Lines and Implications for International Law

The Covid-19 pandemic and related shutdowns created seismic shifts in the boundaries between public and private life, with lasting implications for human rights and international law. Arriving just as the international legal order was wobbling in the wake of a populist backlash and other great challenges, the pandemic intensified fault lines of marginalisation and state action, amplifying the forces that had already left the liberal international order in crisis and retreat. This article examines the pandemic’s impacts on the international legal order through a gendered lens. It argues that in the short-term, the pandemic has reinforced public-private divides in international law, reinvigorating previous debates over the role of the state in protecting its people from harm. It argues that in the long-term, these developments threaten to unravel the most recent gains in international law and global governance that have supported and expanded the recognition of human rights to marginalised groups. Left unaddressed, this unraveling will further entrench such divides and contribute to the further retreat of the liberal international order. Examining these fault lines and their implications can help us re-imagine a post-pandemic international legal order that offers more protection for human rights, even as multilateral institutions and cooperation sputter or fail.

Theorizing nation-building through high-speed rail development: Hegemony and space in the Basque Country, Spain

Despite a variegated body of academic work on nation-building and rail infrastructures, attention to the relationship between nation-building and wider processes of economic and political restructuring and an explicit and theoretically robust consideration of space have been largely missing. This paper seeks to address both limitations by advancing a spatially sensitive conceptualization of how rail infrastructures may be used as a tool for nation-building in contemporary capitalist societies. Particularly, I draw on Jessop's strategic-relational approach to the state and on theoretical contributions on the spatiality of social relations to propose the synthetic notion of ‘spatial hegemonic vision’ to explain the legitimacy and substantive coherence of state action, argue for the inherent spatiality of nation-building projects, and facilitate a theoretically robust and nuanced understanding of such spatiality. I further distinguish between political economic and cultural dimensions in nation-building and discuss the materialization and imagining of specific configurations of territories, places, scales and networks involved in spatial hegemonic visions. This conceptualization is then applied to the development of a high-speed rail line in the Spanish region of the Basque Country. This line has been mobilized to advance two competing yet partially compatible spatial hegemonic visions, whilst becoming itself a site where they came into conflict. The paper concludes by examining the validity of the proposed conceptualization and discussing its applicability to other contemporary cases of nation-building through transport infrastructures.

Gender Difference in Unmet Needs Among People Aging With a Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) can result in a myriad of short and long-term mental and physical changes and conditions. While fall-related brain injury prevention strategies and outcomes among older adults have been well-documented in previous literature, less is understood about the experiences and needs of those aging with a brain injury. The aim of this project is to explore gender differences in experiences and needs among people aging with a TBI. A Needs Assessment survey was conducted in early 2020 with adult TBI survivors and their family members in Missouri (n = 150). The mean age of respondents was 45.8 and 58% identified as male. Bivariate analyses reveal gender difference in unmet needs related to information and referral, recreation, and continuing education among TBI survivors. For example, more female respondents (43.1%) identified unmet needs associated with physical activity than their male counterparts (25.9%, p < .05). More females (61.3%) than males (43.4%) also identified unmet continuing education needs related to aging with brain injury (p < .05), whereas more males (10.8%) identified unmet continuing education needs on the topic of parenting (females: 1.6%, p < .05). Significantly more females (31.1%) than males (16.9%) identified lack of transportation as a barrier to accessing needed supports and resources (p < .05). Results will guide development of an Annual State Action Plan to maximize the independence, well-being, and health of Missourians aging with TBI and their families. A better understanding of needs and preferences can inform targeted policies, programs, and resources.

International Law in Public Debate

Public debates in the language of international law have occurred across the 20th and 21st centuries and have produced a popular form of international law that matters for international practice. This book analyses the people who used international law and how they used it in debates over Australia's participation in the 2003 Iraq War, the Vietnam War and the First World War. It examines texts such as newspapers, parliamentary debates, public protests and other expressions of public opinion. It argues that these interventions produced a form of international law that shares a vocabulary and grammar with the expert forms of that language and distinct competences in order to be persuasive. This longer history also illustrates a move from the use of international legal language as part of collective justifications to the use of international law as an autonomous justification for state action.

