Connecting into the Social Sustainability Effects of Infrastructure through China’s Digital Silk Road: Issues, Indices, and Indications

There is a heated debate about the social-sustainability implications of infrastructure. We engage this debate by delving into China’s Digital Silk Road (DSR), an important component of China’s infrastructure-centric Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Optimists and pessimists have offered strong views about the DSR’s social-sustainability implications. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of analytical tools and in-depth studies which can be used to judge their competing arguments. In this article, we address these problems in two ways. First, we advance an original scheme for operationalizing social sustainability. Second, we use our framework to systematically analyze the DSR’s social-sustainability effects in Ethiopia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Hungary. Our research indicates that much of the positive and negative commentary about the DSR’s social-sustainability implications is problematic. None of our cases show significant year-to-year changes in political or quality-of-life social-sustainability benchmarks. Indeed, our analysis indicates that analysts must pay close attention to the political and economic context to understand the social-sustainability patterns associated with DSR infrastructure. Finally, it suggests that the social-sustainability implications of DSR infrastructure are dependent on its scale and nature. These findings have ramifications for broader debates about the socioeconomic impact of infrastructure.

Effect of the third dose of BNT162b2 vaccine in quantitative SARS-CoV-2 spike 1-2 IgG antibody titers in healthcare workers

Background: Vaccination is our main strategy to control SARS-CoV-2 infection. Given a decrease in the quantitative SARS-CoV-2 spike 1-2 IgG antibody titers three months following the second BNT162b2 dose, healthcare workers got a third booster dose after six months of completing the original scheme. This study aimed to analyze quantitative SARS-CoV-2 spike 1-2 IgG antibody titers and safety of the third dose. Material and methods: A prospective longitudinal cohort study included healthcare workers who received a third booster dose after six months of the complete BNT162b2 regimen. We assessed the quantitative SARS-CoV-2 spike 1-2 IgG antibody titers 21-28 days after the first and second dose, three months after the complete scheme, 1-7 days following the third dose, and 21-28 days after the boost. Results: The cohort comprised 168 non-immunocompromised participants of 41(10) years old, 67% being women. The third dose was associated with increasing the quantitative antibody titers, regardless of previous SARS-CoV-2 history. In negative SARS-CoV-2 history, the median (IQR) antibody titers increased from 379 (645.4) to 2960 (2010), while in positive SARS-CoV-2 history, from 590 (1262) to 3090 (2080). The third dose had less number of total side effects compared to the other two shots. The most common side effect after the third BNT162b2 shot was pain at the injection site (n=82, 84.5%), followed by tiredness (n=45, 46.4%), with a mild severity (n=36, 37.1%). Tiredness, myalgias, arthralgias, fever, and adenopathy were proportionally higher following the third dose than the two-dose regimen (p<0.05). Conclusion: The third dose applied after six months of the original BNT162b2 regimen provided a good humoral immune response by elevating the quantitative SARS-CoV-2 spike 1-2 IgG antibody titers. The booster dose was well tolerated with no severe side effects after the additional BNT162b2 dose.

Control of mobile equipment for the processing of marine shaft lines

The purpose of the research is to develop solutions for mobile equipment control in the processing of marine shaft lines; to solve the issues of geometric accuracy of processing; to create a corrective program to address the issues of accuracy of the geometric parameters processing; to give reasons for the application of linear electrohydraulic step drive (LEHSD) in mobile equipment control. The analysis of schemes and mathematical dependencies for calculating the trajectory of the tool movement of a mobile machine when processing shaft lines is carried out; the choice of the optimal zone for finishing the shaft line, taking into account the beats. The object of the study is a ship shaft line. The paper presents an original scheme of rotation of the shaft line section, as well as schemes for changing the position of the shaft line during processing; justifies the possibility of using a linear electrohydraulic step drive (LEHSD) with a corrective program for processing taking into account automatic measurements and a specified error.

STUDY ON FORCE MECHANISM OF CABLE-TRUSS FRAME AND JUMPED LAYOUT OF ANNULAR CROSSED CABLE-TRUSS STRUCTURE

A new type of cable-strut tension structure named Annular Crossed Cable-truss Structure(ACCTS) comprises a series of planar cable-truss frames crossed each other. To investigate the force mechanism of ACCTS, a cable-truss frame model with 2-bar and 6-cable has been developed, and its initial stiffness formula has been derived as well. The model is further simplified to make it is upper and lower vector heights equal, and then the initial stiffness formula and the critical slack load formula are further deduced. Based on ANSYS software and cable-truss frame with a span of 60m, the influences of the number of struts and position of jumped layout on the cable-truss frame are studied. According to the former 60m span cable-truss frame's research results, the jumped layout of ACCTS with a span of 100m is studied. The static and dynamic performances of two schemes, the optimal jumped layout scheme and the original scheme, are systematically studied. It is shown that the number of struts would be about 6~8 for the planar cable-truss frame and the optimal order of jumped layout is strut 6-7→strut 4-5→strut 2-3. The optimal order of jumped layout of ACCTS agrees with that of the cable-truss frame, verifying the feasibility of conclusions. In the condition of no variation in the original structure's static and dynamic performance, the optimal scheme of the jumped layout will lower the steel consumption and enhance the buckling loads. Moreover, it also simplifies structure for easy construction.

