Hasil untuk "Settlements"

G. Ikenberry

The end of the Cold War was a “big bang” reminiscent of earlier moments after major wars, such as the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the end of the world wars in 1919 and 1945. But what do states that win wars do with their newfound power, and how do they use it to build order? This book examines postwar settlements in modern history, arguing that powerful countries do seek to build stable and cooperative relations, but the type of order that emerges hinges on their ability to make commitments and restrain power. The book explains that only with the spread of democracy in the twentieth century and the innovative use of international institutions—both linked to the emergence of the United States as a world power—has order been created that goes beyond balance of power politics to exhibit “constitutional” characteristics. Blending comparative politics with international relations, and history with theory, the book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the organization of world order, the role of institutions in world politics, and the lessons of past postwar settlements for today.

Wenxin Xu, Taotao Wang, Yihan Xia et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating the shift from an Internet of information to an Internet of Agents (IoA), where autonomous entities discover services, negotiate, execute tasks, and exchange value. Yet today's agents are still confined to platform silos and proprietary interfaces, lacking a common stack for interoperability, trust, and pay-per-use settlement. This article proposes \textit{Agent-OSI}, a six-layer reference stack for decentralized agent networking built on top of the existing Internet. Agent-OSI combines secure connectivity and A2A messaging, decentralized identity and authorization, settlement and metering, verifiable execution and provenance, and semantic interoperability for orchestration. In particular, we treat HTTP 402 (Payment Required) as an application-level payment challenge (analogous to HTTP 401 for authentication) that triggers escrow-based settlement and verifiable receipts (instantiated via a blockchain escrow in our prototype), rather than introducing a new network-layer protocol. We implement a prototype and evaluate cost and latency. Results show that keeping negotiation and delivery off-chain while preserving verifiable settlement reduces on-chain session costs by approximately 51\% compared with a standard Web3 baseline in our prototype setting, and that blockchain confirmation latency is often not the dominant factor for generative workloads.

Avi Arora, Ritesh Malpani

Prediction markets offer a natural testbed for trading agents: contracts have binary payoffs, prices can be interpreted as probabilities, and realized performance depends critically on market microstructure, fees, and settlement risk. We introduce PredictionMarketBench, a SWE-bench-style benchmark for evaluating algorithmic and LLM-based trading agents on prediction markets via deterministic, event-driven replay of historical limit-order-book and trade data. PredictionMarketBench standardizes (i) episode construction from raw exchange streams (orderbooks, trades, lifecycle, settlement), (ii) an execution-realistic simulator with maker/taker semantics and fee modeling, and (iii) a tool-based agent interface that supports both classical strategies and tool-calling LLM agents with reproducible trajectories. We release four Kalshi-based episodes spanning cryptocurrency, weather, and sports. Baseline results show that naive trading agents can underperform due to transaction costs and settlement losses, while fee-aware algorithmic strategies remain competitive in volatile episodes.

Wenyu Zhang, Yao Tong, Yiqiu Liu et al.

Urban villages (UVs), informal settlements embedded within China's urban fabric, have undergone widespread demolition and redevelopment in recent decades. However, there remains a lack of systematic evaluation of whether the demolished land has been effectively reused, raising concerns about the efficacy and sustainability of current redevelopment practices. To address the gap, this study proposes a deep learning-based framework to monitor the spatiotemporal changes of UVs in China. Specifically, semantic segmentation of multi-temporal remote sensing imagery is first used to map evolving UV boundaries, and then post-demolition land use is classified into six categories based on the "remained-demolished-redeveloped" phase: incomplete demolition, vacant land, construction sites, buildings, green spaces, and others. Four representative cities from China's four economic regions were selected as the study areas, i.e., Guangzhou (East), Zhengzhou (Central), Xi'an (West), and Harbin (Northeast). The results indicate: 1) UV redevelopment processes were frequently prolonged; 2) redevelopment transitions primarily occurred in peripheral areas, whereas urban cores remained relatively stable; and 3) three spatiotemporal transformation pathways, i.e., synchronized redevelopment, delayed redevelopment, and gradual optimization, were revealed. This study highlights the fragmented, complex and nonlinear nature of UV redevelopment, underscoring the need for tiered and context-sensitive planning strategies. By linking spatial dynamics with the context of redevelopment policies, the findings offer valuable empirical insights that support more inclusive, efficient, and sustainable urban renewal, while also contributing to a broader global understanding of informal settlement transformations.

