Abstract: The purpose of this study is to develop a framework for the assessment of research and development projects. The assessment map is developed in this study based on the strategy map of the balanced scorecard approach. The assessment map is applied in a project that aims to reduce the inequality and risk of exclusion of young people from disadvantaged social groups. The assessment map denotes that not only funding but also necessary skills and qualifications should be carefully assessed in the implementation of the project plans so as to achieve the objectives of projects and the desired impact. The results of this study are useful for those who want to develop the implementation of the Erasmus+ Programme and the project teams of research and development projects.
Abstract: This paper considers an H∞ TS fuzzy state-derivative feedback controller for a class of nonlinear dynamical systems. A Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy model is used to approximate a class of nonlinear dynamical systems. Then, based on a linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach, we design an H∞ TS fuzzy state-derivative feedback control law which guarantees L2-gain of the mapping from the exogenous input noise to the regulated output to be less or equal to a prescribed value. We derive a sufficient condition such that the system with the fuzzy controller is asymptotically stable and H∞ performance is satisfied. Finally, we provide and simulate a numerical example is provided to illustrate the stability and the effectiveness of the proposed controller.
Abstract: This study deals with wage inequality in organization
and shows the relationship between ICT and wage in organization.
To do so, we incorporate ICT’s factors in organization into our
model. ICT’s factors are efficiencies of Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP), Computer Assisted Design/Computer Assisted
Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), and NETWORK. The improvement of
ICT’s factors decrease the learning cost to solve problem pertaining
to the hierarchy in organization. The improvement of NETWORK
increases the wage inequality within workers and decreases within
managers and entrepreneurs. The improvements of CAD/CAM and
ERP increases the wage inequality within all agent, and partially
increase it between the agents in hierarchy.
Abstract: The goal of this project is to investigate constant
properties (called the Liouville-type Problem) for a p-stable map
as a local or global minimum of a p-energy functional where
the domain is a Euclidean space and the target space is a
closed half-ellipsoid. The First and Second Variation Formulas
for a p-energy functional has been applied in the Calculus
Variation Method as computation techniques. Stokes’ Theorem,
Cauchy-Schwarz Inequality, Hardy-Sobolev type Inequalities, and
the Bochner Formula as estimation techniques have been used to
estimate the lower bound and the upper bound of the derived
p-Harmonic Stability Inequality. One challenging point in this project
is to construct a family of variation maps such that the images
of variation maps must be guaranteed in a closed half-ellipsoid.
The other challenging point is to find a contradiction between the
lower bound and the upper bound in an analysis of p-Harmonic
Stability Inequality when a p-energy minimizing map is not constant.
Therefore, the possibility of a non-constant p-energy minimizing
map has been ruled out and the constant property for a p-energy
minimizing map has been obtained. Our research finding is to explore
the constant property for a p-stable map from a Euclidean space into
a closed half-ellipsoid in a certain range of p. The certain range of
p is determined by the dimension values of a Euclidean space (the
domain) and an ellipsoid (the target space). The certain range of p
is also bounded by the curvature values on an ellipsoid (that is, the
ratio of the longest axis to the shortest axis). Regarding Liouville-type
results for a p-stable map, our research finding on an ellipsoid is a
generalization of mathematicians’ results on a sphere. Our result is
also an extension of mathematicians’ Liouville-type results from a
special ellipsoid with only one parameter to any ellipsoid with (n+1)
parameters in the general setting.
Abstract: Background: Traditional chronic disease management did not pay attention to effects of geographic factors on the compliance of treatment regime, which resulted in geographic inequality in outcomes of chronic disease management. This study aims to examine the geographic distribution and clustering of quality indicators of diabetes care. Method: We first extracted address, demographic information and quality of care indicators (number of visits, complications, prescription and laboratory records) of patients with diabetes for 2014 from medical information system in a medical center in Tainan City, Taiwan, and the patients’ addresses were transformed into district- and village-level data. We then compared the differences of geographic distribution and clustering of quality of care indicators between districts and villages. Despite the descriptive results, rate ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated for indices of care in order to compare the quality of diabetes care among different areas. Results: A total of 23,588 patients with diabetes were extracted from the hospital data system; whereas 12,716 patients’ information and medical records were included to the following analysis. More than half of the subjects in this study were male and between 60-79 years old. Furthermore, the quality of diabetes care did indeed vary by geographical levels. Thru the smaller level, we could point out clustered areas more specifically. Fuguo Village (of Yongkang District) and Zhiyi Village (of Sinhua District) were found to be “hotspots” for nephropathy and cerebrovascular disease; while Wangliau Village and Erwang Village (of Yongkang District) would be “coldspots” for lowest proportion of ≥80% compliance to blood lipids examination. On the other hand, Yuping Village (in Anping District) was the area with the lowest proportion of ≥80% compliance to all laboratory examination. Conclusion: In spite of examining the geographic distribution, calculating rate ratios and their 95% CI could also be a useful and consistent method to test the association. This information is useful for health planners, diabetes case managers and other affiliate practitioners to organize care resources to the areas most needed.