Fault Diagnosis of Data-Driven Photovoltaic Power Generation System Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Aiming at the problem of fault diagnosis of the photovoltaic power generation system, this paper proposes a photovoltaic power generation system fault diagnosis method based on deep reinforcement learning. This method takes data-driven as the starting point. Firstly, the compressed sensing algorithm is used to fill the missing photovoltaic data and then state, action, strategy, and return functions from the environment. Based on the interaction rules and other factors, the fault diagnosis model of the photovoltaic power generation system is established, and the deep neural network is used to approximate the decision network to find the optimal strategy, so as to realize the fault diagnosis of the photovoltaic power generation system. Finally, the effectiveness and accuracy of the method are verified by simulation. The simulation results show that this method can accurately diagnose the fault types of the photovoltaic power generation system, which is of great significance to enhance the security of the photovoltaic power generation system and improve the intelligent operation and maintenance level of the photovoltaic power generation system.

Adaptive Optimization of Traffic Signal Timing via Deep Reinforcement Learning

With rapid development of the urbanization, how to improve the traffic lights efficiency has become an urgent issue. The traditional traffic light control is a method that calculates a series of corresponding timing parameters by optimizing the cycle length. However, fixing sequence and duration of traffic lights is inefficient for dynamic traffic flow regulation. In order to solve the above problem, this study proposes a traffic light timing optimization scheme based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). In this scheme, the traffic lights can output an appropriate phase according to the traffic flow state of each direction at the intersection and dynamically adjust the phase length. Specifically, we first adopt Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to improve the convergence speed of the model. Then, we elaborate the design of state, action, and reward, with the vehicle state defined by Discrete Traffic State Encoding (DTSE) method. Finally, we conduct experiments on real traffic data via the traffic simulation platform SUMO. The results show that, compared to the traditional timing control, the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the waiting time of vehicles and queue length in various traffic flow modes.

‘The Hope of Pessimism’

This chapter reads George Gissing’s Thyrza (1887) and Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) in relation to the settlement movement of the 1880s. The chapter turns to the idealist philosophy of Green, which provided one of the most philosophically advanced articulations of welfarist thinking in this period. Echoing Green, Ward suggests that the success of her protagonist’s reformist plans depends on the workers’ ability to see them as integral to their personal flourishing: instead of appearing as an alien imposition on workers’ lives, these new institutions are shown to depend on entgegenkommende Lebensformen, i.e. forms of social life which lend substance to but also retain a degree of independence from the institutional structures that support them. Thyrza, by contrast, critically interrogates the belief that institutions can create social harmony from above—a scepticism which continues to haunt later engagements with state action in works by Carpenter, Wells, and Forster.

‘True Ownership’

The third chapter focuses on the work of Edward Carpenter, the socialist poet, cultural critic, and early queer activist. Seeking to keeping open a middle ground for people who could accept some role for the state while regarding full centralization askance, Carpenter’s thinking about the ends of state-action in the 1880s and 1890s crystallized around the question of land reform. Key to his reformist vision was the attempt to re-signify the language of capitalist society by advocating an ethos of proprietary care and concern (what Carpenter calls ‘true ownership’), a form of custodial attention that is supported by the state but that cannot be reduced to purely legal entitlements. The chapter explores Carpenter’s writing as well as his experience of rural living in Derbyshire. Carpenter, I argue, hoped to turn poetry itself into the ground where a collective desire for comprehensive, non-revolutionary social change might take root.

Reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation using simulated locomotion demonstrations

Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only when the task has been successfully completed, can lead to better policies. However, state-action space exploration is more difficult in this case. Recent RL approaches to learning with sparse rewards have leveraged high-quality human demonstrations for the task, but these can be costly, time consuming or even impossible to obtain. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective approach that does not require human demonstrations. We observe that every robotic manipulation task could be seen as involving a locomotion task from the perspective of the object being manipulated, i.e. the object could learn how to reach a target state on its own. In order to exploit this idea, we introduce a framework whereby an object locomotion policy is initially obtained using a realistic physics simulator. This policy is then used to generate auxiliary rewards, called simulated locomotion demonstration rewards (SLDRs), which enable us to learn the robot manipulation policy. The proposed approach has been evaluated on 13 tasks of increasing complexity, and can achieve higher success rate and faster learning rates compared to alternative algorithms. SLDRs are especially beneficial for tasks like multi-object stacking and non-rigid object manipulation.