Tomoo Kikuchi, Lien Pham

We develop a model where currency issuers provide liquidity, while users in a trade network choose currency usage for trade settlement. We identify a feedback mechanism where a user's currency preference spillovers to others and increases the issuer's commitment to liquidity provision, which in turn increases the adoption of the currency. Our findings highlight not only the advantage of the incumbent issuer in maintaining dominance, but also the conditions that lead to the rise and fall of dominant currencies. Our framework offers testable implications for the share of global settlement currencies, the network structure, and the strategy of issuers.

Ethan Buchman, Paolo Dini, Shoaib Ahmed et al.

For centuries, financial institutions have responded to liquidity challenges by forming closed, centralized clearing clubs with strict rules and membership that allow them to collaborate on using the least money to discharge the most debt. As closed clubs, much of the general public has been excluded from participation. But the vast majority of private sector actors consists of micro or small firms that are vulnerable to late payments and generally ineligible for bank loans. This low liquidity environment often results in gridlock and leads to insolvency, and it disproportionately impacts small enterprises and communities. On the other hand, blockchain communities have developed open, decentralized settlement systems, along with a proliferation of store of value assets and new lending protocols, allowing anyone to permissionlessly transact and access credit. However, these protocols remain used primarily for speculative purposes, and so far have fallen short of the large-scale positive impact on the real economy prophesied by their promoters. We address these challenges by introducing Cycles, an open, decentralized clearing, settlement, and issuance protocol. Cycles is designed to enable firms to overcome payment inefficiencies, to reduce their working capital costs, and to leverage diverse assets and liquidity sources, including cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and lending protocols, in service of clearing more debt with less money. Cycles solves real world liquidity challenges through a privacy-preserving multilateral settlement platform based on a graph optimization algorithm. The design is based on a core insight: liquidity resides within cycles in the payment network's structure and can be accessed via settlement flows optimized to reduce debt.

Mecca Howe, Jennifer Robinson

Research shows that youth participating in engaged agricultural learning gain important practical skills and knowledge. The physicality, setting, and social aspects of agricultural and horticultural projects are opportune for improving mental, emotional, and social well-being—yet the psychosocial and meta­cognitive impacts of agricultural learning are still unclear. This study examines psychosocial impacts among youth participants, ages 13–17, in the Felege Hiywot Center’s 2023 STEAM (science, technology, engineering, agriculture, and math) Farm Camp. The Farm Camp combines hands-on urban agriculture with employable skills training while addressing food insecurity in an urban neigh­borhood with limited access to affordable and nutritious foods. During the camp, students design and maintain garden plots where they grow food, prepare shared meals, and participate in integrative science projects. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative data collected from surveys and facili­tated journaling, we explored the positive psycho­social and metacognitive impacts of camp partici­pation. We found gardening instilled positive feelings and was perceived as a source of stress relief and accomplishment among participants. Teens also gained social support through the devel­opment of friendships and mentorships. Further­more, their participation in the program was asso­ciated with metacognitive skills development, including self-awareness and reflection. This case study provides a compelling example of how to engage youth from an underserved area in sustain­able urban agriculture while fostering metacogni­tive skills development and positive psychosocial experiences. We conclude that urban youth agricul­tural learning programs have valuable impacts on participants that go beyond agricultural education and the achievement of practical skills. These find­ings—which highlight the potential to contribute to psychosocial well-being, social support, and metacognitive abilities associated with maturation and personal development—may be particularly useful for other programs addressing at-risk and vulnerable youth.

Bich Hong Ha, Mai Phuong Pham, Quoc Khanh Nguyen et al.