Abstract: Developmental social welfare implemented through developmental social work is being applauded internationally as an approach that facilitates social development theory and practice. However, twenty-two years into democracy, there are no tangible evidences that the much-desired developmental social welfare approach has assisted the post-apartheid macroeconomic policy frameworks in addressing poverty and inequality, thus, the derailment of the post-apartheid development approach in South Africa. Based on the implementation research theory, and the literature review technique, this paper recognizes social work as a principal role-player in social development. It recommends the redesign and implementation of an effective developmental social welfare approach with specific strategies, programs, activities and sufficient resources aligned to and appropriate in delivering on the promises of the government’s macroeconomic policy frameworks. Such approach should be implemented by skilled and dedicated developmental social workers in order to achieve transformation in South Africa.
Abstract: The control of ammonia build-up and its by-product is a limiting factor for a successful commercial aquaculture in a developing country like Nigeria. The technology for an advanced treatment of fish tank effluent is uneconomical to local fish farmers which have led to indiscriminate disposal of aquaculture wastewater, thereby increasing the concentrations of these nitrogenous compound and other contaminants in surface and groundwater above the permissible level. Phytoremediation using water lettuce could offer cheaper and sustainable alternative. On the first day of experimentation, approximately 100 g of water lettuce were replicated in four hydroponic units containing aquaculture effluents. The water quality parameters measured were concentration of ammonium–nitrogen (NH4+-N), nitrite-nitrogen (NO2--N), nitrate-nitrogen (NO3--N), and phosphate–phosphorus (PO43--P). Others were total suspended solids (TSS), pH, electrical conductivity (EC), and biomass value. At phytoremediation intervals of 7, 14, 21 and 28 days, the biomass recorded were 361.2 g, 498.7 g, 561.2 g, and 623.7 g. Water lettuce was able to reduce the pollutant concentration of all the selected parameter. The percentage reduction of pH ranged from 3.9% to 14.4%, EC from 49.8% to 96.2%, TDS from 50.4% to 96.2%, TSS from 38.3% to 81.7%, NH4+-N from 38.9% to 90.7%, NO2--N from 0% to 74.9%, NO3--N from 63.2% to 95.9% and PO43--P from 0% to 76.3%. At 95% confidence level, the analysis of variance shows that F(critical) is less than F(cal) and p < 0.05; therefore, it can be concluded statistically that the inequality between the pre-treatment and post-treatment values are significant. This suggests the potency of water lettuce for remediation of aquaculture effluent.
Abstract: In this paper, we consider the MU-MISO downlink scenario, under imperfect channel state information (CSI). The main issue in imperfect CSI is to keep the probability of each user achievable outage rate below the given threshold level. Such a rate outage constraints present significant and analytical challenges. There are many probabilistic methods are used to minimize the transmit optimization problem under imperfect CSI. Here, decomposition based large deviation inequality and Bernstein type inequality convex restriction methods are used to perform the optimization problem under imperfect CSI. These methods are used for achieving improved output quality and lower complexity. They provide a safe tractable approximation of the original rate outage constraints. Based on these method implementations, performance has been evaluated in the terms of feasible rate and average transmission power. The simulation results are shown that all the two methods offer significantly improved outage quality and lower computational complexity.
Abstract: This paper presents the performance analysis of dynamic search space reduction (DSR) based gravitational search algorithm (GSA) to solve dynamic economic dispatch of thermal generating units with valve point effects. Dynamic economic dispatch basically dictates the best setting of generator units with anticipated load demand over a definite period of time. In this paper, the presented technique is considered that deals an inequality constraints treatment mechanism known as DSR strategy to accelerate the optimization process. The presented method is demonstrated through five-unit test systems to verify its effectiveness and robustness. The simulation results are compared with other existing evolutionary methods reported in the literature. It is intuited from the comparison that the fuel cost and other performances of the presented approach yield fruitful results with marginal value of simulation time.