Higher-Order Lookup Table Masking in Essentially Constant Memory

Masking using randomised lookup tables is a popular countermeasure for side-channel attacks, particularly at small masking orders. An advantage of this class of countermeasures for masking S-boxes compared to ISW-based masking is that it supports pre-processing and thus significantly reducing the amount of computation to be done after the unmasked inputs are available. Indeed, the “online” computation can be as fast as just a table lookup. But the size of the randomised lookup table increases linearly with the masking order, and hence the RAM memory required to store pre-processed tables becomes infeasible for higher masking orders. Hence demonstrating the feasibility of full pre-processing of higher-order lookup table-based masking schemes on resource-constrained devices has remained an open problem. In this work, we solve the above problem by implementing a higher-order lookup table-based scheme using an amount of RAM memory that is essentially independent of the masking order. More concretely, we reduce the amount of RAM memory needed for the table-based scheme of Coron et al. (TCHES 2018) approximately by a factor equal to the number of shares. Our technique is based upon the use of pseudorandom number generator (PRG) to minimise the randomness complexity of ISW-based masking schemes proposed by Ishai et al. (ICALP 2013) and Coron et al. (Eurocrypt 2020). Hence we show that for lookup table-based masking schemes, the use of a PRG not only reduces the randomness complexity (now logarithmic in the size of the S-box) but also the memory complexity, and without any significant increase in the overall running time. We have implemented in software the higher-order table-based masking scheme of Coron et al. (TCHES 2018) at tenth order with full pre-processing of a single execution of all the AES S-boxes on a ARM Cortex-M4 device that has 256 KB RAM memory. Our technique requires only 41.2 KB of RAM memory, whereas the original scheme would have needed 440 KB. Moreover, our 8-bit implementation results demonstrate that the online execution time of our variant is about 1.5 times faster compared to the 8-bit bitsliced masked implementation of AES-128.

An Extension of Explicit Coupling for Fluid–Structure Interaction Problems

We present an extension of a non-iterative, partitioned method previously designed and used to model the interaction between an incompressible, viscous fluid and a thick elastic structure. The original method is based on the Robin boundary conditions and it features easy implementation and unconditional stability. However, it is sub-optimally accurate in time, yielding only O(Δt12) rate of convergence. In this work, we propose an extension of the method designed to improve the sub-optimal accuracy. We analyze the stability properties of the proposed method, showing that the method is stable under certain conditions. The accuracy and stability of the method are computationally investigated, showing a significant improvement in the accuracy when compared to the original scheme, and excellent stability properties. Furthermore, since the method depends on a combination parameter used in the Robin boundary conditions, whose values are problem specific, we suggest and investigate formulas according to which this parameter can be determined.

Superunification Theory: The Shortest Way to The Unified Field Equations

This continues previous articles on the unified theory published in this journal and intends to discuss the general principles of the theory, again. The Final theory, if any, shall necessarily be the most original scheme grounded upon certain postulates intuitively clear to us. The universal system of mathematical harmony begins with the

16. Private Law Proceedings Concerning Children

This chapter considers the courts’ powers under Part II of the Children Act 1989 to resolve family disputes concerning the upbringing of children. These disputes, commonly labelled ‘private law disputes’, are normally between the parents following divorce or separation but can involve other family members. It first discusses the original scheme of Part II; changes made by the Children and Adoption Act 2006; and changes made by the Children and Families Act 2014. It then considers section 8 orders; family assistance orders; and section 37 directions.

IMPLEMENTATION OF BLOM’S KEY PREDISTRIBUTION SCHEME BY USING ELLIPTIC CURVE CRYPTOGRAPHY

Cryptography, along with its various methods is used to serve the security communication purpose. Cryptography is said to be secure if the encryption key is hard to break by the attacker. Initially, Blom’s Key pre-distribution uses an integer finite field which makes this scheme easy to be intervened by attackers and criminal activists. Hence, this study suggests implementing the Elliptic Curve Cryptography to better enhance the security of the original Blom’s. In this proposed scheme, points generated from the elliptic curve will be appointed as public identifiers to be used in the original scheme. The private key and session key of each user are generated using the addition law mathematical operation with public identifiers assigned. Two users who intend to communicate with each other will obtain a common session key. Overall, the modification of Blom’s Key pre-distribution scheme will be presented in this study.

Linear Active Disturbance Rejection Control Strategy with Known Disturbance Compensation for Voltage-Controlled Inverter

When the linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) is applied for the voltage-controlled inverter, the discrete period and the measurement noise limits the observer bandwidth, which affects the anti-disturbance performance of the system. This results in a poor ability to deal with the output voltage fluctuation under the load switch. In this paper, a novel LADRC strategy based on the known disturbance compensation is proposed for the voltage-controlled inverters. Firstly, the original LADRC scheme is designed. The dynamic performance and robustness of the system are analyzed by a root locus diagram, and the anti-disturbance ability is studied through amplitude-frequency characteristics. Then the partial model information and the load current are treated as the known disturbance and introduced to the linear extended state observer (LESO) to improve observation accuracy. The difference in anti-disturbance performance with the original scheme is compared and the stability of the LESO and LADRC is analyzed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified by the simulation and experimental results.