Biodiversity loss and degradation activities have a significant impact and devastating consequences on the ecosystem, eventually posing a major threat to many plant species, including Cunninghamia konishii. Deforestation and the growth of settlements are the main factors that affect the biodiversity hotspots in Vietnam such as Northwest, Northeast, North Central and Central Highlands regions. This has led to a decline of the species, so effective conservation strategies are urgently required. This study aimed to identify simple sequence repeat markers within expressed sequence tags from C. konishii, develop markers from them and assess the potential of those markers for diversity and population structure analysis of the plant. The Illumina HiSeq™ 4000 sequencing technology was applied for the transcriptomic analysis of C. konishii and genetic differentiation and population structure of C. konishii in Vietnam. In this study, the transcriptomes of C. konishii were analysed using the Illumina HiSeqTM 4000 sequencing system and a total of 5,361,856,500 base pairs were generated. De novo assembly indicated that 58,905 unigenes were generated (average length = 736.4 bp, N50 = 1,869 bp, Q20 = 98.44% and Q30 = 95.08%). A total of 23,232 and 16,510 unigenes had significant similarities amongst Nr and Swiss-Prot, respectively. In the GO database, 12,056 (20.47%) unigenes were annotated and these genes were divided into three major categories and 50 subcategories. In the KOG analysis, 13,248 (22.49 %) unigenes were annotated and divided into 25 gene function categories. In the KEGG analysis, 8,714 (14.79%) unigenes were annotated. According to the related pathways involved, they could be classified into 56 subclasses. In this study, we have identified a total of 2,854 EST-SSRs markers. Of the 960 primer pairs, 99 were validated and reported for polymorphism. The genetic diversity within and amongst C. konishii populations was studied using 10 SSR markers. A sample size of 96 trees considered from three distant populations in Vietnam was analysed in this study. Our data determined PIC = 0.67, Na = 4.05, Ne = 2.76 and P = 100%. We reported moderate levels of genetic diversity with Ho = 0.56 and He = 0.58 and the fixation index value was recorded as positive for three populations (XL, HSP and PH). The bottleneck tests showed clear evidence of a bottleneck in PH population sizes. Genetic differentiation amongst populations was recorded very low (FST = 0.029), indicating gene flow (Nm = 8.169). This result indicates gene exchange between the populations of ancient C. konishii from different geographical areas and regions. The analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) showed that high genetic variation existed within individuals (90.68%) compared to amongst populations (2.97%). A Discriminant Analysis of Principal Components (DAPC) and Bayesian clustering grouped the populations into three genetically similar clusters. Additionally, candidate genes related to essential oil biosynthesis were identified. This study provides the first EST-SSR marker-based genetic diversity and population structure analysis of C. konishii, offering valuable insights for breeding and conservation efforts. The findings establish a key genetic resource for future conservation strategies with the aim of preserving this endangered species.

Dina Rahayuning Pangestuti, Apoina Kartini, Suhartono Suhartono et al.

Introduction: Lead in the environment can be more easily absorbed by individuals with nutritional deficiencies, particularly breastfeeding mothers residing in agricultural areas near lead sources. Contaminated breast milk can disrupt infants' growth and development. This study aims to identify lead contaminants in the environment and assess the nutritional status of breastfeeding mothers to provide preventive measures. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in the highland agricultural area of Semarang Regency in October 2021. Environmental samples, including air from agricultural land, settlements, groundwater, and raw food were carried out as environmental samples from 31 breastfeeding mothers. Dietary intake, haemoglobin, MCV, MCH, MCHC, and lead levels in breast milk was carried out. Lead content was analysed using ICP-OES. Geographic information system (GIS) was used to compare spatial distribution lead status levels with identified exposure factors. Results and Discussion: Median age of breastfeeding mothers was 24 years, with 72% being housewives, having a senior high school education. Median age of the infants was 2.5 months, 32% being boys, and 48% were exclusively breastfed. Mean hemoglobin level of the mothers was 13 ± 1.4 g/dL (13.8% was anemic) and median lead level in breast milk was 0.019 ppm. None of the mothers met their recommended macro- and micronutrient intake. Lead content in foods was 0.02-0.180 ppm, groundwater 0.017-0.034 ppm, and air 0-1.56 μg/Nm3 over a three-hours. Conclusion: The environment surrounding breastfeeding mothers contains lead, particularly in the air, and these mother experiences nutritional deficiencies, thereby increasing the risk of lead absorption.

