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What can the situation in Sri Lanka tell us about China’s “Belt and Road” Initiative (BRI)? During Sri Lanka’s ongoing economic crisis, China initially seemed to take a step back, leaving everyone to wonder whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would agree to restructure its debt in Sri Lanka. If Beijing agreed to help its “friend in need”, what would this entail for other BRI countries seekin

A method to describe spectra starting from nuclear density functionals is explored. The idea is based on postulating an effective Hamiltonian that reproduces the stiffness associated with collective modes. The method defines a simple form of such an effective Hamiltonian and a mapping to go from a density functional to the corresponding Hamiltonian. In order to test the method, the Hamiltonian is

Coal combustion greatly contributes to global emissions of toxic gases into the atmosphere, with sulfur emissions as one of the prominent pollutants in addition to carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, Botswana utilizes Morupule's sub-bituminous coal with average sulfur and ash contents, as determined in this study being 1.9 and 24.4 % by weight with an average calorific value of 22 MJ Kg−1 to generate el

People appear to vary in their susceptibility to lifestyle risk factors for cardiometabolic disease; determining a priori who is most sensitive may help optimize the timing, design, and delivery of preventative interventions. We aimed to ascertain a person's degree of resilience or sensitivity to adverse lifestyle exposures and determine whether these classifications help predict cardiometabolic d

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe experiences of working as a paid part-time firefighter (PTF) in Swedish rural areas. Design/methodology/approach: An inductive explorative design was used, based on interviews with 18 paid PTFs in Sweden. Data were analyzed using qualitative latent content analysis. Findings: Three themes emerged from the interviews and describe paid PTFs’ experie

Exposure to ambient air pollution can cause a numberof health problems and may be particularly dangerous to susceptible population groups such as children. Health effects caused by air pollution are criticallydependent on both the deposited fraction (DF) of the inhaled particles and in what region of the respiratory tract the deposition takes place. With increasing physical activity, the breathing

Sex is a difficult issue for contemporary Christians, but the past decade has witnessed a newfound openness regarding the topic among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Both the theological trajectory and the historical circumstances of the Orthodox Church differ radically from those of other Christian denominations that have already developed robust and creative reflections on sexuality and sexual dive

What is the relationship between trust and the quality of political institutions in a society? According to an influential cultural perspective, social trust—the belief that most people can be trusted—is a value inculcated during individuals’ formative years, and remains fixed afterward. A second perspective holds that social trust reflects experiences throughout the life course, particularly inte

Order Picking in warehouses is often optimized with a method known as Order Batching, which means thatone vehicle can be assigned to pick a batch of several orders at a time. Although there exists a rich body ofresearch on Order Batching Problem (OBP) optimization, one area which demands more attention is that ofcomputational efficiency, especially for optimization scenarios where warehouses have

The Storage Location Assignment Problem (SLAP) is of primary significance to warehouse operations sincethe cost of order-picking is strongly related to where and how far vehicles have to travel. Unfortunately, ageneralized model of the SLAP, including various warehouse layouts, order-picking methodologies andconstraints, poses a highly intractable problem. Proposed optimization methods for the SLA

Speaker localization using microphone arrays depends on accurate time delay estimation techniques. For decades, methods based on the generalized cross correlation with phase transform (GCC-PHAT) have been widely adopted for this purpose. Recently, the GCC-PHAT has also been used to provide input features to neural networks in order to remove the effects of noise and reverberation, but at the cost

There remains a knowledge gap concerning the persistence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) over the longer term. The current study aimed to investigate the change in parent-rated, and performance-based metrics of executive functioning (EF) and the relationship between these EF metrics and ADHD symptoms in individuals with ADHD from childhood/adolescence to young adulthood. This wa

We use administrative and supervisory data at the bank and loan level to investigate the impact of the introduction of covered bonds on the composition of bank alance sheets and bank risk. Covered bonds, despite being collateralized by mortgages, lead to a shift in bank lending from mortgages to corporate loans. Young and low-rated firms in particular receive more credit, suggesting that overall c

BACKGROUND: This paper investigates the impact of a non-mandatory and age-specific social distancing recommendation on isolation behaviors and disease outcomes in Sweden during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (March to July, 2020). The policy stated that people aged 70 years or older should avoid crowded places and contact with people outside the household.METHODS: We used a regression dis