Hasil untuk "Asia and Eurasia, Africa, Pacific Area, and Antarctica"

Steven M. Radil, Nick Dorward, Olivier Walther et al.

Existing models of political violence often emphasize discrete transitions, when conflicts emerge, escalate, or subside, without considering the longer trajectories of violence that accumulate across time and space. This paper introduces a spatially explicit longitudinal sequence analysis to address this gap. Using event-level data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset covering Africa from 1997 to 2024, we classify locations according to the intensity and spatial concentration of violence, tracing how these states evolve into distinct conflict trajectories. Applying optimal matching and clustering techniques, we identify six recurrent patterns ranging from short-lived, localized outbreaks to protracted high-intensity conflicts. We further assess how these trajectories align across neighboring areas, revealing evidence of spatial interdependence, particularly in border regions. By highlighting the temporal rhythms and geographic linkages of political violence, the study advances conflict research beyond isolated transitions and provides a framework for understanding the life cycles of violence.

Isabel Agadagba, Triphonia Kilasara, Takudzwa Tarutira et al.

Digital payment systems have become a cornerstone of consumer finance in Africa. Prominent payment categories include money transfer applications, mobile money, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). While there are studies exploring how and why people use individual digital payment systems (both in Africa and beyond), we lack a good understanding of why people choose between different categories of payment systems, and how they view the tradeoffs between different categories. We conducted qualitative interviews in three African countries -- Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe -- to understand how and why people use various payment systems, and what influenced them to start using these systems. Our study highlights several notable findings regarding tradeoffs between perceived utility, privacy, and security. For example, many users trust government issuers to protect them from scams, but they do not trust those same institutions to build reliable systems and products or prioritize customer satisfaction. We also find that most users have accounts on multiple payment systems, and conduct a complex selection process using different platforms for different types of payments. This selection process is driven in part by financial considerations, but also by security, privacy, and trust preferences. Our findings suggest compelling directions for regulators and the research community to design systems that balance users' trust and utility needs.

Amir Asiaee, Chao Yan, Zachary B. Abrams et al.

Differential privacy (DP) provides a mathematical guarantee limiting what an adversary can learn about any individual from released data. However, achieving this protection typically requires adding noise, and noise can accumulate when many statistics are measured. Existing DP synthetic data methods treat all features symmetrically, spreading noise uniformly even when the data will serve a specific prediction task. We develop a prediction-centric approach operating in three regimes depending on available structural knowledge. In the causal regime, when the causal parents of $Y$ are known and distribution shift is expected, we target the parents for robustness. In the graphical regime, when a Bayesian network structure is available and the distribution is stable, the Markov blanket of $Y$ provides a sufficient feature set for optimal prediction. In the predictive regime, when no structural knowledge exists, we select features via differentially private methods without claiming to recover causal or graphical structure. We formalize this as PRISM, a mechanism that (i) identifies a predictive feature subset according to the appropriate regime, (ii) constructs targeted summary statistics, (iii) allocates budget to minimize an upper bound on prediction error, and (iv) synthesizes data via graphical-model inference. We prove end-to-end privacy guarantees and risk bounds. Empirically, task-aware allocation improves prediction accuracy compared to generic synthesizers. Under distribution shift, targeting causal parents achieves AUC $\approx 0.73$ while correlation-based selection collapses to chance ($\approx 0.49$).

Mark R. Thompson, Kevin N. M. Agojo

Streltsov D.V.

The article attempts to trace the political biography of Shinzo Abe and show the most significant features of his legacy. The author analyzes Abe’s views as a conservative politician, among which he emphasizes the rejection of the pacifist post-war direction and the romanticization of Japan’s pre-war past, as well as the conviction of the need to revise the constitution. The article examines in detail the methods and political practices used by Abe to retain the LDP power during his premiership in 2012–2020, including the skillful use of populist technologies, and above all media opportunities, to strengthen his personal charisma, as well as real achievements in the field of foreign policy and diplomacy. The author concludes that under Abe’s rule, the process of Japan’s final departure from the “Yoshida doctrine” and its transformation into a country with full-fledged armed forces, not burdened with pacifist restrictions, was actually completed.