Robin W. Spencer

Throughout history most young adults have chosen to live where their parents did while a smaller number moved away. This is sufficient, by proof and simulation, to account for the well-known power law distributions of city sizes. The model needs only two parameters, $r$ = the probability that a child stays, and the maximum number of cities (which models the observed saturation at high city rank). The power law exponent follows directly as $α= 1 + 1/r$, with Zipf's Law simply the limiting case as $r \rightarrow 1$. Observed exponents $(α= 2.2 \pm 0.4, n = 158)$ are consistent with stay-or-leave data from large genealogic studies. This model is self-initializing and could have applied from the time of the earliest stable settlements. The driving narrative behind city-size distributions is fundamentally about family ties, familiarity, and risk-avoidance, rather than economic optimization.

Isar Nejadgholi, Maryam Molamohammadi, Samir Bakhtawar

The non-profit settlement sector in Canada supports newcomers in achieving successful integration. This sector faces increasing operational pressures amidst rising immigration targets, which highlights a need for enhanced efficiency and innovation, potentially through reliable AI solutions. The ad-hoc use of general-purpose generative AI, such as ChatGPT, might become a common practice among newcomers and service providers to address this need. However, these tools are not tailored for the settlement domain and can have detrimental implications for immigrants and refugees. We explore the risks that these tools might pose on newcomers to first, warn against the unguarded use of generative AI, and second, to incentivize further research and development in creating AI literacy programs as well as customized LLMs that are aligned with the preferences of the impacted communities. Crucially, such technologies should be designed to integrate seamlessly into the existing workflow of the settlement sector, ensuring human oversight, trustworthiness, and accountability.

Malka Liaquat, Ghina Ahmed, Hina Ismail et al.

With the emergence of a green environment and green business, the banking sector has also enforced green practices. This study aims to explore the impact of motivational factors and green behaviors on the environmental performance of banking sector employees. This is a quantitative study and data has been collected through a cross-sectional survey of the questionnaire in the banking sector. 300 questionnaires were distributed to the bank employees. PLS-SEM was used to find the statistical results. The study finds a positive impact of Extrinsic motivation and Intrinsic motivation on Employee Environmental Performance, the mediating effect of Task-related Green Behaviors was also found to be positive. The study does not support the effect of Voluntary Green Behaviors on Employee Environment Performance and its mediating effect was also not supported. The study findings and deep knowledge of the impact of motivational and behavioral employee environmental performance on banking sector employees have provided new directions for researchers and policymakers. This study will help the policymakers in strategically developing rewarding policies for the employees that would definitely create a positive impact on performance. The results of the study have provided empirical confirmation of employees’ motivational needs and their impact on green behaviors that collectively impact employee environmental performance.

Ercan Işık, Marijana Hadzima-Nyarko, Fatih Avcil et al.

On 6 February 2023, two very large destructive earthquakes occurred in the East Anatolian Fault Zone (EAFZ), one of Türkiye’s primary tectonic members. The fact that these earthquakes occurred on the same day and in the same region increased the extent of the destruction. Within the scope of this study, twenty different settlements affected by earthquakes and located directly on the EAFZ were taken into consideration. Significant destruction and structural failure at different levels were induced in reinforced concrete (RC) structures, the dominant urban building stock in these regions. To determine whether the earthquake hazard is adequately represented, the PGA values predicted in the last two earthquake hazard maps used in Türkiye for these settlements were compared with the measured PGAs from actual earthquakes. Subsequently, the damage to reinforced concrete structures in these settlements was evaluated within the scope of construction and earthquake engineering. In the final part of the study, static pushover analyses were performed on a selected example of a reinforced concrete building model, and target displacement values for different performance levels were determined separately for each earthquake. For the 20 different settlements considered, the displacements were also derived based on the values predicted in the last two earthquake hazard maps, and comparisons were made. While the target displacements were exceeded in some settlements, there was no exceedance in the other settlements. The realistic presentation of earthquake hazards will enable the mentioned displacements predicted for different performance levels of structures to be determined in a much more realistic manner. As a result, the performance grades predicted for the structures will be estimated more accurately.

