Challenges and Development Strategy of Sharia Insurance in an Era of Economic Disruption

<p><em>The presence of Islamic insurance is an alternative to avoid conventional insurance, which is considered to have elements of usury, maytsir, gharar and zholim. In the era of economic disruption, Islamic insurance players and customers are waiting for the government's strategic policies as regulators and facilitators. The formulation of a sharia insurance development strategy policy begins with analyzing the obstacles to developing sharia insurance in Indonesia. These constraints mean that the number of sharia insurance customers in Indonesia is not maximal. These obstacles include the lack of socialization and promotion, inadequate use of technology, lack of product and service development, lack of knowledge, and the existence of conventional insurance. Based on these constraints, strategies for developing sharia insurance in Indonesia that can be carried out include maximizing socialization and promotion, maximizing the use of technology, developing products and services, increasing literacy, and market penetration. This research aims to analyze Islamic insurance's constraints and development strategies using a mathematical method, namely the Analytic Network Process (ANP) method so that scientific studies support policy recommendations. Furthermore, in this study, the ANP method was adopted in a survey design involving several respondents. The heterogeneity of the assessments of some respondents is expected to provide a more rational alternative. The analysis results using the ANP method are priority constraints to get more attention and priority strategies that can be used to formulate policies to make them more focused.</em></p>

Intelligent control based on ergatic systems in conditions of incomplete and fuzzy information

The article deals with the management of human-machine (ergatic) systems in the conditions of digital transformation in relation to their functioning in the presence of NON-factors, such as: uncertainty, complexity, instability, ambiguity. Modern conditions for the formation of the digital economy imply the search and use of a new methodology in the organization of management activities, including the regional level. This process is carried out through the widespread use of human-machine systems with a high level of intellectualization of the machine component, the use of hybrid intelligence and the formation of bionts. We show a variant of classification of ergatic systems, focused on socio-economic systems. We propose a method for choosing a rational alternative to support the management of human-machine systems in the conditions of vagueness and ambiguity of the initial data and approaches to the management quality criteria. A fuzzy approach to a multi-criteria problem is proposed. It leads to a certain combination of fuzzy selection criteria, and to the study of complex systems as a hierarchical structure, with the representation of system elements and its qualitative properties as fuzzy mathematical models, the combination of which will give a mathematical model of the systems.

Immunomodulation for the Treatment of Chronic Chagas Disease Cardiomyopathy: A New Approach to an Old Enemy

Chagas disease is a parasitic infection caused by the intracellular protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi. Chronic Chagas cardiomyopathy (CCC) is the most severe manifestation of the disease, developed by approximately 20-40% of patients and characterized by occurrence of arrhythmias, heart failure and death. Despite having more than 100 years of discovery, Chagas disease remains without an effective treatment, especially for patients with CCC. Since the pathogenesis of CCC depends on a parasite-driven systemic inflammatory profile that leads to cardiac tissue damage, the use of immunomodulators has become a rational alternative for the treatment of CCC. In this context, different classes of drugs, cell therapies with dendritic cells or stem cells and gene therapy have shown potential to modulate systemic inflammation and myocarditis in CCC models. Based on that, the present review provides an overview of current reports regarding the use of immunomodulatory agents in treatment of CCC, bringing the challenges and future directions in this field.

Municipal management in the south of Russia: managerial tools ensuring efficiency

To establish the potential opportunities to achieve more efficiency of municipal management in the theory and practice of using the tools of state managerialism. This article uses rational choice theory, which is based on the idea of three forms of capital: physical, human and social. These forms are transformed into a set of resources used by the actor to achieve the goal in the process of choosing the most rational alternative. There was the research and presentation of its results on the third empirical indicator. The empirical research was carried out for the practical use of the developed theoretical model. Substantively this research will focus on such aspects of the activities of self-governments as work for indicators, management in the form of service delivery, restructuring of government bodies, effectiveness of interaction with civic activists and business communities.

Diplomasi Pertahanan Maritim Indonesia dalam Menghadapi Ancaman Keamanan Non-tradisional Upaya Mewujudkan Visi Poros Maritim Dunia

Sitting between two world’s biggest oceans and bussiest shipping lanes, Indonesia’s geographic positioning has given it a very strategic leverage. Such potential is then stressed out during the era of President Joko Widodo with his vision of Global Maritime Fulcrum. One of the crucial aspects needed for optimalization in order for this idea to be achived is security. Indonesian waters have been known to be quite hostile due to the ploriferation of non-traditional threats such as piracy, terrorism, and transnational crimes. A series of maritime defense diplomacy thus have been initiated and intensified—along with other means—to counter them, both bilateral and multilateral in form. This article would elaborate more on the manifestation and implications of those actions made, and why Indonesia specifically focused more on Its maritime defense diplomacy. Based on the findings, it is then revealed that such diplomatic move can be owed to Indonesia’s lacking defense system—making diplomacy a rational alternative to compensate for Its flaw in capacity.