Abstract: The importance of advancing women’s rights is closely intertwined with the development of civil society and the institutionalization of democracy in Middle Eastern countries. There is indeed an intimate relationship between the process of democratization and promoting gender equality, since democracy necessitates equality between men and women. In order to advance the issue of gender equality, what is required is a solid theoretical framework which has its roots in the reexamination of pre-modern interpretation of certain Qurʾānic passages that seem to have given men more rights than it gives women. This paper suggests that those Muslim scholars who adopt a contextualist approach to the Qurʾānic text and its interpretation provide a solid theoretical background for improving women’s rights. Indeed, the aim of the paper is to discuss how the contextualist approach to the Qurʾānic text and its interpretation given by a number of prominent scholars is capable of promoting the issue of gender equality. The paper concludes that since (1) much of the gender inequality found in the primary sources of Islam as well as pre-modern Muslim writings is rooted in the natural cultural norms and standards of early Islamic societies and (2) since the context of today’s world is so different from that of the pre-modern era, the proposed models provide a solid theoretical framework for promoting women’s rights and gender equality.
Abstract: This paper studies a secondary voltage control
framework of the microgrids based on the consensus for a
communication network of multiagent. The proposed control is
designed by the communication network with one-way links. The
communication network is modeled by a directed graph. At this
time, the concept of sampling is considered as the communication
constraint among each distributed generator in the microgrids. To
analyze the sampling effects on the secondary voltage control of
the microgrids, by using Lyapunov theory and some mathematical
techniques, the sufficient condition for such problem will be
established regarding linear matrix inequality (LMI). Finally, some
simulation results are given to illustrate the necessity of the
consideration of the sampling effects on the secondary voltage control
of the microgrids.
Abstract: Conventional wastewater treatment plants of activated carbon, electrodialysis, ion exchange, reverse osmosis etc. are expensive to install, operate and maintain especially in developing countries; therefore, the use of aquatic macrophytes for wastewater purification is a viable alternative. On the first day of experimentation, approximately 100g of water hyacinth was introduced into the hydroponic units in four replicates. The water quality parameters measured were total suspended solids (TSS), pH and electrical conductivity (EC). Others were concentration of ammonium–nitrogen (NH4+-N), nitrite-nitrogen (NO2--N), nitrate-nitrogen (NO3--N), phosphate–phosphorus (PO43--P), and biomass value. At phytoremediation intervals of 7, 14, 21 and 28 days, the biomass recorded were 438.2 g, 600.7 g, 688.2 g and 725.7 g. Water hyacinth was able to reduce the pollutant concentration of all the selected parameter. The percentage reduction of pH ranged from 1.9% to 14.7%, EC from 49.8% to 97.0%, TDS from 50.4% to 97.6%, TSS from 34.0% to 78.3%, NH4+-N from 38.9% to 85.2%, NO2--N from 0% to 84.6%, NO3--N from 63.2% to 98.8% and PO43--P from 10% to 88.0%. Paired sample t-test shows that at 95% confidence level, it can be concluded statistically that the inequality between the pre-treatment and post-treatment values are significant. This suggests that the use of water hyacinth is valuable in the design and operation of aquaculture effluent treatment and should therefore be adopted by environmental and wastewater managers.
Abstract: This paper uses a primary data from 670 Chinese
manufacturing firms, together with the newly introduced regressionbased
inequality decomposition method, to study the effect of
openness on wage inequality. We find that openness leads to a
positive industry wage premium, but its contribution to firm-level
wage inequality is relatively small, only 4.69%. The major
contributor to wage inequality is human capital, which could explain
14.3% of wage inequality across sample firms.
Abstract: Financial inclusion has become a crucially important
factor in debates on economic inequality posing challenges to the
financial systems of countries around the world. Nowadays
governments and banks are concerned about creating products that
allow access to wide sectors of the population. The creation of
banking products by the financial sector for people with low incomes
tends to lead to improvements in the quality of life of vulnerable parts
of the population. In countries with notable social and economic
inequalities, financial inclusion is a key aspect for equitable
economic growth. This study is based on the case of Colombia, which is a country
with a strong record of economic growth over the past decade.
