No Arabic abstract
This morphological study identifies and measures recent nationwide trends in American street network design. Historically, orthogonal street grids provided the interconnectivity and density that researchers identify as important factors for reducing vehicular travel and emissions and increasing road safety and physical activity. During the 20th century, griddedness declined in planning practice alongside declines in urban form compactness, density, and connectivity as urbanization sprawled around automobile dependence. But less is known about comprehensive empirical trends across US neighborhoods, especially in recent years. This study uses public and open data to examine tract-level street networks across the entire US. It develops theoretical and measurement frameworks for a quality of street networks defined here as griddedness. It measures how griddedness, orientation order, straightness, 4-way intersections, and intersection density declined from 1940 through the 1990s while dead-ends and block lengths increased. However, since 2000, these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns. Yet, despite this rebound, when controlling for topography and built environment factors all decades post-1939 are associated with lower griddedness than pre-1940. Higher griddedness is associated with less car ownership - which itself has a well-established relationship with vehicle kilometers traveled and greenhouse gas emissions - while controlling for density, home and household size, income, jobs proximity, street network grain, and local topography. Interconnected grid-like street networks offer practitioners an important tool for curbing car dependence and emissions. Once established, street patterns determine urban spatial structure for centuries, so proactive planning is essential.
We study on topological properties of global supply chain network in terms of degree distribution, hierarchical structure, and degree-degree correlation in the global supply chain network. The global supply chain data is constructed by collecting various company data from the web site of Standard & Poors Capital IQ platform in 2018. The in- and out-degree distributions are characterized by a power law with in-degree exponent = 2.42 and out-degree exponent = 2.11. The clustering coefficient decays as power law with an exponent = 0.46. The nodal degree-degree correlation indicates the absence of assortativity. The Bow-tie structure of GWCC reveals that the OUT component is the largest and it consists 41.1% of total firms. The GSCC component comprises 16.4% of total firms. We observe that the firms in the upstream or downstream sides are mostly located a few steps away from the GSCC. Furthermore, we uncover the community structure of the network and characterize them according to their location and industry classification. We observe that the largest community consists of consumer discretionary sector mainly based in the US. These firms belong to the OUT component in the bow-tie structure of the global supply chain network. Finally, we confirm the validity for propositions S1 (short path length), S2 (power-law degree distribution), S3 (high clustering coefficient), S4 (fit-gets-richer growth mechanism), S5 (truncation of power-law degree distribution), and S7 (community structure with overlapping boundaries) in the global supply chain network.
This paper selects the NARX neural network as the method through literature review, and constructs specific NARX neural networks under application scenarios involving macroeconomic forecasting, national goal setting and global competitiveness assessment. Through case studies on China, US and Eurozone, this study explores how those limited & partial exogenous inputs or abundant & comprehensive exogenous inputs, a small set of most relevant exogenous inputs or a large set of exogenous inputs covering all major aspects of the macro economy, whole area related exogenous inputs or both whole area and subdivision area related exogenous inputs specifically affect the forecasting performance of NARX neural networks for specific macroeconomic indicators or indices. Through the case study on Russia this paper explores how the limited & most relevant exogenous inputs set or the abundant & comprehensive exogenous inputs set specifically influences the prediction performance of those specific NARX neural networks for national goal setting. Finally, comparative studies on the application of NARX neural networks for the forecasts of Global Competitiveness Indices (GCIs) of various economies are conducted, in order to explore whether the specific NARX neural network trained on the basis of the GCI related data of some economies can make sufficiently accurate predictions about GCIs of other economies, and whether the specific NARX neural network trained on the basis of the data of some type of economies can give more accurate predictions about GCIs of the same type of economies than those of different type of economies. Based on all of the above successful application, this paper provides policy recommendations on applying fully trained NARX neural networks that are assessed as qualified to assist or even replace the deductive and inductive abilities of the human brain in a variety of appropriate tasks.
Based on some analytic structural properties of the Gini and Kolkata indices for social inequality, as obtained from a generic form of the Lorenz function, we make a conjecture that the limiting (effective saturation) value of the above-mentioned indices is about 0.865. This, together with some more new observations on the citation statistics of individual authors (including Nobel laureates), suggests that about $14%$ of people or papers or social conflicts tend to earn or attract or cause about $86%$ of wealth or citations or deaths respectively in very competitive situations in markets, universities or wars. This is a modified form of the (more than a) century old $80-20$ law of Pareto in economy (not visible today because of various welfare and other strategies) and gives an universal value ($0.86$) of social (inequality) constant or number.
We show how the Shannon entropy function can be used as a basis to set up complexity measures weighting the economic efficiency of countries and the specialization of products beyond bare diversification. This entropy function guarantees the existence of a fixed point which is rapidly reached by an iterative scheme converging to our self-consistent measures. Our approach naturally allows to decompose into inter-sectorial and intra-sectorial contributions the country competitivity measure if products are partitioned into larger categories. Besides outlining the technical features and advantages of the method, we describe a wide range of results arising from the analysis of the obtained rankings and we benchmark these observations against those established with other economical parameters. These comparisons allow to partition countries and products into various main typologies, with well-revealed characterizing features. Our methods have wide applicability to general problems of ranking in bipartite networks.
We develop a mathematical framework to study the economic impact of infectious diseases by integrating epidemiological dynamics with a kinetic model of wealth exchange. The multi-agent description leads to study the evolution over time of a system of kinetic equations for the wealth densities of susceptible, infectious and recovered individuals, whose proportions are driven by a classical compartmental model in epidemiology. Explicit calculations show that the spread of the disease seriously affects the distribution of wealth, which, unlike the situation in the absence of epidemics, can converge towards a stationary state with a bimodal form. Furthermore, simulations confirm the ability of the model to describe different phenomena characteristics of economic trends in situations compromised by the rapid spread of an epidemic, such as the unequal impact on the various wealth classes and the risk of a shrinking middle class.