Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Big Data and Energy Poverty Alleviation

The focus of this paper is to bring to light the vital issue of energy poverty alleviation and how big data could improve the data collection quality and mechanism. It also explains the vicious circle of low productivity, health risk, environmental pollution and energy poverty and presents currently used energy poverty measures and alleviation policies and stresses the associated problems in application due to the underlying dynamics.
Germany’s Growth Prospects against the Backdrop of Demographic Change

Abstract This paper shows how the German Council of Economic Experts (GCEE) determines Germany’s potential output, and compares the results with those of the European Commission. The approach of the European Commission is a natural benchmark, as it provides the basis for the deficit and debt rules of the European Union. In comparison with the European Commission’s method, the GCEE’s method places greater emphasis on demographic factors in estimating labour input. Additionally, both approaches differ regarding how they estimate the structural unemployment rate and total factor productivity. Finally, this paper discusses the limitations of, and the different options for estimating potential output.
Microshift: An Efficient Image Compression Algorithm for Hardware

In this paper, we propose a lossy image compression algorithm called microshift. We employ an algorithm-hardware co-design methodology, yielding a hardware-friendly compression approach with low power consumption. In our method, the image is first micro-shifted, and then the sub-quantized values are further compressed. Two methods, FAST and MRF models, are proposed to recover the bitdepth by exploiting the spatial correlation of natural images. Both methods can decompress images progressively. On an average, our compression algorithm can compress images to 1.25-bits per pixel with a resulting quality that outperforms the state-of-the-art on-chip compression algorithms in both peak signal-to-noise ratio and structual similarity. Then, we propose a hardware architecture and implement the algorithm on an FPGA. The results on the ASIC design further validate the low-hardware complexity and high-power efficiency, showing that our method is promising, particularly for low-power wireless vision sensor networks.
Business Formation and Economic Growth Beyond the Great Recession

We develop a model with endogenous entry and exit in an economy subject to non-stationary shocks to aggregate total factor productivity. Firms exhibit a life-cycle consistent with microeconomic data, and our model reproduces key moments of the empirical firm age and size distribution. In this setting, persistent shocks to trend growth can drive long term reductions in business formation. The economic consequences of a persistent decline in entry grow over time and, together with "wait-and-see" effects on aggregate capital investment, can compound and protract a productivity slowdown. We apply our model to understanding the last decade of U.S. economic activity, an episode marked by slow GDP growth and persistently low entry rates and business fixed investment in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Firms vary in the permanent and transitory components affecting their productivity and in their capital stocks, and their capital adjustments are subject to one period time-to-build, alongside convex and nonconvex costs. Thus, the economy's aggregate state includes a distribution of firms over productivity and capital, and changes in this distribution have a persistent influence on economic activity. Epstein-Zin preferences and a time-varying relative price of capital goods combine to accommodate countercyclical risk premia capable of driving large changes in firm values. Following a persistent shock to trend growth, equilibrium movements in firms' stochastic discount factors imply long-run reductions in the value of entry. The resulting declines in new business formation propagate the shock's effects on investment and GDP, slowing aggregate recovery.
Fostering Situated Conversation Through Game Play

Background. Prior research suggests that video games function as spaces for informal interaction. In this way, they foster spontaneous conversation that supports gameplay. Such conversation can facilitate learning. In particular, conversations that connect gameplay with the learning materials have positive effects on learning. In this article, those conversations are called situated conversations and used as an important concept to understand video games as educational tools. Aim. This study explores the conversations produced in educational activities supported by video games and the effects of these conversations on the learning of subject matter. Method. This randomized design experiment compares the conversations of a group of students using traditional text-based learning materials with the conversations of a group of students using an educational video game, during a four week intervention focused on the viral-replication process. In both conditions, spontaneous conversation among students was allowed and registered, and learning was assessed using a think-aloud task at the end of the intervention. Results. Students using the video game produced high-quality conversations focused on disciplinary content. The results show, additionally, that only conversations connecting different resources in the learning setting had a significant effect on learning, highlighting the importance of situated conversations for video game learning. Conclusions. The concept of situated conversation is proposed to characterize conversations that connect different resources available in the social environment. This type of conversation increases knowledge levels by bringing external information into the learning process.
Shifting Welfare Policy Positions: The Impact of Radical Right Populist Party Success Beyond Migration Politics

ABSTRACT Political parties respond strategically to the electoral success of radical right populist parties (RRPPs). While previous research has focused on programmatic responses on cultural conflict issues, we are expanding the research on policy position adaption to the economic left-right issue of welfare-state politics. Actual and potential supporters of RRPPs do not only feel threatened by migration or liberal conceptions of society but are also often confronted with real or perceived socio-economic decline. Therefore, we argue that established parties do not only react by changing their socio-cultural policy offers but also by adjusting their welfare state policy positions. Based on parties' voter potentials and issue ownership theory, we investigate whether such changes are especially pronounced for left-of-center parties. Analysing data from 18 West European countries since 1985, we find that non-RRPPs indeed advocate more leftist positions on welfare state policies in response to increasing electoral support for RRPPs. This effect is especially pronounced for economically left-of-centre parties as these parties might consider this to be a promising strategy to win back voters from the populist radical right.
Recovery of the 3D Virtual Human: Monocular Estimation of 3D Shape and Pose with Data Driven Priors

The virtual world is increasingly merging with the real one. Consequently a proper human representation in the virtual world is becoming more important as well. Despite recent technological advances in making the virtual human presence more realistic, we are still far from having a fully immersive experience in the virtual world, in part due to the lack of proper capturing and modeling of a virtual double. Thus, new methods and techniques are needed to obtain and recover a realistic virtual doppelgänger. This thesis aims to make virtual human representation accessible for every person, by showcasing how it can be obtained under inexpensive minimalistic sensor requirements. Potential fields of application of the findings could be the estimation of body shape from selfies, health monitoring and garment fitting. In this thesis we investigate the problem of reconstructing the 3D virtual human from monocular imagery, mainly coming from an RGB sensor. Instead of focusing on the full avatar at once, we separately consider three constituting parts of it: the naked body, clothing and the human hand. The preeminent focus is on the estimation of the 3D shape and pose from 2D images, e.g. taken from a smart-phone, making use of data-driven priors in order to alleviate this ill-posed problem. We utilize discriminative methods, with a focus on CNNs, and leverage existing and new realistically rendered synthetic datasets to learn important statistics. In this way, our presented data-driven methods can generalize well and provide accurate reconstructions on unseen real input data. Our research is not only based on single views and annotated groundtruth data for supervised learning, but also shows how to utilize multiple views simultaneously, or leverage from them during training time, in order to boost performance achieved from a single view at inference time. In addition, we demonstrate how to train and refine unsupervised with unlabeled real data, by integrating lightweight differentiable renderers into CNNs. In the first part of the thesis, we aim to estimate the intrinsic body shape, regardless of the adopted pose. Under assumptions of uniform background colours and poses under minimal self-occlusion, we show three different approaches for estimating the body shape: Firstly, by basing our estimation on handcrafted features in combination with CCA and random forest regressors, secondly by basing it on simple standard CNNs, and thirdly by basing it on more involved CNNs with
Blurred lines: exploring internal auditor involvement in the local authority risk management function

ABSTRACT The internal audit remit includes assessing budgetary compliance by departments, investigating fraud and error, appraising systems of control and undertaking consulting, the last including risk management even though internal auditors generally lack risk training and expertise. Surveying internal auditors in Scottish local authorities, this paper investigates discrepancies between professional guidance and current practice regarding the risk management remit of internal audit. Lines of responsibility were found to be blurred, so there were insufficient safeguards to ensure compliance and the roles and responsibilities of internal audit involvement in risk management assurance did not fully comply with professional guidance. IMPACT This paper has important policy implications for clearly defining the risk and control culture within organizations. The research findings prove that internal auditors often stray into areas of risk management outside their remit, and thus support the need to understand the clear boundaries of separation between the two roles. The paper identifies the challenge that both of these functions face and provides guidance as to how both professions can work more effectively to strengthen governance frameworks. Internal auditors are encouraged to go beyond local government focused guidance, to address the disconnect between ‘institutionalized’ sector specific guidance and wider professional guidance.
Short floating-point representation for convolutional neural network inference

: Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are being widely used in computer vision tasks, and there have been many e ﬀ orts to implement CNNs in ASIC or FPGA for power-hungry environments. Instead of the previous common representation, the ﬁ xed-point representation, this letter proposes a short ﬂ oating-point representation for CNNs. The short ﬂ oating-point representation is based on the normal ﬂ oating-point representation, but has much less width and does not have complex cases like Not-a-Number and in ﬁ nity cases. The short ﬂ oating-point representation, contrary to the common belief, can produce a low-complexity computation logic because the operands of the multiplier logic can be shortened by the exponent concept of the ﬂ oating-point representation. The exponent can also reduce the total length to reduce the SRAM area. The experimental results show that the short ﬂ oating-point representation with 8-bit total width achieves less-than-1-percentage-point degradation without the aid of retraining in the top-5 accuracy on very deep CNNs of up to 152 layers and gives more than a 60% area reduction in the ASIC implementation.
Practice and Associated Factors of Health Professionals towards Citizens' Charter at Jimma University Medical Center

Background Citizens' Charter is a public promise between citizens and service providing organizations which visibly specifies expectations and standards in the service delivery. Citizens' charter standard has been implemented in Jimma University Medical Center since 2016/17. However, the practice and associated factor of citizens' charter among health professionals have not been studied yet. Hence, the aim of this study was to assess the practice of citizens' charter and associated factors among health professionals. Methods Facility based cross-sectional study was conducted on 389 health care providers, selected through stratified sampling, from April 1 to April 26. Data was collected using a pretested structured self-administered questionnaire. Data were entered into EPI-data version 3.1 and exported to Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. Descriptive statistics, binary and multivariable logistic regression analysis were done. P-values less than 0.05 were used to declare significant association between dependent and independent variables. In the process of multivariable logistic regression analysis, knowledge and attitude variables were not tested due to low number of respondents to those specific variables' measuring items. Hence, it was difficult to declare as a predictor at bivariate analysis. Result For this study, the response rate was 92%. Out of all, 237(60.9%) professionals were properly practicing citizens' charter standard while 152(39.1%) were not properly practicing it. The factors affecting the practice were job satisfaction [AOR =7.4, 95%CI (4.4, 12.5)], perceived workload [AOR =1.8, 95%CI (1.05, 3.0)] and type of profession [AOR=5.4, 95%CI ((1.98, 14.8)]. Conclusion This study revealed that more than half of the respondents properly practiced citizens' charter. However, few health professionals only knew the existence of citizens' charter. Job satisfaction, perceived workload, and type of profession were the factors affecting the practice of citizens' charter.
Lessons from climate-related planned relocations: the case of Vietnam

ABSTRACT Planned relocation is increasingly recognized and implemented as a climate change adaptation strategy. Nascent literature on climate-related relocation draws on findings and experience from development-forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR), yet DFDR contexts lack a key factor central in climate-related relocation: uncertain environmental change. The article therefore examines how planning and implementing authorities address environmental uncertainty and what implications this may have for relocation outcomes. In the case of coastal erosion and related relocation schemes in Central Vietnam, linked to climate change, the article focuses on responsible government institutions. It looks at the governmental practices they employ to manage environmental change and related relocation. Based on field study, in-depth interviews, and document and policy review, the article finds that the sub-national institutions responsible for relocation attempted to make environmental change legible through quantifying and standardizing fluctuations in coastal erosion. These technical approaches carried through planning and implementation. They contributed to rigid relocation programmes in which households’ input and adaptive outcomes were limited and other political goals were realized through territorialization. The findings support literature on the highly political nature of adaptation and challenge the prominence of technical approaches to adaptation.
Why basic income is needed for a right to work

Most people who think about such matters have a rudimentary theory of justice, and every worthwhile theory of justice postulates the equality of something, be it income, wealth, opportunity or something else. As I have argued extensively elsewhere (Standing 2002), I believe that what should be equalized in the good society of the 21st century is basic security, which encompasses basic income security. This should be a right. Before discussing the claims made for a right to work, much discussed over the past 150 years, it may be useful to reiterate what is meant by the key terms used by mainstream proponents of a basic income, and to reiterate the two policy principles that I believe should be associated with it. Let us start by considering the claims for equal security. The brief answer is that everybody needs a sense of basic security in order to function rationally, in order to be responsible, and in order to develop competencies and capabilities. Without basic security, it is not fair to expect too much from anybody. Basic security is the essence of real freedom. The term ‘real’ is inserted because freedom requires Isaiah Berlin’s famous two liberties – negative and positive liberty. The former is the absence of unchosen controls over us. Liberty is enhanced by the removal of controls, whether they are exercised by a boss, the state, or tyrants. In contrast, positive liberty is a form of security that gives us self-control, a sense of autonomy that allows us to develop ourselves as human beings within a community. Most importantly, we are talking about basic security as an economic and social right. This is essentially a republican or claim right, developed by Rousseau, Thomas Paine and others. A claim right implies that policies and institutions should move toward a realization of that right. A right – and this is important given the way social policy debates have evolved in recent years – is unconditional in behavioral terms. You do not have a right if you have to do x, y and z in order to have an entitlement. That is not a right.
Compact and green urban development—towards a framework to assess urban development for a high-density metropolis