Agent-Level Adaptive Learning

Adaptive learning is a boundedly rational alternative to rational expectations that is increasingly used in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and financial economics. The agent-level approach can be used to provide microfoundations for adaptive learning in macroeconomics. Two central issues of bounded rationality are simultaneously addressed at the agent level: replacing fully rational expectations of key variables with econometric forecasts and boundedly optimal decisions-making based on those forecasts. The real business cycle (RBC) model provides a useful laboratory for exhibiting alternative implementations of the agent-level approach. Specific implementations include shadow-price learning (and its anticipated-utility counterpart, iterated shadow-price learning), Euler-equation learning, and long-horizon learning. For each implementation the path of the economy is obtained by aggregating the boundedly rational agent-level decisions. A linearized RBC can be used to illustrate the effects of fiscal policy. For example, simulations can be used to illustrate the impact of a permanent increase in government spending and highlight the similarities and differences among the various implements of agent-level learning. These results also can be used to expose the differences among agent-level learning, reduced-form learning, and rational expectations. The different implementations of agent-level adaptive learning have differing advantages. A major advantage of shadow-price learning is its ease of implementation within the nonlinear RBC model. Compared to reduced-form learning, which is widely use because of its ease of application, agent-level learning both provides microfoundations, which ensure robustness to the Lucas critique, and provides the natural framework for applications of adaptive learning in heterogeneous-agent models.

Fosfomycin, Applying Known Methods and Remedies to A New Era

The exponential increase in the numbers of isolates of Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) creates the need for using novel therapeutic approaches to save the lives of patients. Fosfomycin has long been considered a rational option for the treatment of CRE to be used as part of a combined therapy scheme. However, the assessment of fosfomycin susceptibility in the laboratory presents a great challenge due to the discrepancies found between different methodologies. Thus, our goal was to evaluate fosfomycin susceptibility in a group of 150 Enterobacteriaceae bacterial isolates using agar dilution as the gold standard technique to compare the results with those obtained by disk diffusion. We found a fosfomycin susceptibility of 79.3% in general terms. By comparing both methodologies, we reported a categorical agreement of 96% without Very Major Errors (VMEs) or Major Errors (MEs) and 4% of minor Errors (mEs). Our results suggest that fosfomycin could provide a rational alternative treatment for those patients that are infected by a Multidrug-Resistant (MDR) microorganism that is currently untreatable and that the disk diffusion and classical agar dilution techniques are adequate to assess the resistance profile of CRE to fosfomycin.

Antitumor chemical constituents of Toddalia asiatica (Linn) Lam root bark and its rational alternative medicinal parts by multivariate statistical analysis

Toddalia asiatica (Linn) Lam (T. asiatica) as a traditional Miao medicine was investigated to find rational alternative medicinal parts for T. asiatica root bark and its antitumor chemical constituents by quantitative pharmacognostic microscopy, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) fingerprint and multivariate statistical analysis. A bivariate correlation analysis method based on microscopic characteristics and content of chemical constituents was established for the first time, there were some regular discoveries between powder microscopic characteristics and common chromatographic peaks of T. asiatica through quantitative pharmacognostic microscopy, cork cells, calcium oxalate square crystal, brown clump, starch granule and phloem fiber, as powder microscopic characteristics may be placed where the main chemical constitutes were enriched. Scores plot of principal component analysis (PCA) and dendrogram of hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) showed that 18 T. asiatica samples were distinguished correctly, clustered clearly into two main groups as follows: S01∼S03 (root bark) and S07∼S09 (stem bark) in cluster 1, S04∼S06 and S10∼S18 in cluster 2. Nineteen common peaks were obtained in HPLC fingerprint of T. asiatica, loadings plot of PCA indicated seven compounds played important roles in different part of samples (P10 > P08 > P07 > P14 > P16 > P17 > P19), peaks 04, 06, 07, 08, 10 were identified as hesperidin, 4-methoxycinnamic acid, toddalolactone, isopimpinlline and pimpinellin. MTT assay was used to determine the inhibitory activity of different medicinal parts of T. asiatica on human breast cancer MCF-7 cells, all parts of T. asiatica had different inhibitory effects on MCF-7 cell lines, root and stem barks of T. asiatica showed the best inhibitory activity. The relationship between chemical constituents and the inhibitions on MCF-7 cell had been established, significant antitumor constituents of T. asiatica were identified by correlation analysis, the order of the antitumor effect of the main compounds was P07 (toddalolactone) > P16 > P06 (4-methoxycinnamic acid), P11 > P18 > P10 (pimpinellin) > P08 (isopimpinellin) > P01 > P19 > P14 > P04 (hesperidin) > P17, which were antitumor chemical constituents of T. asiatica root bark. T. asiatica stem bark was the most rational alternative medicinal part for T. asiatica root bark.