Africa: Her Space-Time Convergence Status

Today, the research interest on the state of mobility and accessibility of a place is growing everywhere. Previous studies on space-time convergence have shown that, the world has become ‘flat’ due to fastness in accessibility of places by goods, information and the people. Whereas this is true, the prevailing state of space-time convergence in Africa is still an outstanding issue of concern. This paper aims to fill this gap through story telling of the information borrowed randomly from existing literature on the subject matter. The results obtained show that, Africa is yet to fully get integrated proper into the global networked society because of her huge transport and communication infrastructure gap. The paper concludes with a recommendation that, African leaders should endeavour to fix the infrastructure gap and must at the same time, purpose to allow a faster cross border movement of goods and people to help speed up space-time convergence to match the global mobility pace.

Mammalian and Invertebrate Models as Complementary Tools for Gaining Mechanistic Insight on Muscle Responses to Spaceflight

Bioinformatics approaches have proven useful in understanding biological responses to spaceflight. Spaceflight experiments remain resource intensive and rare. One outstanding issue is how to maximize scientific output from a limited number of omics datasets from traditional animal models including nematodes, fruitfly, and rodents. The utility of omics data from invertebrate models in anticipating mammalian responses to spaceflight has not been fully explored. Hence, we performed comparative analyses of transcriptomes of soleus and extensor digitorum longus (EDL) in mice that underwent 37 days of spaceflight. Results indicate shared stress responses and altered circadian rhythm. EDL showed more robust growth signals and Pde2a downregulation, possibly underlying its resistance to atrophy versus soleus. Spaceflight and hindlimb unloading mice shared differential regulation of proliferation, circadian, and neuronal signaling. Shared gene regulation in muscles of humans on bedrest and space flown rodents suggest targets for mitigating muscle atrophy in space and on Earth. Spaceflight responses of C. elegans were more similar to EDL. Discrete life stages of D. melanogaster have distinct utility in anticipating EDL and soleus responses. In summary, spaceflight leads to shared and discrete molecular responses between muscle types and invertebrate models may augment mechanistic knowledge gained from rodent spaceflight and ground-based studies.

A Vicious Circle: The Interaction between Income Distribution and Household Indebtedness in the Neoliberal Era

In the neoliberal era, financialization of the economies is associated both with large-scale speculative movements in the financial sector and over-indebtedness. The fact that there were significant increases in household indebtedness in the United States before the 2008/09 global financial crisis made the growing indebtedness an outstanding issue that should be examined in terms of its supply and demand-side causes and its distributive consequences. Increasing inequality in income distribution has been an important consideration associated with the increase in household indebtedness. In a sense, the borrowing opportunities enable working households to maintain their consumption and living standards in the short term despite the stagnation in wages and thus increasing inequality, but it does not prevent them from undergoing an unsustainable debt burden. This debt burden creates a feedback effect by deepening the existing inequality. The purpose of this study is to reveal the macro and micro dynamics associated with neoliberal policies that create the supposed relationship between inequality and household indebtedness and to try to interpret the increasing household indebtedness and income inequality in Turkey in the 2000s within this framework.

Harmonic Amplitude Summation for Frequency-tagging Analysis

In the approach of frequency tagging, stimuli that are presented periodically generate periodic responses of the brain. Following a transformation into the frequency domain, the brain's response is often evident at the frequency of stimulation, F, and its higher harmonics (2F, 3F, etc.). This approach is increasingly used in neuroscience, as it affords objective measures to characterize brain function. However, whether these specific harmonic frequency responses should be combined for analysis—and if so, how—remains an outstanding issue. In most studies, higher harmonic responses have not been described or were described only individually; in other studies, harmonics have been combined with various approaches, for example, averaging and root-mean-square summation. A rationale for these approaches in the context of frequency-based analysis principles and an understanding of how they relate to the brain's response amplitudes in the time domain have been missing. Here, with these elements addressed, the summation of (baseline-corrected) harmonic amplitude is recommended.

An Experience-Sampling Study on Academic Stressors and Cyberloafing in College Students: The Moderating Role of Trait Self-Control

Student cyberloafing is a relatively new educational phenomenon and is getting to be an outstanding issue that educators have to face. It is necessary to find out important factors that aggravate cyberloafing. Using an experience sampling method, this study examined the relationship between academic stressors and cyberloafing. Once a week for five consecutive weeks (T1–T5), 134 undergraduate students assessed the extent of academic stressors and cyberloafing of that week through an electronic questionnaire. Additionally, participants completed a trait self-control scale at Time 2. Results of two-level regression analysis showed that academic stressors were negatively associated with cyberloafing at the within-person level (i.e., week-to-week changes), but not at the between-person level. Furthermore, this relationship pattern was only observed in students with low trait self-control, while those with high trait self-control were less likely to cyberloaf regardless of academic stressors. These findings suggest that cyberloafing can fluctuate over periods, especially for individuals who lack self-control. Future research should consider cyberloafing from a dynamic perspective of individual-context interaction. Several practical implications are also discussed.

On non-canonical degrees of freedom

Non-canonical degrees of freedom provide one of the most promising routes towards characterising a range of important phenomena in condensed matter physics. Potential candidates include the pseudogap regime of the cuprates, heavy-fermion behaviour, and also indeed magnetically ordered systems. Nevertheless it remains an open question whether non-canonical algebras can in fact provide legitimate quantum degrees of freedom. In this paper we survey progress made on this topic, complementing distinct approaches so as to obtain a unified description. In particular we obtain a novel exact representation for a self-energy-like object for non-canonical degrees of freedom. We further make a resummation of density correlations to obtain analogues of the RPA and GW approximations commonly employed for canonical degrees of freedom. We discuss difficulties related to generating higher-order approximations which are consistent with conservation laws, which represents an outstanding issue. We also discuss how the interplay between canonical and non-canonical degrees of freedom offers a useful paradigm for organising the phase diagram of correlated electronic behaviour.

First Principles Modeling of Polymer Encapsulant Degradation in Si Photovoltaic Modules

An outstanding issue in the longevity of photovoltaic (PV) modules is the accelerated degradation caused by the presence of moisture. Moisture leads to interfacial instability, de-adhesion, encapsulant decomposition, and contact...

The Role of Monetary Policy using the Taylor´s Rule under High Level Indebtedness: The Brazilian Case

This research investigated if the Central Bank of Brazil follows the Taylor´s rule under high indebtedness. Research data collected covered last 25 years from Dec/1995 until Feb/2020 from the Central Bank of Brazil and methodology applied was vector auto-regression (VECM) analysis with five macroeconomic variables as follows: Government net Debt to GDP (DEBT/GDP), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Exchange Rate (EXRATE), Consumer Price Index (IPCA) and Interest Rate (SELIC). Government´s indebtedness in relation to Brazilian GDP doubled from January/2014 up to Mar/2020, what make this research an outstanding issue. Conclusively the high-level debt environment interferes in the Central Bank of Brazil policy. Therefore, the Taylor´s rule is not being followed as it is expected for inflation rate targeting control. With respect economic activity monitoring the Central Bank of Brazil still applies the Taylor´s rule, increasing the interest rate in overheated economic activity periods.

Education and Diet in the Scientific Literature: A Study of the Productive, Structural, and Dynamic Development in Web of Science

Nutrition-related education is necessary to protect and improve the health status of schoolchildren and to minimize the risk of future diseases. The objective of this research was to analyze the trajectory and transcendence of the concepts “education” and “diet” in the Web of Science literature. The methodology focused on bibliometry, analyzing both the performance and the structural and dynamic development of the concepts through a co-word analysis. A total of 1247 documents were analyzed, and the results show that scientific production experienced a turning point in 2009, in comparison to the level of production reported in previous years. The medium of papers and the language of English were the most common. In relation to the research topic, before 2014, scientific production focused on medical and disease-related aspects; however, since 2014, it has focused on disease prevention and feeding. It was therefore concluded that the theme “diet and education” has been researched for more than 20 years, although it is only in the last decade that it has become more relevant—particularly studies focusing on disease prevention and the type of food, specifically fruit, which is presented as the most outstanding issue for researchers in this field of knowledge.

Montenegro

The International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Statistics Department (STA) conducted a technical assistance (TA) mission to support the Central Bank of Montenegro (CBM) for the compilation of external sector statistics (ESS) in Montenegro during January 20–31, 2020. The mission was funded by Eurostat to meet the European Union (EU)’s acquis1 from the ESS perspective. The CBM has already met most of the EU requirements in ESS. The main outstanding issue is a production of international investment position (IIP) quarterly.