Nevertheless, corruption, unemployment, and poverty contribute to
uncertainty regarding the country’s future growth prospects. This study wants to explain the situation of financial exclusion and
financial inclusion with respect to the Colombian case. Financial
inclusion is going to be studied from the perspective of social
innovation.
Abstract: In this article, a new method is proposed for the measuring of well-being inequality through a model composed of superimposing satisfaction waves. The displacement of households’ satisfactory state (i.e. satisfaction) is defined in a satisfaction string. The duration of the satisfactory state for a given period is measured in order to determine the relationship between utility and total satisfactory time, itself dependent on the density and tension of each satisfaction string. Thus, individual cardinal total satisfaction values are computed by way of a one-dimensional form for scalar sinusoidal (harmonic) moving wave function, using satisfaction waves with varying amplitudes and frequencies which allow us to measure wellbeing inequality. One advantage to using satisfaction waves is the ability to show that individual utility and consumption amounts would probably not commute; hence, it is impossible to measure or to know simultaneously the values of these observables from the dataset. Thus, we crystallize the problem by using a Heisenberg-type uncertainty resolution for self-adjoint economic operators. We propose to eliminate any estimation bias by correlating the standard deviations of selected economic operators; this is achieved by replacing the aforementioned observed uncertainties with households’ perceived uncertainties (i.e. corrected standard deviations) obtained through the logarithmic psychophysical law proposed by Weber and Fechner.
Abstract: In this paper, the problem of stability and stabilization
for neutral delay-differential systems with infinite delay is
investigated. Using Lyapunov method, new delay-independent
sufficient condition for the stability of neutral systems with infinite
delay is obtained in terms of linear matrix inequality (LMI).
Memory-less state feedback controllers are then designed for the
stabilization of the system using the feasible solution of the resulting
LMI, which are easily solved using any optimization algorithms.
Numerical examples are given to illustrate the results of the proposed
methods.
Abstract: Latin America is probably the region with greater
social inequality, contrary to the amount of rights enshrined in their
constitutions. In the last decade of the twentieth century, the area
resulted in significant changes to democratization and constitutional
changes. Through low-key public policy, political leaders activated
participation in the culture of human rights. The struggle for social
rights in Latin America has been a constant regulation. His
consecration at the constitutional level has chained search
application. The constitutionalization and judicial protection of these
rights have been crucial in countries like Argentina, Venezuela, Peru
and Colombia. This paper presents an analytical view on the
constitutionalization of social rights in the Latin American context
and its justiciability.
Abstract: Model predictive control is a kind of optimal feedback
control in which control performance over a finite future is optimized
with a performance index that has a moving initial time and a moving
terminal time. This paper examines the stability of model predictive
control for linear discrete-time systems with additive stochastic
disturbances. A sufficient condition for the stability of the closed-loop
system with model predictive control is derived by means of a linear
matrix inequality. The objective of this paper is to show the results
of computational simulations in order to verify the effectiveness of
the obtained stability condition.
Abstract: In this study, firstly democratic thoughts which
directly or indirectly affect economic development and/or the
interaction between authoritarian regimes and the economic
development and the direction and channels of this interaction were
studied and then the study tried to determine how democracy affects
economic development. It was concluded that the positive
contributions of democracy to economic development were more
determinant than the effects that were either negative or restrictive in
terms of development. When compared to autocracy, since
democracy is more successful in managing social conflicts, ensuring
political stability and preventing social disasters such as famine, it
contributes more to economic development. Democracy also
facilitates delegation of authority, provides a stable investment
environment and accelerates mobilization of resources in accordance
with economic growth/development. Democracy leads to an increase
in human capital accumulation and increases the growth rate through
reducing income inequality. It can be said that democratic regimes
are the most appropriate ones in terms of increasing economic
performance and supporting economic development through their
strong institutional structures and the assurance they will ensure in
property rights.
Abstract: Typically, virtual communities exhibit the well-known
phenomenon of participation inequality, which means that only a
small percentage of users is responsible of the majority of
contributions. However, the sustainability of the community requires
that the group of active users must be continuously nurtured with new
users that gain expertise through a participation process. This paper
analyzes the time evolution of Open Source Software (OSS)
communities, considering users that join/abandon the community
over time and several topological properties of the network when
modeled as a social network. More specifically, the paper analyzes
the role of those users rejoining the community and their influence in
the global characteristics of the network.