Razuvaev Yury D.

The author characterizes the ceramic complex of the Gorodets culture settlements, widespread in the second half of the 1st millennium BC in the forest-steppe part of the Don basin. It consists of molded earthenware for kitchen purposes; there are practically no tableware. The pottery had both a smoothed and relief-shaped outer surface (“matting”, “mesh”, “grooved”). The main mineral impurity added to the molding mass during their manufacture was grus (crushed mineral rocks). Sand and chamotte (crushed ceramics) were often used. The dominant type of dishes were pots, the appearance of which is given by 24 reconstructed specimens. Three main and several single varieties of shape of these vessels have been identified. Less numerous are jars and cups, of which three were found in their “whole” form. A significant part of the vessels were undecorated, but most ones were decorated with finger tucks, notches, punctures. The spread of well-profiled pots in the Gorodets environment, which replaced jar forms, is explained by economic interaction with the Scythian culture, whose area covered the southern part of the region.

Johannes H. Uhl, Stefan Leyk

To better understand the dynamics of human settlements, thorough knowledge of the uncertainty in geospatial built-up surface datasets is critical. While frameworks for localized accuracy assessments of categorical gridded data have been proposed to account for the spatial non-stationarity of classification accuracy, such approaches have not been applied to (binary) built-up land data. Such data differs from other data such as land cover data, due to considerable variations of built-up surface density across the rural-urban continuum resulting in switches of class imbalance, causing sparsely populated confusion matrices based on small underlying sample sizes. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by testing common agreement measures for their suitability and plausibility to measure the localized accuracy of built-up surface data. We examine the sensitivity of localized accuracy to the assessment support, as well as to the unit of analysis, and analyze the relationships between local accuracy and density / structure-related properties of built-up areas, across rural-urban trajectories and over time. Our experiments are based on the multi-temporal Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) and a reference database for the state of Massachusetts (USA). We find strong variation of suitability among commonly used agreement measures, and varying levels of sensitivity to the assessment support. We then apply our framework to assess localized GHSL data accuracy over time from 1975 to 2014. Besides increasing accuracy along the rural-urban gradient, we find that accuracy generally increases over time, mainly driven by peri-urban densification processes in our study area. Moreover, we find that localized densification measures derived from the GHSL tend to overestimate peri-urban densification processes that occurred between 1975 and 2014, due to higher levels of omission errors in the GHSL epoch 1975.

Jose Ricra, Alejandro Gangui

The Caral civilization developed on the north-central coast of Peru and had an occupation period between 2870 and 1970 years BC. The first studies carried out in the field of archaeoastronomy showed evidence of possible astronomical orientations in some buildings of its capital city, the Ciudad Sagrada de Caral. However, methodological issues cast doubt on these conclusions. A recent study carried out a more general statistical analysis, which covered a total of 55 architectural structures distributed in ten urban settlements that were part of this civilization, thus managing to identify topographic and astronomical orientation patterns. Based on this evidence, we propose to carry out a new study focused on the capital city, with the objective of analyzing the orientation pattern of the city, placing emphasis on the analysis of the most important religious and administrative structures in order to determine their functionality and their possible links with relevant astronomical objects. The study will include field work to measure the various structures and the subsequent statistical analysis of the data, using declination histograms, density functions and probability tests.

