Generalizing treatment effects from a randomized trial to a target population requires the assumption that potential outcome distributions are invariant across populations after conditioning on observed covariates. This assumption fails when unmeasured effect modifiers are distributed differently between trial participants and the target population. We develop a sensitivity analysis framework that bounds how much conclusions can change when this transportability assumption is violated. Our approach constrains the likelihood ratio between target and trial outcome densities by a scalar parameter $Λ\geq 1$, with $Λ= 1$ recovering standard transportability. For each $Λ$, we derive sharp bounds on the target average treatment effect -- the tightest interval guaranteed to contain the true effect under all data-generating processes compatible with the observed data and the sensitivity model. We show that the optimal likelihood ratios have a simple threshold structure, leading to a closed-form greedy algorithm that requires only sorting trial outcomes and redistributing probability mass. The resulting estimator runs in $O(n \log n)$ time and is consistent under standard regularity conditions. Simulations demonstrate that our bounds achieve nominal coverage when the true outcome shift falls within the specified $Λ$, provide substantially tighter intervals than worst-case bounds, and remain informative across a range of realistic violations of transportability.
Tabular synthetic data generators are typically trained to match observational distributions, which can yield high conventional utility (e.g., column correlations, predictive accuracy) yet poor preservation of structural relations relevant to causal analysis and out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning. When the downstream use of synthetic data involves causal reasoning -- estimating treatment effects, evaluating policies, or testing mediation pathways -- merely matching the observational distribution is insufficient: structural fidelity and treatment-mechanism preservation become essential. We propose CausalWrap (CW), a model-agnostic wrapper that injects partial causal knowledge (PCK) -- trusted edges, forbidden edges, and qualitative/monotonic constraints -- into any pretrained base generator (GAN, VAE, or diffusion model), without requiring access to its internals. CW learns a lightweight, differentiable post-hoc correction map applied to samples from the base generator, optimized with causal penalty terms under an augmented-Lagrangian schedule. We provide theoretical results connecting penalty-based optimization to constraint satisfaction and relating approximate factorization to joint distributional control. We validate CW on simulated structural causal models (SCMs) with known ground-truth interventions, semi-synthetic causal benchmarks (IHDP and an ACIC-style suite), and a real-world ICU cohort (MIMIC-IV) with expert-elicited partial graphs. CW improves causal fidelity across diverse base generators -- e.g., reducing average treatment effect (ATE) error by up to 63% on ACIC and lifting ATE agreement from 0.00 to 0.38 on the intensive care unit (ICU) cohort -- while largely retaining conventional utility.
When synthetic data is released, some individuals are harder to protect than others. A patient with a rare disease combination or a transaction with unusual characteristics stands out from the crowd. Differential privacy provides worst-case guarantees, but empirical attacks -- particularly membership inference -- succeed far more often against such outliers, especially under moderate privacy budgets and with auxiliary information. This paper introduces risk-equalized DP synthesis, a framework that prioritizes protection for high-risk records by reducing their influence on the learned generator. The mechanism operates in two stages: first, a small privacy budget estimates each record's "outlierness"; second, a DP learning procedure weights each record inversely to its risk score. Under Gaussian mechanisms, a record's privacy loss is proportional to its influence on the output -- so deliberately shrinking outliers' contributions yields tighter per-instance privacy bounds for precisely those records that need them most. We prove end-to-end DP guarantees via composition and derive closed-form per-record bounds for the synthesis stage (the scoring stage adds a uniform per-record term). Experiments on simulated data with controlled outlier injection show that risk-weighting substantially reduces membership inference success against high-outlierness records; ablations confirm that targeting -- not random downweighting -- drives the improvement. On real-world benchmarks (Breast Cancer, Adult, German Credit), gains are dataset-dependent, highlighting the interplay between scorer quality and synthesis pipeline.
The article reviews the service system of complaints of the PRC’s population on violations on the Internet and the peculiarities of the normative legal regulation of its functioning. The main goal of the service system is to ensure public safety through self-regulation of Chinese citizens, as well as to increase their trust in the work of specialized party, state and quasi-state departments. The study identifies and characterizes online platforms that ensure the service system’s functioning. The aim of the Chinese approach to legal regulation is to increase the service system’s efficiency. Such tools as fixed payments for reliable complaints, special formulas for calculating increased amounts for reporting certain types of illegal activities are used. False reports on violations carry legal liability. Besides, requirements for data operators in China’s territory for establishing complaints collecting and processing mechanisms are increased. The planned reform of the PRC’s general complaints system should solve the problem of governance decentralization. In accordance with the concept of “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验) in the new era, developed after the 18th CPC Congress on the personal initiative of Xi Jinping, it is proposed to strengthen self-regulation at the local level. The service system is an integral part of the Chinese digital governance model and information security system. Individual elements of these systems have already been institutionalized at the legal level for promotion among the countries participating in the Digital Silk Road Initiative and BRICS.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
We introduce a novel dataset mapping career transitions of 505 elites in North Korea. Despite ample attention to granular data on elites, there is a lack of comprehensive information spanning state, party, military, and parastatal sectors. Granular rank and position data enable tracing intra- and inter-institutional elite transitions, opening new research avenues on North Korean elite studies and leader-elite dynamics in personalist autocracies. Exploiting within-regime threat-level variation during successions, we test hypotheses on dictators’ use of intra- versus inter-institutional elite management. We conclude with implications for new research directions in North Korean studies and authoritarianism literature.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Social Sciences
Kausutua Tjikundi, Jackie Kleynhans, Stefano Tempia
et al.