Khokhlova P.A.

The purpose of the paper is to examine China's foreign economic relations with the countries of the Global South and to identify the prerequisites, logic, and ideological foundations for this interaction. The analysis is based on specific projects implemented within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. The author examines Chinese projects in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, including both successful cooperation cases and controversial ones. The article also discusses China's guiding principles for building relations with developing countries, such as combatting hegemony, perceiving “benefits and justice” correctly and maintaining the historical continuity of China's diplomatic approaches. The paper analyses critical assessments of Chinese credit policy by the collective West, accusations of neocolonialism and debt-trap policy. At the same time, the research presents the point of view of the Global South countries, whose leaders often see China as a strategic and mutually beneficial partner. The paper considers China’s debt restructuring policy towards partner countries. The author pays special attention to the analysis of diplomatic relations with neighboring countries for China's future rise and domestic development goals, as well as the establishment of a fair international order. The article concludes that China seeks to build sustainable, equitable and pragmatic ties with developing countries and offers a different model for global interaction from the Western one.

Ilias Aarab, Thomas Gottron

The rapidly increasing availability of large amounts of granular financial data, paired with the advances of big data related technologies induces the need of suitable analytics that can represent and extract meaningful information from such data. In this paper we propose a multi-layer network approach to distill the Euro Area (EA) banking system in different distinct layers. Each layer of the network represents a specific type of financial relationship between banks, based on various sources of EA granular data collections. The resulting multi-layer network allows one to describe, analyze and compare the topology and structure of EA banks from different perspectives, eventually yielding a more complete picture of the financial market. This granular information representation has the potential to enable researchers and practitioners to better apprehend financial system dynamics as well as to support financial policies to manage and monitor financial risk from a more holistic point of view.

Babaev K.V.

The article analyzes the main problems and prospects for economic development of the Russian macro-region of Greater Siberia in the context of the main trend in the Russian foreign economic activity in recent years – the “pivot to the East”. In particular, the difficulties of developing cross-border cooperation between the Far Eastern regions of the Russian Federation and the adjacent regions of neighboring countries – China, Mongolia, and North Korea are highlighted, and possible ways to overcome them are analyzed. The author also describes factors that can either contribute to the accelerated pace of economic development of the macroregion of Greater Siberia, or slow it down. The article aims to contribute to the scientific and expert discourse on the issues of building effective economic relations between Russia and its eastern partners in the medium and long term.

Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, Aloysius Ochasi, Russ B. Altman

Data are essential in developing healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) systems. However, patient data collection, access, and use raise ethical concerns, including informed consent, data bias, data protection and privacy, data ownership, and benefit sharing. Various ethical frameworks have been proposed to ensure the ethical use of healthcare data and AI, however, these frameworks often align with Western cultural values, social norms, and institutional contexts emphasizing individual autonomy and well-being. Ethical guidelines must reflect political and cultural settings to account for cultural diversity, inclusivity, and historical factors such as colonialism. Thus, this paper discusses healthcare data ethics in the AI era in Africa from the Ubuntu philosophy perspective. It focuses on the contrast between individualistic and communitarian approaches to data ethics. The proposed framework could inform stakeholders, including AI developers, healthcare providers, the public, and policy-makers about healthcare data ethical usage in AI in Africa.

D. B. de Freitas, G. S. França

A multifractal methodology was utilized to analyze a set of seismic sequences distributed along the Pacific Ring of Fire, sourced from the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) catalog. The analysis employed the Multifractal Detrended Moving Average Analysis (MFDMA) method to characterize the multi-scale behavior using various geometrical parameters of the multifractal spectrum. The findings of this study can be summarized as follows: firstly, our research suggests that seismic sequences along the Ring of Fire exhibit distinct dynamics; and secondly, it indicates that long-range correlations may influence larger magnitude earthquakes, as demonstrated by the correlation with the $b_{\rm GR}$ index. These results contribute to an enhanced understanding of the multifractal characteristics of seismic activity and their implications for earthquake dynamics.

Zakharov O.Yu.

The modern global system of international sports creates barriers for the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes in international tournaments. The need to solve this problem is a topical issue of domestic sports of the highest achievements. The example of international sports events in Japan is the first step in restoring the collapsing international sports ties. In 2023, various international organizations of Japanese martial arts facilitated the participation of delegations of athletes from Russia and Belarus in training camps, seminars and sports camps in Japan. Delegations of athletes from Russia were admitted to the largest international competitions held in Japan. Russian and Japanese athletes conduct joint training, training camps and competitions, developing friendly good-neighbourly relations between the peoples of their countries. The development of cooperation between Russia and Japan in the sports industry is a successful example of the restoration of relations between neighboring peoples in a tense geopolitical situation.

Amir Asiaee, Chiara Di Gravio, Cole Beck et al.

Understanding how treatment effects vary across patient characteristics is essential for personalized medicine, yet randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are often underpowered to detect heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs). We propose a framework that improves the efficiency of conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation in RCTs by leveraging large observational studies (OS) while preserving the unbiasedness of RCT estimates. By framing CATE estimation as a supervised learning problem, we show that estimation variance is minimized using the counterfactual mean outcome (CMO) as an augmentation function. We derive finite-sample error bounds and establish conditions under which OS data improves CMO estimation, and thus CATE efficiency, even in the presence of confounding in the OS or outcome distribution shifts between populations. We introduce R-OSCAR (Robust Observational Studies for CMO-Augmented RCT), a two-stage estimator that calibrates OS outcome predictions to the RCT population and corrects residual biases through regularized regression. Simulations show that R-OSCAR can reduce the RCT sample size needed for HTE detection by up to 75%, maintaining robustness to model misspecification. Application to the Tennessee STAR study confirms these efficiency gains. Our framework offers a principled approach to integrating observational and experimental data using tools from statistical learning and transfer learning.

Keziah Naggita, Julienne LaChance, Alice Xiang

Biases in large-scale image datasets are known to influence the performance of computer vision models as a function of geographic context. To investigate the limitations of standard Internet data collection methods in low- and middle-income countries, we analyze human-centric image geo-diversity on a massive scale using geotagged Flickr images associated with each nation in Africa. We report the quantity and content of available data with comparisons to population-matched nations in Europe as well as the distribution of data according to fine-grained intra-national wealth estimates. Temporal analyses are performed at two-year intervals to expose emerging data trends. Furthermore, we present findings for an ``othering'' phenomenon as evidenced by a substantial number of images from Africa being taken by non-local photographers. The results of our study suggest that further work is required to capture image data representative of African people and their environments and, ultimately, to improve the applicability of computer vision models in a global context.

Sirijit Sunanta

This paper examines Thai immigrant entrepreneurship in the UK, drawing on 17 inter-views with Thai migrants in Brighton, East Sussex. It explores how Thai immigrants from different socioeconomic backgrounds and migration pathways mobilize ethnic and non-ethnic forms of capital in their entrepreneurial activities. Thai immigrants constitute a relatively new, small, but internally diverse migrant population in the UK, with female marriage migrants dominating the Thai migrant population in the past two decades. The findings of this study reveal that Thai migrants tend to own small-scale businesses or provide personal services in three sectors: cleaning and care work, beauty and massage, and food and catering. In their interaction with opportunity structures in the UK, Thai restaurant and massage entrepreneurs mobilize the exotic notion of “Thai-ness” to add value to their services catering to local British customers.

Luzyanin S.G.

The article highlights modern Russian-Mongolian and Mongolian-Chinese relations in the period 2013- 2022, including political, diplomatic, trade, economic, transport, energy and humanitarian spheres, as well as the impact of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative on the interaction in the triangle “Russia – Mongolia – China”. The processes of transformation of the Russian-Mongolian relations are investigated, both before the launch of the Initiative in 2013 and after it. The author analyzes Mongolian public opinion on the Russian special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine and highlights the main reactions of its population, as well as the possibilities of transformation of Ulaanbaatar’s official position on the Ukrainian events, objective obstacles for Mongolia to dismantle friendly relations with the Russian Federation and connect to anti-Russian sanctions.

Cheera Thongkrajai

Many queer foreigners perceive Thailand as a gay paradise. They have an image of the country as having a tolerant attitude towards LGBTIQ+. However, for Thai LGBTIQ+, Western countries evoke wealth, progress, and acceptance where people with a different gender identity or sexual orientation can fully enjoy their rights. Thai LGBTIQ+, like men and women, strive to go abroad seeking a life they dream of. This article aims to give an account of one of these marginalized groups’ experience that is often neglected by both Thai and Western transnational scholars. Based on an ethnographic study in four European countries with 26 Thai transgender informants, this article argues that migration needs to be considered as a search for one’s well-being, not only in terms of economic aspects, but also in terms of sentimental or emotional needs – that is, the possibility of living their gender and being socially and legally accepted. In this transcultural context, not only do people move across borders, but they also export with them perceptions and understandings about sex, gender, and sexuality from their home country. These aspects are renegotiated and rearticulated in the new socio-cultural milieu of the host countries in order to maximize these new conditions for their own interest. They may or may not reveal their transgender identity, depending on contexts, social interactions, and whom they are dealing with. Their transgender identity can offer them advantages, particularly in the realm of sex.

Sarah Scuzzarello, Paul Statham

This article studies the aspirations and experiences of kathoey (Thai male-to-female trans* people) from poor rural Isan in enduring cross-border relationships with Western men. Drawing from biographical life stories, we try to unpack the cultural script through which partnering a Western man is seen as a plausible pathway for a better kathoey life in Thailand. We study the opportunities such partnering presents for achieving goals of gender affirmation, social advancement, and re-gaining merit within family relations. In the face of significant discriminatory barriers, kathoey in our study managed to build lives that they saw as self-validating, materially successful, and significantly conferring gender recognition. They understood their relationships as socially and personally much more than access to financial resources and drew important sources of emotional support, especially for gender validation from them. Western men were seen as more dedicated to partnering, caring, and being publicly seen in social settings (including family), compared to Thai.

Alexandrova M.V.

The article discusses barriers and weak points on the way of Russian agricultural and food export to China during the coronavirus period. For many years for objective reasons (unfavorable epizootic situation in the Russian Federation) domestic producers of meat and offal could not enter the Chinese market. The export of aquatic biological products, primarily pollock, to China prevailed in the Russian agroexport at the same time. The epidemic of coronavirus infection has become a serious and difficult test for our fishermen and farmers. Russian fishermen have not been able to deliver their cargo in the Chinese ports of Qingdao and Dalian in the usual bilge batches (in bags) almost for a year and a half. As the result the pollock putina-2020 was disrupted. The author identifies the reasons for these circumstances. Presumably, the goal of Chinese business, and possibly the state, is to transfer all transport supplies to and from China to containers and refrigerated containers under the guise of “anti-COVID measures”. The point is more than 96 % of the world's dry cargo containers and 100 % of refrigerated containers are manufactured in Chinese factories since 2021. Different requirements for packaging of agricultural goods at various checkpoints on the Russian-Chinese border have been a big problem for Russian agricultural exporters in the last two years. The effective Order of the General Customs Administration of the People's Republic of China No. 248 “Regulations of the People's Republic of China on the management of registration of foreign enterprises for the production of imported food products”, on the one hand, will introduce uniformity in this matter, on the other, will significantly increase the costs of Russian exporters. As a result,the bulk of the previously planned exports to China will be redirected to other foreign markets or processed in Russia.

Abbas M. Sherif, Peter K. S. Dunsby

In this paper, we study the stability of marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTS), foliating horizons of the form $r=X(τ)$, embedded in locally rotationally symmetric class II perfect fluid spacetimes. An upper bound on the area of stable MOTS is obtained. It is shown that any stable MOTS of the types considered in these spacetimes must be strictly stably outermost, that is, there are no MOTS ``outside" of and homologous to $\mathcal{S}$. Aspects of the topology of the MOTS, as well as the case when an extension is made to imperfect fluids, are discussed. Some non-existence results are also obtained. Finally, the ``growth" of certain matter and curvature quantities on certain unstable MOTS are provided under specified conditions.