FengHua Wen, Yating Jiang, Ling Jiang

Abstract Floating population is an important group in the emerging urbanization process. This group promotes long-term settlement, which is a significant driving force increasing the urbanization level of countries. This study analyzed the changes in population mobility between Chinese cities and the willingness of the floating population to settle down. The analyses were based on data obtained from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) in 2017, and the China Seventh Census 2020. Spatial econometric models were constructed for in-depth research. The result showed that: ① the floating population migrated mainly from the central region to the surrounding cities, and their long-term settlement intention presented a spatial pattern of "high in the east, low in the west, and local concentration." ②the long-term settlement intention significantly negatively affected the urban floating population. City economic level, public service capacity, and environmental quality significantly positively or negatively influence the number of the floating population. For promoting more floating population to become urban residents, management of the group should be strengthened, construction level of the urban economy, society, and ecology improved, and the willingness of the group to settle for an extended time encouraged.

Cecilia Rocha, Melody Mendonça, Do Huy Nguyen et al.

Despite recent improvements in health, Vietnam continues to face significant problems with food security and chronic malnutrition among children. In the Northern Mountainous Region, small-scale farmers and ethnic minority groups are particularly hit hard. Anemia is present in almost half the local population of children under two, and close to 20% of children experience stunted growth. Anemia and stunting can cause irreversible deficiencies in learning and child development. Fortification of food products that are complementary to breast milk has been identified as an option to intervene and tackle chronic child malnutrition, particularly in situations requiring rapid results. Our paper describes how the ECOSUN project addressed food security and chronic child malnutrition in northern Vietnam (Lào Cai, Lai Châu, and Hà Giang provinces) using a food-system approach to design and implement a viable and sustainable value chain for fortified complementary foods. Through public-private partnerships, the project procured locally grown crops from small-scale women farmers to produce affordable fortified complementary food products in a small-scale food processing plant. Social marketing campaigns and nutrition education counseling centers supported product distribution through local vendors while emphasizing and promoting the value of fortified foods for healthy child development. The ECOSUN project also aimed to contribute to the broader goal of transforming the local economy. The process, lessons, challenges, successes, and methods employed to assess and test the delivery mechanisms of the project can offer insights to researchers, program implementers, and decision-makers involved in research-integrated development projects embedded in local socio-ecological systems. 

Keith Burghardt, Johannes Uhl, Kristina Lerman et al.

Road networks represent a key component of human settlements, such as cities, towns, and villages, that mediate pollution and congestion, as well as economic development. However, little is known about the long-term development trajectories of road networks in rural and urban settings. We leverage novel spatial data sources to reconstruct and analyze road networks in more than 850 US cities and over 2,500 US counties since 1900. Our analysis reveals significant variations in the structure of roads both within cities and across the conterminous US. Despite differences in the evolution of these networks, there are commonalities and strong geographic patterns. These results persist across the rural-urban continuum and are therefore not just a product of accelerated urban growth. These findings refine and extend existing knowledge and illuminate the need for policies for urban and rural planning including the critical assessment of new development trends.

Pekka Janhunen

We analyse a megasatellite settlement built from Ceres materials in high Ceres orbit. Ceres is selected because it has nitrogen, which is necessary for an earthlike atmosphere. To have $1 g$ artificial gravity, spinning habitats are attached to a disk-shaped megasatellite frame by passively safe magnetic bearings. The habitats are illuminated by concentrated sunlight produced by planar and parabolic mirrors. The motivation is to have a settlement with artificial gravity that allows growth beyond Earth's living area, while also providing easy intra-settlement travel for the inhabitants and reasonably low population density of 500 /km$^2$. To enable gardens and trees, a 1.5 m thick soil is used. The soil is upgradable to 4 m if more energy is expended in the manufacturing phase. The mass per person is $10^7$ kg, most of which is lightly processed radiation shield and soil. The goal is a long-term sustainable world where all atoms circulate. Because intra-settlement travel can be propellantless, achieving this goal is possible at least in principle. Lifting the materials from Ceres is energetically cheap compared to processing them into habitats, if a space elevator is used. Because Ceres has low gravity and rotates relatively fast, the space elevator is feasible.