Households play a crucial role in the propagation of infectious diseases due to the frequent and prolonged interactions that typically occur between their members. Recent studies have emphasized the need to include socioeconomic variables in epidemic models to account for the heterogeneity induced by human behavior. While sub-Saharan Africa suffers the highest burden of infectious disease diffusion, few studies have investigated the mixing patterns in the countries and their relation with social indicators. This work analyzes household contact matrices measured with wearable proximity sensors in a rural and an urban village in South Africa. Leveraging a rich data collection describing additional individual and household attributes, we investigate how the household contact matrix varies according to the household type (whether it is composed only of a familiar nucleus or by a larger group), the gender of its head (the primary decision-maker), the rural or urban context, and the season in which it was measured. We show the household type and the gender of its head induce differences in the interaction patterns between household members, particularly regarding child caregiving, suggesting they are relevant attributes to include in epidemic modeling.
We present two generalizations for the celebrated works of Ferus-Karcher-Münzner \cite{FKM81} and Wang \cite{W94}. We first show that an isoparametric foliation on $\mathbb{S}^{2n+1}$ constructed by Ferus-Karcher-Münzner naturally yields an isoparametric foliation on its submanifold $\mathbb{S}^n \times \mathbb{S}^n$ with one same focal variety. The second part concerns area-minimizing cones; all known regular area-minimizing hypercones are realized as real algebraic varieties: isoparametric cones (cf. \cite{W94}). As a noteworthy application, we extend area-minimizing isoparametric hypercones in \cite{W94} to codimension-two cases, and obtain infinitely many families (each containing infinitely many members) of area-minimizing subcones of Simons cones.
The glaring lack of employment opportunities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has led to the conclusion of special employment contracts, including domestic work contracts. Today, there is a rapid development of labour contracts in Congolese society for domestic purposes. While it is true that the Congolese Constitution and various international legal instruments ratified by the DRC provide all workers, including domestic workers, with general protection, Congolese labour legislation hardly takes account of this development in the labour market. Many domestic workers in the DRC are still subject to countless abuses by their employers. As employment has become a very scarce commodity in the DRC, these workers sometimes have no alternative but to cope with all these abuses. In order to take special account of this rapid evolution of the Congolese employment market and to ensure that the workers concerned are specifically protected, this study recommends that the DRC ratify Convention No. 189 of the International Labour Organisation on domestic workers. However, such ratification would contribute effectively to the reduction
of the countless abuses to which people working under a domestic labour contract continue. to fall victim, only if it is accompanied by appropriate implementation measures at the domestic level and if the competent labour administration effectively ensures their respect.
Asia and Eurasia, Africa, Pacific Area, and Antarctica
The article analyzes problems in China-US relations in the spheres of economic and humanitarian cooperation. Major trends of their bilateral interaction in these areas are examined as concrete manifestations of the countries’ opposing strategic goals. The author traces the relationship between the political strategies of Beijing and Washington that determine their actions toward each other, including the “two policy clusters” or ”packages” as major paradigms governing the PRC's foreign policy course on the American track. The article provides a comparative analysis of China-US trade turnover, the volume of mutual export and import and their sci-tech component, as well as the volume of mutual direct investment in recent years, taking into account the impact of the “trade war” and COVID-19 pandemic. The article analyzes reasons for decline in the role of the two countries’ “soft power” in humanitarian cooperation and observes the dynamics of China-US academic exchanges and tourist flows intensity, weakening of bilateral interaction in the field of cinema and shrinking of Confucius Institutes operating in the US. It is concluded that despite the stagnation of bilateral ties in economic and humanitarian areas, China and the US are still linked by a network of complex interdependence in various aspects of their economies and societies, which will determine their bilateral interaction stability in those areas where cooperation is most beneficial.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The Chinese government is focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques for numerous sectors, such as healthcare. The achievement of AI initiatives depends on the adoption and attractiveness of AI by way of physicians, nurses, decision-makers, and patients. This study aims to explore essential
achievement factors for implementing AI initiatives inside the healthcare industry. The research analyzes the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and identifies the broadly applied factors, together with the perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, attitude towards use, and behavioral intention to use. A systematic evaluation of 34 related studies among 2020 and 2023 was carried out to discover the most popular elements. The authors also used Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The data was
collected through surveys from 154 employees within the health and IT sectors in China. The findings demonstrated that perceived usefulness and ease of use of AI projects are definitely influenced by management, organizational, operational and IT infrastructure factors.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
Alessandra D'Alise, Davide Iacobacci, Francesco Sannino
We show that the epidemiological Renormalization Group (eRG) framework is a useful and minimal tool to effectively describe the temporal evolution of the Dengue multi-wave pandemics. We test the framework on the Dengue history of several countries located in both Latin America and Asia. We also observe a strong correlation between the total number of infected individuals and the changes in the local temperature. Our results further support the expectation that global warming is bound to increase the cases of Dengue worldwide. We then move to investigate, via the eRG, the recent outbreak in Fano, Italy and offer our projections.