This paper proposes a framework for measuring compactness and urban green accessibility in a high-density transit-oriented metropolis and uses Taipei City and its surrounding outskirts, New Taipei City, as a case to illustrate the measurement framework. Two indices, urban compactness index (UCI) and urban green accessibility index (UGAI), are developed to illustrate various aspects of a sustainable urban built environment, with UCI including density of residents and commercial activities, land use mix, street connectivity, access to center/subcenters, and access to transit stops, and UGAI measuring access to public urban green spaces. We found that while great spatial variations exist among different parts, our study area has a distinguished polycentric pattern of UCI index with three distinct clusters around the center and sub-centers illustrating higher index values in 2015. When compared to UCI, UGAI has a similar polycentric but more dispersed spatial pattern, as well as linear patterns along river corridors. We found that most areas of medium or high UCI values are located in areas of either plan-induced or plan-expanded development. UCI values in areas of plan-expanded development are generally higher than that of areas of plan-induced development. UCI and UGAI are spatially correlated to a certain extent. We found that most centers and one particular subcenter have high UCI and UGAI, moving towards both compactness and good green accessibility. Two subcenters with high UCI and low UGAI, i.e. Banqiao and Yonghe, call for planning to provide green spaces for residents living in these rising subcenters. UCI and UGAI can be applied and used to assess compact and green urban development of other cities and they are particularly useful to dense urban environment of large cities in Europe and Asia.
The Study of Tourist Movements in Tourist Historic Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Applicability of Four Different Tools

This paper presents the results of the application of four different tools (tourist card, questionarie, GPS and NFC) with the objective to study the movement of tourists in a tourist historic city (Popayán, Colombia). Given the need for these types of cities to manage tourism in a sustainable way, and considering that the management of tourist flows is a key aspect to achieve this, the aim was to find out which of the tools applied provides more precise data on the movement of tourists in the destination. For this, information was collected on the movement of tourists with four different tools, applying each tool in four different years (2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015) during the same time period (Holy Week). For the analysis of tourist movements, the Markov chain was obtained for each period. In order to study the generation of routes geo-location was used in each case. The results show that even though GPS technology provided more information on the visited places, NFC technology facilitates more extensive information. In addition, NFC technology allowed the extraction of important information about the places visited, showing a wide number of sites visited and, therefore, providing greater value for the study. Finally, the results of the study provide a better understanding of how destination management organizations could develop more suitable alternatives of the customer services systems, the delivery of tourist information and the identification of sites with heavy use. Conclusively, this study helps to identify how to take better advantage of the marketing strategies through different tools that analyses tourism movements.
Trade Shocks and Credit Reallocation

The effect of trade liberalization on welfare and economic activity remains one of the most important questions in economics. The literature identifies a number of key determinants that reduce the potential gains from trade, by focusing on frictions to labor mobility across regions or sectors. This paper contributes to this debate by exploring a novel channel, namely the reallocation of credit in the aftermath of a trade shock. We find that there are endogenous financial frictions that arise from trade liberalization and spillovers between losers and winners from trade that go through banks, as banks can be negatively affected by a trade shock through the portfolio of firms they lend to. Using data from the Italian credit registry, matched with bank and firm level data, we follow the evolution of bank and firm activities prior to and after the entry of China into the WTO. We identify the sectors most affected by import competition from China and estimate the transmission of this trade shock from firms to their lending banks, and the consequence of the shock on banks' lending to other firms. We find that, controlling for credit demand, banks exposed to the China shock decrease their lending relative to non-exposed banks. Importantly, this lending is reduced both for firms exposed to competition from China and to those that are not and that we should expect to expand. The main mechanism is related to the reduction of the core capital of banks, and their resulting funding capacity, through the rise of non-performing loans. We quantify the impact of this effect on real outcomes such as employment, investment, and output and we find relevant aggregate implications. These findings provide evidence that following a trade shock, bank lending has a key impact on the reallocation channel and on the potential gains from trade.