The study investigated the impact of healthcare system efficiency on the delivery of maternal, newborn, and child services in Africa. Data Envelopment Analysis and Tobit regression were employed to assess the efficiency of 46 healthcare systems across the continent, utilizing the Variable Returns to Scale model with Input orientation to evaluate technical efficiency. The Tobit method was utilized to explore factors contributing to inefficiency, with inputs variables including hospital, physician, and paramedical staff, and outputs variables encompassing maternal, newborn, and child admissions, cesarean interventions, functional competency, and hospitalization days. Results revealed that only 26% of countries exhibited efficiency, highlighting a significant proportion of 74% with inefficiencies. Financial determinants such as current health expenditures, comprehensive coverage index, and current health expenditure per capita were found to have a negative impact on the efficiency of maternal-child services. These findings underscore a marginal deficiency in technical efficiency within Africa's healthcare systems, emphasizing the necessity for policymakers to reassess the roles of both human resources and financial dimensions in enhancing healthcare system performance.
The DNS root server system uses Anycast technology to provide resolution through widely distributed root nodes. In recent years, the F-root node has seen astonishing growth and now boasts the largest number of nodes among the 13 root servers. Based on Ripe Atlas measurement data, we examined the availability and query latency of the F-root within the Southeast Asian region historically. The collected data illustrates how latency varies with changes in the number of root nodes, how the geographic distribution of responding root nodes changes in different periods, and examines the most recent differences between countries in terms of latency distribution. This study sheds light on the evolving landscape of DNS infrastructure in Southeast Asia.
AST3-2 is the second of the three Antarctic Survey Telescopes, aimed at wide-field time-domain optical astronomy. It is located at Dome A, Antarctica, which is by many measures the best optical astronomy site on the Earth's surface. Here we present the data from the AST3-2 automatic survey in 2016 and the photometry results. The median 5$σ$ limiting magnitude in $i$-band is 17.8 mag and the light curve precision is 4 mmag for bright stars. The data release includes photometry for over 7~million stars, from which over 3,500 variable stars were detected, with 70 of them newly discovered. We classify these new variables into different types by combining their light curve features with stellar properties from surveys such as StarHorse.
A $p$-Kähler structure on a complex manifold of complex dimension $n$ is given by a $d$-closed transverse real $(p,p)$-form. In the paper we study the existence of $p$-Kähler structures on compact quotients of simply connected Lie groups by discrete subgroups endowed with an invariant complex structure. In particular, we discuss the existence of $p$-Kähler structures on nilmanifolds, with a focus on the case $p =2$ and complex dimension $n = 4$. Moreover, we prove that a $(n-2)$-Kähler almost abelian solvmanifold of complex dimension $n\geq3$ has to be Kähler.
The article is an analytical review of the monograph «Overseas Chinese Affairs Policy of the PRC: Socio-Economic Direction» by Alina Afonaseva. The Russian Sinologist gives a description of the world's largest Chinese diaspora, including the historical context, arranges the conceptual apparatus and analyzes the policy of the People's Republic of China in relation to the Chinese diaspora in socio-economic aspects. The author of the book tries to answer the question, how China managed to establish productive relations with its diaspora abroad and attract its resources for modernization and access to international markets. The review notes the significant contribution of A.V. Afonasyeva to the development of the scientific topic “China and overseas Chinese”, which provides an increase in knowledge for Chinese studies in general.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
Veretekhina S.V., Petrova E.A., Khalyukin V.V.
et al.
The analytical review is devoted to various aspects of the implementation of the “Program of economic, political, cultural and information cooperation between the Eurasian Economic Commission and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations”. The authors note that the Year of Scientific and Technical Cooperation between Russia and ASEAN (2022) laid the foundations for the development and harmonization of integration processes of legal regulation and created the information and analytical space for ASEAN members. The implementation of the strategic government task “The Agenda for Sustainable Development for the period up to 2030” is focused on international cooperation with the countries of Southeast Asia. The article substantiates the thesis about Russia’s geopolitical turn towards economic cooperation with the Southeast Asia countries. The authors describe scientific and technical cooperation in the conditions of the new economic reality, give a description of innovative Russian information technologies for monitoring plant vegetation and assessing the psychophysiological state of a person.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources